Day 2: Tokyo > Nagoya

Jetlagged, I woke up at 6am in Tokyo and figured that I’d may as well get up than lie there restlessly in bed. The hostel has multiple floors with 3-4 dorm-style rooms on each floor and an extremely small elevator: the smallest I've ever seen. I headed downstairs to the common area and met a Korean lady and her son. Her son, Dennis, is studying at a university in California. We went out to get breakfast at a nearby restaurant and brought it back.

As we ate our breakfasts, I met Aurélien from France who had recently climbed Fujisan. The mountain is divided into ten stations: the first at the bottom and the tenth at the top. Station #5 is where the road terminates and most people start their climb. He had started at the very bottom of the mountain and climbed to the top in nine hours - I don't think the average person could do it in that time. He was pretty fit and passed people on his way up. I was impressed. He said that once he got to station 7, it got pretty windy and one would need a windbreaking jacket and proper head protection. At the top there is a crater that takes about an hour to walk around, kind of like walking around a lake.

Later in the morning, I met Jason from New York and we went off to explore Tokyo. I spent a week in Tokyo six years ago and remember some of the areas I had explored, and I was planning to check out the Akihabara area before leaving for Nagoya to meet my sister. Akihabara is Japanese for “electric town” and is a huge area with electronics shops, arcades, and video stores. I packed up my bag and left it locked at the hostel for easy later access, and we took off for Akihabara.

We spent hours looking at all sorts of cool things. There were lots of shiny objects to capture my attention and distract me. Cameras are generally more expensive in Japan than their North American equivalents, but you can also pick something up that won’t exist in North America for another year or two. That’s what I did the last time I went to Tokyo, but I paid a huge premium for the novelty. My main purpose (other than window shopping) was to buy a watch so I could tell time. A watch has become such a foreign thing to me, since I always just check my cell phone for the time. I also came across some T-shirts that were a cut above most of the low-quality tourist stuff, and picked up two shirts. These are shirts I actually wear. The older Japanese guy who sold me the shirts spoke English quite well and said he learned from watching English-language TV.

In addition to seeing some of the larger attractions of Japan, I also wanted to spend time in places where the locals go. I'm not really that interested in going to the typical tourist areas and spending a lot of money on a manufactured attraction. I remember going to a small neighbourhood Tokyo izakaya (tavern) six years ago with my friends and having a great time. It had only two large Japanese-style square tables and a bar and our group of about ten took up half of the izakaya. I wanted to find something similar again, and we asked the English-speaking guy at the shirt store for a good place to find such a neighbourhood izakaya. He recommended an area along the Yamanote line under the tracks between the Hibiya and Shimbashi stations. More on that in a few days on my return to Tokyo.

All that walking made us hungry and so we set out looking for food, which actually wasn’t as easy as one would think in a large shopping area. Some people on the streets were handing out KFC coupons (and seemed to target the tourists with their handouts), but I was hoping for something more authentic and slightly healthier. After wandering off the main street onto the side streets, Jason and I found a little hole-in-the-wall restaurant, full of Japanese men in suits on their lunch breaks. This was exactly what I was looking for and I knew it would be a good place to eat. It was called Komoro Soba Restaurant (see map).


An old Japanese lady greeted us and directed us to a vending machine to pay for our food. This was the first (of many) times that I’d seen this type of ordering system. The customer buys a ticket for the food he desires and takes it to the cooks. It removes cash handling from the food preparation process. Since the buttons on the machine were in kanji, I asked for oyakodon and she pushed the right button for me. I should have looked at the button and memorized the kanji for future reference. Nevertheless, the food was great and we were both happy.

All that food made us thirsty, so we went across the street to the Family Mart and bought a seasonal autumn beer made by Suntory – very tasty. Family Marts are everywhere in Japan and are their equivalent of 7-Eleven (of which there are also many in Japan). I enjoyed the novelty of walking down the sidewalk drinking beer, just because it’s something we can’t do in Canada.

It was getting close to that time for me to make the trip over to Nagoya, and we headed back to the hostel. Jason was planning to stay in Tokyo for the same duration as my stay in Japan, and I’d see him 8 or 9 days later when I returned from exploring the rest of the country. We parted and I started a 30 minute urban hike in the humidity to JR Ueno station with my pack on my back. It ended up being very humid for the duration of my stay in all of Japan. I noticed a lot of furniture stores in the area I walked through. I guess this is the area where people go to buy furniture.

Thirty minutes later as I arrived at Ueno station, I immediately recognized some of the buildings and landscape around the station from six years' prior. I had spent a few hours walking around the station with friends on our last day in Tokyo to kill time before catching the train back to the airport, and I remembered spending an inordinate amount of time in an 8-story toy store directly outside the station... and there it was! From Ueno, I took the local Yamanote line to the nearby Tokyo station where the shinkansens depart. Then I was on my way to Nagoya on the bullet train.

This was my first time riding the shinkansen. When I was 15 years old, I had an opportunity to do a 2-month summertime homestay program in Japan through my high school. It eventually came down to myself and someone else competing for it, and unfortunately he ended up getting it. I remember being very disappointed. I had heard about these fast bullet trains in my youth and had wanted to ride one, so in a way I was living out a childhood fantasy.

