Adam Schabtach's Blog
Entries made during our vacation in Japan during the spring of 2013
I found out today that home phone numbers are considered very private information in Japan. If you don’t know someone’s phone number, there’s not really any way to obtain it, particularly if you don’t know the kanji for their name. The “white pages” sections of phone books, as we know them in the USA, don’t exist.
Thus, there are no phone solicitors in Japan. The mind boggles.
I was going to try to post something substantial today, to make up for yesterday’s post which meant something to only one person, but it’s now late and I’m tired. Yesterday we went to Kamakura but our plans were somewhat curtailed by the weather. It was rainy and cold–quite cold. We made our usual visit to the Great Buddha anyway.
We’ve been on crowded commuter trains a couple of times recently. While I haven’t actually seen the much publicized phenomenon of station personnel packing people into trains with their white-gloved hands, we have been on trains that are so crowded that people (myself included) have to briefly hop off at station stops to make enough room for other passengers to exit.
Here are some photos from today. It was a pretty leisurely day. We poked around Tokyo Station, Ginza, and Akihabara, doing a little shopping but mostly just enjoying being on vacation. I rather liked some glass tiling at a restroom entrance in a subway station:
The same restroom had a little map thoughtfully indicating that both Japanese and Western toilets were available, and where to find them:
This is my favorite store in Akihabara:
The selection of tools and supplies for electronics prototyping is dazzling. I bought a particular tip for my soldering iron and a rather nice set of digital SI-unit calipers. That photo belies how busy it was in that area today; some of the streets were quite crowded. Of course they weren’t as crowded as Nakamise street near our hotel in Asakusa, which is always packed at this time of year:
We arrived in Tokyo a few hours ago; it’s about 9:05PM local time now. We’ll be in Japan for about two weeks, and will be staying in Tokyo, Kobe, Kyoto, and Matsue. In recent years I’ve had a tendency to not blog much while here, mostly for lack of time and energy. On this visit, however, I’ve set myself the goal of posting something here once a day. It might be just a photo, or just a single sentence. The general idea is that even a very small entry is better than no entry at all. We’ll see how well I manage.