It’s about 7:45AM here in Tokyo. We just returned to our room after breakfast, where we’ll pause for a bit before heading out into the shopping area in Asakusa. Among other things, I want to look at pots for making gyokuro at a shop from which I purchased a pot two years ago; the trick will be to find the shop again in the maze of narrow streets densely lined with other shops. I think it’s not far from the Kentucky Fried Chicken. Also, Tracie needs some socks, so we’ll stop at a department store called Rox, on the theory that there are socks in Rox.<\/p>\n
We arrived at the hotel late in the afternoon. The flights were entirely uneventful, and the Seattle-Tokyo flight may have even been a little less turbulent than usual. Apprently we made a good-enough impression on an attendant on the Denver-Seattle flight that she mentioned us to one of the attendants for the Seattle-Tokyo flight, who greeted us as we boarded by saying something like, “you must be the nice couple that Suzie told us about!” As usual I brought more than enough stuff to attempt to divert my attention while trapped in a metal tube for 10 hours but ended up ignoring most of it, although I did watch an hour-long documentary on Detroit techno that I pulled off YouTube a few days ago, and started on a similar one on psychedelic trance.<\/p>\n
For the sake of simplicity and convenience we book a private taxi to take us from the airport to the hotel. Usually this drive provides a pleasant hour of urban scenery–or so Tracie tells me, since I usually sleep though most of it. This time, though, it was marred by the driver’s inability to keep the vehicle moving at a constant velocity. His driving style might generously be described as unusual; I believe that he had both feet on the pedals and controlled the speed of the car with frequent and unpredictable applications of the brakes. I tried not to remember that I was prone to car-sickness as a child, but the trip–particularly after a somewhat bumpy descent in the airplane–was fairly unpleasant. Both Tracie and I were nearly green by the time we got to the hotel, and ended up scratching our plans to go the nearby grocery store after settling into the room. Instead we watched a little bit of TV before succumbing to jetlag and going to bed.<\/p>\n
The Tokyo Sky Tree is complete, and amazing. It’s so tall that it looks somewhat disconnected from its surroundings. Looking at it is somewhat like looking at a Photoshop editing job done by someone with a terrible sense of proportion. It reminded me of seeing the Eiffel Tower, which is a good deal smaller but also looks somewhat surreal because it is so unlike anything near it. I’d post a photo of it but the sun is currently directly above it.<\/p>\n
It’s good to be here again. I was amused to notice that our visits here have spanned enough time that some new landscaping I noticed during our first trip is now fairly mature. The freeway not far from the airport is flanked by some steep banks where the roadway cuts through low hills. Rather than covering these banks with flat slabs of concrete, as is done in the U.S., the banks are covered with molded, concave, concrete blocks about two feet across. (Imagine a big catbox cast from concrete.) The cavities are filled with soil and seeded with grass and small plants. The first time I saw such a construction I wondered whether the grasses ever obscure the concrete, or whether it always looks like a concrete grid of tiny planted plots. Several years later I have now learned that the grass does eventually cover the concrete, and the end result is a fairly natural-looking (albeit unnaturally flat) hillside, presumably quite immune to erosion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It’s about 7:45AM here in Tokyo. We just returned to our room after breakfast, where we’ll pause for a bit before heading out into the shopping area in Asakusa. Among other things, I want to look at pots for making gyokuro at a shop from which I purchased a pot two years ago; the trick… Continue reading In Tokyo<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1800","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-japan2012","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1800","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1800"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1800\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1809,"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1800\/revisions\/1809"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1800"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1800"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1800"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}