Day 2 (part I) - Tokyo

Day 2 (part I) - Tokyo

Tsukiji Fish Market

My first whole day in Tokyo got started incredibly early. We woke up at around 6:00 a.m. and headed over to the world famous Tsukiji (basically pronounced "skee-jee") Fish Market near Tokyo Bay.

For those who are unfamiliar, the Tsukiji Fish Market is the largest wholesale fish and seafood market in the world. The market consists of two areas, the outer market and the inner market.

The outer market has various seafood items for sale, in addition to some cooking supplies and other food related materials. It is a complete madhouse - I couldn't walk two feet without almost being run over by a forklift or stepping into a box full of live fish.

The inner market is where the more important items, including tuna, are bid on in a live auction. By the time we got there many of the fish had already been sold but we did get a chance to see a few sales. Here are a few videos of the madness:

From my understanding, bidders for the fish usually include agents for restaurants, large retailers, and food processing companies. Some single tuna sell for thousands of dollars, which is not all that surprising with the ever increasing popularity of sushi worldwide. The Tsukiji fish market sets tuna and other fish prices throughout the world. It is my understanding that they will be converting to a new type of market in the next few years so I feel very fortunate to have been able to see this market while it still is the center of the fishing/sushi industry.

After being purchased many of the Tuna, swordfish, and other fish are sliced up with table saws in the outer market and package them up for worldwide distribution.

After watching the auctions we headed over to a sushi restaurant across the street from the market for some breakfast sushi. Doesn't sound like a great idea but it was a really interesting experience. We sat at the bar area and had sushi chefs whip up various pieces of fresh fish and put them on our plate. I had probably the freshest sushi/sashimi possible and it wasn't a problem eating it so early. The only problem that I had was eating the sea urchin that was placed on my plate.

I suppose there are some twisted, masochistic individuals out there who actually enjoy eating this foul creature, but to me it was possibly the single worst thing I have ever tasted in my life. After having three or four pieces of the best sushi I have ever had I decided to get a little adventurous and go ahead and try out the yellow pasty piece of sushi sitting at the top of my plate.

How bad could it be? I thought.

It might even be good. After all, I just tried some eel (unagi) for the first time a few minutes ago and it was absolutely delicious.

The chef was kind enough to serve me a tennis ball sized piece of urchin, which for some God forsaken reason I decided to stick in my mouth all at once. In retrospect that had to be one of the five or ten worst decisions of my entire life. My initial urge to spit the urchin back out on the table, gargle the taste out of my mouth with some wasabi-filled soy sauce and curse out everyone in the entire restaurant was put aside, as I was sitting at the counter right in front of the chef who served it to me and I didn't want to be insulting. So, I started chewing as fast as I could, which, it turns out, was not very fast at all. Each partial bite that I swallowed I had to choke down, with all of it almost coming back up two or three times. At the end, I finally finished the urchin and feigned a smile. I think I may have even said "that wasn't so bad" or some other ridiculous lie, while I tried my best to ensure that the buckets of water that formed in my eyes didn't formulate into actual tears.

I tried to enjoy the rest of my sushi but the damage had already been done. As I handed my money over I thought about how funny it was to be paying someone to make me exercise my gag reflex. That is akin to giving someone $30 to give you a swift kick in the nuts. The next time I eat urchin, someone will be paying me to do it.

Cityview

After the fish market we took a quick nap and then headed out to Rappongi to check out the Tokyo cityview.

Rappongi is a neighborhood in Tokyo that is best known for its nightlife (we went there on weekend #2) but it also has a skyscraper located on high ground that provides an excellent view of the city.

As you can see, in my opinion Tokyo is not as highly condensed and vertical as some cities like New York, but it is very large in terms of geographical space and it also has many pockets of large skyscrapers. According to many sources, Tokyo is the largest city in the world.

