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 f
or 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.
