Japan Trip Report

Japan!

Before Februrary 2, 2006, I had been outside of America and Canada, and outside of North America, but never to Asia. I've been a fan of Japanese animation for years but hadn't really thought much about going to Japan anytime soon (it sounded too expensive among other things) until a friend asked me if I wanted to go on a tour with her and some others. First I said "maybe," then I said "yes," then I started waffling over money and other issues. Finally, I just did it and boy am I glad!

All images have been reduced to thumbnails, click through the images to see a larger version. 

Day 1

The trip started from Vancouver airport, where I started reading Altered Carbon, which is an excellent book! I've got lots to say about Japan so I don't want to get too into it, but Altered Carbon is set in a future where humanity is spread among many worlds and high speed travel involves transmitting the mind and leaving the body behind, taking up a new body when you arrive. I'm not into hard science fiction (I guess I live tech enough in my work) and love looking at how technology effects society and vice versa, and this book handles those issues very well.

 

 From there, I arrived at Tokyo's Narita airport. I knew I would have lots of time to kill, since the tour was flying out of LA and I chose to fly out from home (it's an hour shorter flight from Vancouver and just much less complicated) so I wandered around some. The first thing I did, because I couldn't resist after reading an article about toilets in Japan, was to go into the airport bathroom and take a quick picture of a squat toilet.
 

I actually didn't once end up using one, though. There were many western toilets and I wasn't feeling adventurous enough to see if I could manage the squat ones with jeans.

Next, well, I was hungry. I found a cash machine that had English (very important when you don't read the language and can't even guess), and then I went to find a snack. I decided on a rice ball since I kind of knew what those were and I wasn't hungry for a whole meal. It was a salmon rice ball and I actually expected it to be cold, so I was surprised when it was so steaming hot I couldn't dare touch it! A friend of mine had asked me to take pics of all the food I ate (Edited to add: Click through here to read my separate "food report") so I'll share one here, it's of half the rice ball so you can see the salmon in it.

 I was supposed to watch for one of the tour guides who has kinda wild hair so isn't difficult to recognize, and was getting nervous that I wasn't seeing him. Then, I saw my friends coming out of customs! Yay! The group got together except for one guy who ended up getting so sick he had to come off the plane in a wheelchair. There was another tour guide with them so we managed to hook up with the missing fellow, and then got into the charter bus to head to the Shinawaga Prince Hotel. Yes, this place is as huge and gorgeous as it looks! It's actually 3 buildings, we were in the New Tower. And yes, we saw the bowling alleys, they're 10 pin if you're curious. We weren't ready for sleep so we wandered around the place. We found the food court and I had a chocolate, banana crepe that was to die for. I took a pic halfway through it and it looks kind of gross so I won't subject you to it, heh.

Day 2

The next morning we got up bright and early after sleeping like the dead, and headed out to Tokyo Tower. This tower looks a lot like the Eiffel Tower and is 13 meters taller as well. Here's a picture of Tokyo from up in the tower--I kind of like the light effect from the window, myself.

 

 My friends and I had the funniest time trying to figure out one of those do it yourself photo machines. It wasn't until the last minute that I discovered a tablet pen hanging from the console. With cheers, we managed to customize it some before the picture was printed out. I have to get the scanned copy from my friend, she's got the original.

Next, we went to the Meiji Shinto Shrine, which is dedicated to the spirit of the current Japanese Emperor's great-grandfather. Sake is sacred in Shinto, so there is a large wall of barrels that were donated to the shrine. Their method of display was quite pretty, I thought.

 

Typically, before entering a shrine, one washes to purify the body. It was a very cold day so we hated to think how cold that water was!

 

Every Shinto shrine is marked by a Tori, which is the initial gate.
 

Our tour guide was so very excited to discover that there was a wedding happening at the shrine that day. Apparently this is a rather rare occurance, to randomly run into one, so we were pretty lucky. The wedding dress was quite traditional, many Kimono and Yukata.
 

 The shrine itself was beautiful, and I very much enjoyed things like learning how one prays at a Shinto temple, more about Shintoism itself, and so on.
 

It's apparently exam season in Japan, so the wishing tree had many, many wishes from students hoping to pass. Apparently it doesn't matter what languages your wishes are written in, so those who wanted to could have added their own to the collection.
 

The shrine itself is located in Tokyo itself. We went from there to another shrine in the city. This is the Akasuka Temple, which is in the older section of Tokyo and is quite old. There was a whole little shopping area in front of it that could easily suck up an hour or two as you go from stall to stall, trying foods and buying gifts.

On the grounds was a massive pagoda ...

 After this we went to Roppongi Hills, a high end shopping area kind of like Beverly Hills (just a guess, I've never been to Beverly Hills). Some of us were starving and I absolutely love sushi, so when the guides said this was the place to have it I knew what I wanted to do.
 

This is conveyor belt-style sushi, where commonly-ordered items are put out on a moving belt and you can otherwise ask for what else you want. They know what you got by having you keep all of your plates, which are color-coded according to price. There's at least one place like this in Vancouver as well. My other favorite part of Roppongi Hills was the art. This is Maman, a massive spider statue. It's dark so you can't see, but there's eggs in an egg sack at the bottom of its body. This picture was taken during an absolutely freezing wind, I'm amazed it isn't completely blurry from shaky hands.
 