The cityview building also is home to a modern art museum/showroom. The majority of the items on display that afternoon were pieces by Annette Messager, a French artist who is known for installation work which incorporates photography, physical objects, prints, and drawings. It reminded me of the sculpture art done by Catherine O'Hara's character in Beetlejuice (Delia Deets?)

especially this particular room (we were not allowed to take pictures or videos, so I shot this from my pocket - sorry if it's a little jumbled).

There were a lot of great exhibits, but we were not allowed to take pictures, so here is one I found on the internet that was on display.

The last one was particularly interesting - entitled "Casino". It was two adjacent rooms, with only a doorway visible into the back room, both covered with a continually flowing red cloth with various skulls hanging from the ceiling and different colored lights underneath the cloth.
The movement of the cloth and the sound of the blowing air was very hypnotic. It looked like a perpetually rocking sea of blood.

The entire exhibit was rather unusual, but overall it was very interesting, thought provoking, and extremely innovative.

Akihabara / Electrictown

After the cityview we decided to check out Akihabara, a neighborhood in Tokyo known as "Electrictown". It is a major shopping area for various electronics, anime & manga (Japanese animation), and computers.

As everyone knows Japan is a very technologically advanced society and Tokyo is the center of it all. Tokyo is a major test market for many new electronics, with many concept electronics being tested first on the Tokyo market before they are mass produced and sent to the US and other countries. Akihabara is supposedly a place where you can get a sneak peek at some electronics before they hit the main stream market. It is probably most well known for being the first place to offer personal robots and robotics. Below is a picture of Eli next to a rather strange robot.With respect to electronics, I did see some interesting phones and some extremely high storage memory cards, but overall I didn't see anything that was over the top.



Most of the fun came from seeing the Japanese animation signs and stores all over. It was like a giant video game arcade / comic book convention that encompassed three or four city blocks. Many Japanese people are completely obsessed with anime and manga, and Akihabara was a great place to get a little taste of that obsession. Each comic book store we went into was packed with people running around and grabbing everything on the shelf. There were also countless signs and billboards with giant cartoons.

In the spirit of the video game arcade feel we decided to head into an arcade to check out some weird stuff and we ended up playing a few games while we were there.

It was nowhere near as fun as SEGA World, which we went to in Nara and I will discuss later, but it was a pretty good time.

We also stopped in a Pachinko parlor to check out and possibly play some Pachinko. Pachinko is, from what I could gather, a game that is some sort of hybrid between pinball and slot machines. People carry around huge trays filled with little silver metallic pinballs and continually pour them into these pachinko machines.

There are flashing lights and loud noises, much like a casino slot machine area. Everyone in the entire place smokes and there is just a lot of weird stuff going on in these parlors. I took a video that I hope does it some justice.

I was also not allowed to take pictures in here so I was just able to get this one.

We didn't stick around to play as we were a little weirded out by the whole situation. I think Pachinko is a game that simply doesn't really translate well to our culture and I'd be perfectly happy if I never played that game in my life. But, it is a very popular and successful game so I'm sure it's a blast if you're into that kind of thing.


We did a lot on this day so I'm going to cut this short and pick up the evening activities in the next post.

Introduction and Day 1

Mike's trip to Japan

I recently took a trip to Japan and I have had so many people ask me about my trip that I have decided to put my thoughts down in blog format.

Here was the itinerary:

Wednesday, Sept 10-Saturday, Sept 13 - Tokyo

Saturday, September 13 - Wednesday, September 17 - Kyoto (with day trip to Hiroshima)

Wednesday, September 17-Friday, September 19 - Nara

Friday, September 19 - Sunday, September 21 - Back to Tokyo


Throughout the entire trip I traveled with two people

Eli (a.k.a. EKO)

Eli is a friend of mine from law school. Eli basically was the brains behind the whole operation as he was the one who planned the trip. It was great to travel with Eli as he is a very experienced traveler and has a great eye for picking up on unusual or interesting things. He has a willingness to go anywhere or do anything and have a great time while he does it.

