Category: Japan 2007

I just returned from a brief walk in Takayama. My main objectives were to locate various things to make Tracie feel a little better (e.g. cough drops, orange juice, Sprite, Vicks Vapor Rub). Remarkably I was able to find all of these things (yes, even the Vicks) within a very short distance from the hotel. I also visited one of the morning markets. It’s fairly cold outside and I wanted to take Tracie’s things back to her quickly, but I did take some photos while I was walking.

Takayama is a small but tightly packed town. old, traditionally styled buildings stand cheek to jowl with modern convenience stores and trinket shops. there are many shops with beautiful hand-crafted objects like furniture, pottery. etc. The streets are quite small but fairly busy.This is the largest street in town, if one can accurately judge scale from the tourist map I picked up: read more

I apologize for the somewhat anemic previous post. Our travels have been complicated somewhat by Tracie having fallen ill. She has a cold of some sort which we were hoping was just allergies, but no such luck. She’s going to rest in bed today while I make a solo exploration of Takayama.

Here are a few more photos from the train trip. These are the sorts of signs that one is confronted with when trying to make a connection in a train station in Nagoya:

You’ll notice that there are bits of English on them. They do in fact eventually display the names of the trains and the destinations in English, but you have to wait for awhile for them to change, and they change back to Japanese quite quickly. It all works in the end but it’s a little nerve-wracking when you’re trying to figure out where you’re supposed to go to meet a particular car of a particular train on a particular track headed to a particular location, and you’re laden with baggage and you’re trying to be helpful to your traveling companion who is a little unsure of foot on her best days and now happens to be struggling with a cold on top of it. But obviously we made it. read more

I just flipped through the photos I took en route to Takayama, and sadly they’re mostly not very good. It’s quite difficult to take a photo of something from a moving train. Things move by so quickly (or rather you move by things so quickly) that by the time you see something interesting, decide that it’s interesting enough to photograph, ready the camera and frame and focus the shot, the thing that you were trying to photograph has already moved past. I shot quite a bit of video but I have no way to transfer that into the computer. read more

We have arrived in Takayama and have checked in to our hotel (a Best Western, which doesn’t make much sense for a hotel in Japan but it is very nice). We took the bullet train, or shinkansen as it’s called in Japanese, from Tokyo to Nagoya. The shinkansen was fast and fairly smooth, the seats were comfortable, and there was more than enough leg room even for gaijin-sized legs. We changed to a smaller train in Nagoya which brought us to Takayama. Both train rides were about two hours long. I dozed a little on the first one and gazed out the windows. The second leg of the trip was particularly enjoyable. The train climbed into wooded mountains, following a river in a sometimes spectacularly rocky gorge. The rain that started in Nagoya turned to snow briefly, but it seems to be sunny now. read more

We’re about to catch a taxi to Tokyo Station to board one of Japan’s famous bullet trains bound for our next destination. Don’t panic if there is a lapse in postings for a couple of days; it simply means we are unable to get an internet connection. If that happens, we’ll catch up when we reach Kyoto.

We arrived at the museum shortly before it opened. It was raining a little bit at the time so we waited in the covered area in front of the ticket vending machines. Once we were inside we were approached by a young attendant who noticed us gazing around trying to figure out where we might ask to borrow a wheelchair for Tracie. She didn’t seem to speak much English but Tracie resourcefully pantomimed using a wheelchair and the young woman quite literally ran to get one once she understood what we were looking for. read more

I did say I had two points to make in my previous post, didn’t I? The second thing was this: I made a quip about decaffeinated beverages and the Japanese consciousness in an earlier post. However, when we asked Tamae-san about decaf coffee, the poor dear did look at us with some amount of skepticism and confusion. We had to explain why we were interested in such a travesty (which is because Tracie is completely off caffeine to avoid headaches). I think it’s just something that they don’t do here. read more

It’s about 8:15AM and we just finished breakfast. We’re heading for the Tokyo National Museum in Ueno park shortly, but I thought of a couple of things over breakfast that I meant to mention in yesterday’s entry.

The first thing I forgot to describe was the couple sitting near us in the noodle booth. They arrived shortly after us and were probably Scandinavian, in their late 50s or so. He was clearly as amused by the place as we were. She, on the other hand, wasn’t at all amused. She visibly didn’t want to come in in the first place, but he was hungry enough that he decided that he was going in anyway so she reluctantly followed. He ordered a beer (they served Asahi in cans) and a plate of noodles and dug in with gusto when it arrived. She glared at him and anything in her field of view. Everntually, after watching a local couple order and enjoy cups of something served from a heated pot near the front which I would guess was corn soup, she asked one of the proprietors for the same. It didn’t look like she thought highly of it, and when she was told that it was 200 yen (about US$1.60) she was visibly put out. Her husband was unflapped, dug the money out of his pocket, and went back to eating. She berated him at some length and finally got up and left even before he was finished–she literally couldn’t wait to get out of the place. He stuffed a few more noodles into his mouth, slugged down some (but not all) of the remaining beer, and followed her out. read more

I first heard the song Technopolis by Yellow Magic Orchestra about 27 years ago. YMO was a pioneering synth-pop band in the 1980s that achieved international recognition, a rare feat for a Japanese band. The song Technopolis is about Tokyo; it features as its sole lyrics a voice synthesizer spelling the word “T-E-C-H-N-O-P-O-L-I-S” and uttering the name “Tokyo”. I just listened to the same song on my iPod while looking down on Tokyo from our hotel window. Little did I suspect, 27 years ago, that I would one day visit this wonderful city. read more

I’ll explain the inside joke: my friend Dan Phillips happened to be in Tokyo a week or so before we arrived here. He IMed me with a certain amount of glee because he had just discovered a brand of canned coffee called Deeppresso. I found some in a vending machine today. It’s quite good.