It got dark pretty quickly as the train departed from Tokyo, and after a while there was nothing to see out the window and I missed seeing Fujisan as the train went past. Besides, I was sitting on the left side and it would have been visible out the the right (facing north). The train arrived in Nagoya at around 7:30pm and I remember it being very warm coming out of the station. They also had a lot of pachinko parlours. It’s their version of gambling.

The hostel I was staying at that night was called Hostel Ann Nagoya. I think it's supposed to be "Ann's Hostel" since the owner's name is Ann (or at least the closest English approximation of her name is) but I guess it got lost in translation. She had opened the hostel just a few weeks prior, and it was in good condition with free Internet access - always a plus (about half of the hostels in Japan seemed to offer free Internet access). I walked the short walk to the hostel and met my sister shortly after 8. She had taken an earlier train but arrived at the hostel only a few minutes before me after getting lost looking for it.

Nagoya probably would have been a lively and fun city since we were staying just a block away from a university, but it was completely dead since university hadn't started yet. If I went in the future, I’d want to go a few weeks later when there are more people around and more things to do at night. We went out for dinner at a nearby restaurant and my sister (Lisa) told me about what a terrible airline United Airlines is; quite the contrast from my experience flying to Japan.

Day 1: Vancouver > Tokyo

Mon Aug 31 (Date of Arrival in Tokyo)

August 31 is my birthday and I was going to spend it in Tokyo. My trip started out very well. I checked in for my flight online the night before and was able to reserve a seat in the emergency exit row, with what turned out to be about four feet of legroom. With the flight time and the time zone difference, I departed Vancouver on August 30 in the early afternoon and was due to arrive in Tokyo on the following day in the late afternoon. When I got to the Air Canada check-in counters at the airport, I saw a massive lineup that looked like it would take more than an hour to get through, but, just beyond it, I saw the web check-in counter with about five people in line. I breezed right through in about 15 minutes with plenty of time to spare. Security was quick and I had time to grab some food before the flight boarded. On the plane, I had the window seat and the middle seat next to me was empty. The aisle seat was occupied by someone travelling on business. He didn't seem too interested in conversing and we didn't talk much. My sister was on a separate flight and would join me the next day in Nagoya.

Air Canada might be criticized for poor service on its domestic flights, but it must compete with the likes of JAL and Korean Air overseas, and ratchets up their level of service on the long-haul flights. I was impressed. The meals were good and every seat had its own personal touchscreen LCD with movies on demand. The one unfortunate drawback of sitting in the emergency row is the engine noise, which made it very difficult to watch anything with audio unless I cranked the volume up really high. I didn’t think to bring noise-cancelling headphones (and it would have been too much bulk to carry around anyway), so I slept a bit and mostly sat there bored.

There was a huge monsoon on arrival at Tokyo Narita airport, and all inbound and outbound flights were being cancelled. I suppose we had been in the air too long when flights started to get cancelled for my flight to get cancelled too. The plane hit a few pockets of turbulence from the monsoon as we descended. At one point the plane dropped a good number of feet and I could feel it in my stomach. Some girls somewhere behind me let out a scream. The landing was rough: the plane bounced left and right on its wheels, but the ends of the wings didn't the ground. Thinking back, an onlooker would have probably let out a gasp watching the plane land.

Narita Airport has direct rail connections to Tokyo integrated into the airport, similar to the new Canada Line at YVR. When I went down to buy my train ticket, I met someone from Toronto whose flight had been cancelled and was heading back to Tokyo. We were on the same train and chatted during the ride. I remember starting to feel really tired and fatigued at this point. It was a very long day with the time zone difference. She recommended some good places to see in and near Tokyo. Unfortunately, I ran out of time and ended up seeing neither of them, but both sounded like pretty cool things to see and I’d like to see them the next time I travel to Japan: Nikko (about 2.5 hours north of Tokyo) and the Tsukiji fish market near Tsukijishijo Station.

I had to transfer to a local service train to get to my destination in Tokyo, slightly south of the Asakusa tourist area, and we said goodbye. After a few stops on the local service train, the digital sign inside changed to say “EXPRESS.” I stood up to check the map above the doors and must have looked pretty confused. This was a few stops before I was supposed to get off, and a Japanese girl approached me asking if I needed help. It turns out we had been on the same flight and she was returning from nine months of learning English in Vancouver. We chatted for a few minutes and it turned out that the train did stop where I wanted to go. When I got to my stop, she was smiling and waving goodbye to me as the train was pulling away. Very sweet girl.

It was dark when I emerged from the station onto the street, and pouring rain from the monsoon. Everyone but me had an umbrella. I was wearing pants, a short-sleeved polo shirt, and a huge 80L pack on my back. I didn’t really want to dig through it to pull out my jacket, so I began walking in the rain.

The directions to the hostel said to turn on the street after the 7-Eleven, but what we call back alleys are streets in Japan and so I walked right past my turnoff and got lost in the rain. Eventually, a car stopped and the driver asked where I was going. I mentioned the name of the hostel, K's House, and he knew where it was. It turns out that I was just around the corner from it. My first impression when I walked in was that it was very clean, the staff was friendly, and the place was extremely quiet. Nearly everyone was on a laptop. After I had checked in and dried up a bit, I went to the 7-Eleven to get a sandwich for dinner and then crashed at 10pm after a very long day.