tokyo return

New pics.

We’ve made it back and gotten through the 5 brutal days of jet lag, thanks in part to a two-day Lord of the Rings marathon caved out at home on the couch (and I mean caved out – we hung sheets over the windows to shield the LCD screen from the sunlight).

Our final week in Tokyo was wondrous and frenetic, flying by far too quickly to see and do everything we wished but quickly enough to satisfy our deepening pangs of homesickness. Again we padded mile after mile through streets and alleyways hunting down treasures of food and gift, experience and insight. The days were both long and short, filled both with the excitement of new discoveries and the mounting tedium of now old inconveniences (the language barrier!). The past two weeks of travel were beginning to catch up with us, translating restless nights into long sleepy mornings, exhaustion cast aside and mortgaged until we were home again.

On our return to Tokyo we stayed the first 3 nights at the Park Hotel in Shiodome, to the east along the bay just across from Odaiba. We shot out on foot and explored the ritzy, euro, too-rich-for-my-blood glam and glitz of Ginza. Gucci, Cartier, Salvator Ferragamo, Burberry, and US$2500 cats filled the multi-story department stores heaved up on some of the most expensive real estate this side of Olympus Mons.

We sought the evening madness of Akihabara, bright and buzzing with relentless neon, hawkers and barkers of the latest electronic wizardry, trance techno blasting out from packed pachinko parlors, and the ubiquitous gaze of wide-eyed manga and anime stars staring out from billboards, posters, and almost every other surface not otherwise in use by shining adverts. Buildings are tall and tightly packed side-by-side with long lit signs running up their outer walls indicating, floor-by-floor, the shops and clubs and bars available within. They’re like American strip malls tipped on end and stuffed into buildings covering entire city blocks for maximum efficiency. We found ourselves winding up floor after floor of brightly lit and densely packed shops, each level presenting some new and possibly haunting surprise, hopelessly sent further and higher up into the seedy den of Otaku nerdery by seemingly exit-less escalators, only finally finding hope on the top floor in some tucked away elevator built for two, to be chucked back out onto the wet flashing street below.

Caught up in the excitement we hopped the Yamanote train line back around the circle to Shinjuku – a station vastly labyrinthine and subterranean beneath the city center, resonant and thick with the passage of over 2 million commuters each day. Eventually we made our way out onto the night street and found we’d taken an exit far away from our intent, with dark looming government buildings rising up around us like docked and slumbering spacecraft waiting for the dawn to meet their launch towards the next great frontier. After securing necessary sustenance we walked a few blocks towards Shinjuku Dori guided by map but met only by a wide and tall wall of closed department stores. The view beyond was obscured and the court around us quiet. I knew this wasn’t the Shinjuku we sought. On Andera’s urging we turned down a side alley towards the high reflection of a great flashing light that brought us out to the boulevard of Shinjuku Dori. It was a moment later that my mind slipped its reigns and basically refused to accept what my eyes saw.

Past the rumbling Yamanote overpass and down the street, 10 to 15 stories tall and stretching out beyond the receding parallax of my perspective, an inconceivable canyon of light like 100 Las Vegas strips scooped up and painted along the walls of Manhatten, buzzing and flashing with inexhaustible neon, splashed with inconceivably humongous LCD screens dancing with the latest video of this or that idoru star, strobes of 5-story tall electric signs blazing out corporate logos to the world and beyond, still-life waterfalls of glowing kanji and signage lining the sides of every building surface, down to the ground and the thousands and thousands of bustling japanese swimming past in black business suits and evening dress. The crackle and buzz that filled my ears was either the fission of Tokyo’s nuclear reactors straining to power it all, or the failure of my own nervous system to rewire the multitudinous neurons necessary to adequately parse the massive download of my experience. I smelled smoke or perhaps ozone as the Yamanote line pounded out its steady rhythm on the steel overpass above us. This was the Shinjuku crossing, next to the busiest train station on the planet, in the heart of the largest city so far heaped up by humanity’s will.

And while the main street of Shinjuku Dori was mind-boggling, each and every side street and alleyway reiterated the same light blasted theme running along every single building facade like a snapshot of the Matrix in full technicolor. So many shops and stores and bars and clubs for so many people. Stumbling through it all agape I couldn’t imagine what it was like to be a local – to be so totally accustomed to it all that the kaleidoscope receded into the background of awareness, as if one could walk these streets and sift through it to find the smallest details. As if it could all just be simply tuned out like shutting the blinds against the sun. We were there 20 minutes and had to flee back to the peace and serenity and simple manageability of our hotel.

Shinjuku stayed with me the rest of the week and still continues to reach up from the depths of my mind and demand some structure of meaning. In our final days we visited the great Meiji Shrine; toured the endless back streets of Harajuku and Aoyama; took a tour of Tokyo bay on the most futuristic and cool boat I’ve ever seen with ovoid curves and windows giving way to a neon lit dancefloor accented with excellent drinks and table service. We sipped martinis under the lights of the future city Odaiba and then went to the top viewing deck of the Tokyo Tower, some 300 meters up, again overwhelmed at the sheer size of the metropolis rolling off in every direction below us, it’s lights hung like stars in a galaxy far larger than is humanly observable.

If the strangeness and scale of it all was at times overwhelming, the simple joys of good food grounded us out. The Westin buffet was fit for a roman emperor. Tonkatsu (fried breaded pork) at Meisan demanded a return trip to savor more of its succulence. Afternoon snack at a fruit boutique on Omote Sando ($100 cantaloupes!) was beautiful and refreshing with an entertaining view of the Harajuku kids swarming past. Windowside tempura with kobe beef on the 39th floor of the Ebisu Palace building, floating high in the Tokyo night. Late night cake set of divine origin with table-mixed martinis at the Park Hotel in Shiodome. And oh if I’d had one more chance to eat at that amazing little ramen place on the street behind Meguro station…

And so finally we bid Tokyo and Japan a fond sayonara, glad to be heading home but certain to return again and enjoy its hospitality. We didn’t see enough robots, didn’t have drinks at the Park Hyatt ala Lost in Translation, missed the best club gigs at Womb and Air, and never had that night sipping Absinthe and stumbling around deeper into Shinjuku. Yet, we both learned so much about Japan and much more about ourselves and our place in this large and often foreign-seeming world. So many differences concealing a far greater amount of sameness. Even the most foreign realms of the Earth are still gathered around the hearts of its people. And some places that may have seemed so very distant suddenly can seem as close as home.

Previous photo libraries:
Tokyo 1
Kyoto & Shimoda
Tokyo Street Design