Being a geek, my friends and I had to wander to find a way to access the Internet. We found this very cool, lighted walkway as we did so. It's part of the hotel complex.

 

Day 3

Bright and early again, we headed off for Mount Fuji.

 We saw an interesting movie, in English, at the visitors' center about the formation of the mountain and the traditions of climbing it that continue today. We were only able to go to the first out of five stations, the others were too heavily snowed. Once we'd gone there, there were food vendors outside. A friend and I got the most awesome BBQ corn from one of them. It was very tasty. Then, we were off toward one of the highlights of the trip, the Hakone Kowakien Yunessun hot springs park and resort. This place was wild! I don't have a lot of pictures, unfortunately, as carrying around a camera with my bathing suit would have been a wee bit awkward. Here's a pic from nearby, though. Those ships in the distance looked kind of like pirate ships, we expected them to start shooting at each other with canons!
 

It was a long day just to get to those two places! Btw, we did the coffee, wine, and green tea spas.
 

Day 4

We started out the next day by going to Harajuku, which is the stylish part of Tokyo that Gwen Stefani likes to sing about. Here's a particularly interesting clothing shop:

 

We couldn't resist more crepes. Here's why! This is actually a display of plastic food, which is apparently a huge industry in Japan. Boy does it make life easier on those of us who don't read the language.
 

 We then went to Studio Gonzo. This was a very cool part of the tour because anime studios don't usually let people in. I was so-so on the idea but I really enjoyed it. It was amusing to see how chaotic things can be behind the scenes. Next we went to a really crazy place called NamjaTown. Our guide was having a hard time explaining it and we understood why once we got there. This is a food theme park. Part of it is based on Tokyo in the 50s, very dark and narrow "streets" with lots of festival-style booths. There's a ton of games (after all, Namco runs it).
 

 The first floor has lots of gyoza.
 

 Upstairs is the dessert area, and they aren't playing around. Part of it's called Ice Cream City. We went to a place that had Turkish ice cream, which I'd never had before, so I gave it a try. The pictures below aren't exaggerations, the stuff can be pulled like taffy! It's very strange but it was tasty. The guy who worked there madea huge production out of preparing the cones, too. It was very fun.
 

 There was also black gelato. Our guide was able to list the ingredients to us, with things like black sesame seeds. We absolutely had to try it. One gal bought a cone and got a bunch of little "Try it" spoons and we all had a taste. It was actually pretty good! Just don't look at your tongue or teeth in the mirror afterwards.
 

 After that we only had about twenty minutes to shop, so we were a bit frenzied! Then, it was off to Akihabara.

 This section of Tokyo is mostly for electronics shopping, with lots of duty free shops. I was tempted to replace my very sad, ancient digital camera but between not knowing what I really wanted to replace it with and not wanting to deal with cross-oceanic warranty issues (and not having infinite funds) I decided not to. Here we found tons of cool "capsule" vending machines, where each machine is on a theme and you never know what you'll get in an individual capsule.
 

 

Day 5

This was our free day. Before going to Tokyo my friends and I had done some digging around and decided we'd go to Odaiba. We didn't do the whole place as there were shopping areas we wanted to go back to from earier in the trip, so we went to Fuji TV, the Venus Fort in Palette Town, and the Sun Walk in Palette Town. We had fun ordering in a food court where no one spoke English. The food was awesome. I'm not even sure what some of it was!

 

 That night, we went to a big Karaoke place and had a great time singing horribly. My two friends and I opted for a private room so there would be no witnesses. When we sang "Killing Me Softly" it was killing us all rather loudly. Truly, be glad I didn't make a podcast out of it or something.

Day 6

Way early in the morning, those of us who were going to continue on to Sapporo Snow Festival headed off to the airport. Sapooro is on the island of Hokkaido, and the snow festival is just incredible! It was freezing, of course, which was good for the ice and snow sculptures, some of them had things like fish embedded in them and some were even bars.

 

 We also went to sushi here, and this was by far the best sushi place out of the three we went to! It was also conveyor belt but the prices were better and there were cool plastic bubbles over the food.
 

 That night, we went back to the festival. Here we saw massive snow and ice buildings used for concerts and more.
 

 When we couldn't feel various parts of our bodies from the cold, we headed back. Here's a lovely pic of Sapporo at night.
 

 

Day 7

Still in Sapporo, we first checked out of our rooms. Then we headed toward the brewery to have an incredible meal of lamb that you BBQ on your table. It was all you could eat for 110 minutes so our guides kept encouraging us to chow down. None of us lasted the whole time but no one came out of there full! I discovered that BBQ pumpkin is really, really good.

 

 Then, we flew back to Tokyo and back to the hotel we'd stayed in before. It was after 8pm by the time we got in so we went to the hotel's food court to have dinner, did the computer thing, and just kind of hung out and repacked. Then in the morning we wandered around Tokyo some before meeting up to head to the airport and go home. I was pretty much ready to chain myself to something in Tokyo so I wouldn't have to go back! There's my trip report. Hope you enjoyed it. I sure did!