Kennon (a.k.a. KP3)

Kennon is a friend of Eli's and, like Eli and myself, also is an attorney. Although Eli provided the basic outline for the trip, Kennon probably did the most research and planned most of our day to day activities in addition to being the primary tour guide/map reader. It was also great to travel with Kennon as he is easy to get along with and has a great sense of humor. Overall the three of us got along really well and we had an absolute blast in Japan.

Japan was just the first stop on a five week tour of Asia for Eli and Kennon, who are continuing on to Singapore, Cambodia, Thailand, and Malaysia, but Japan was the only spot on my itinerary.

I caught a direct flight from Atlanta to Tokyo, which took about 14 hours. It sounds worse than it was - I actually didn't mind the flight at all. I signed up for an exit row seat and had plenty of room. That is until a 6'8" guy who plays for the JBL came and sat down right next to me, completely occupying my leg and armrest space. For those who are unfamiliar, which I'm guessing is everyone, the JBL is the Japanese Basketball League, which, apparently, exists. Anyway, I chatted it up with this guy for quite a while. Apparently he played for the Toyama Grousers, which is one of eight or ten teams in the JBL. Some things that I remember from the conversation were that there were typically a few thousand people at each game (he described it as a popular high school game), with numbers increasing in the playoffs, foreign players (mostly US) accounted for about 60% of the players on any given team, and that basketball was a young sport in Japan but that it was definitely getting more popular (the league started with 6 teams, then had 8, 10 and finally up to 12 teams).

Upon arriving in Tokyo I met up with Eli and Kennon at the hotel. It was quite an ordeal finding the hotel as I didn't have a cell phone and neither did Eli or Kennon, I didn't have anything but a printout of directions to the hotel from a Japanese girl who didn't really speak English very well, and I could't read or speak a lick of Japanese. Eventually I found them, mostly through a lot of pointing and motioning directions from locals, and we met up at our hotel in the Shiodome area of Tokyo near Tokyo Bay, the Park Hotel.

Shortly after arriving we headed out on the town, meeting up with a few of Eli's friends.

Chris Jones

Chris is a friend of Eli's from Northwestern. Chris is from Nashville, TN but is living in Tokyo teaching English. He recently got engaged to a Japanese girl named Miwa and they are deciding where to set up shop once they are married. We hung out with Chris quite a bit - he is a really cool guy and did a great job of showing us around Tokyo, getting us tickets to a Sumo wrestling tournament as well as a Japanese professional baseball game.

Chris Brennan

Chris is a friend of a friend of Eli's. He is a native Australian who lives and works in Tokyo. Chris showed us around and showed us a lot of the off-book bars and night clubs. When I say "off-book" I simply mean things that were not mentioned in any of the tourguide books that we brought with us on the trip.

First night out - Shibuya

Shibuya is one of the many wards/neighborhoods in Tokyo. It is a popular nightlife section for younger people and it was very close to our hotel so we decided to head there for our first night.
Chris Brennan took us to a cool little restaurant in Shibuya that is owned by one of his friends. Brennan took care of the ordering and before we knew what happened we had a few rounds of beer (or beeru), some sake, and ended up eating some sashimi that was supposedly a type of goldfish as well as something that looked like bacon, tasted a lot like bacon, but ended up being horse. Disgusting.

We then went out to a lounge called Insomnia. We didn't stick around long as we had an early morning planned and I was a little jet lagged.

What we did see, which I found pretty interesting, was the Japanese "love hotels", which are hotels that you can rent out for a few hours to....sleep in. I suppose they are not much different than places we have in the US (motels, etc.), but if I'm not mistaken it is a little more socially acceptable in Japan. It could be in part because the public transportation system in Tokyo, which just about everyone uses, stops running at midnight and doesn't start again until around 6:00 a.m. Thus, instead of taking an expensive cab to the distant suburbs, people can just hole up for a few hours and catch the early morning train home.


We checked in pretty early as we had a full day planned for Friday and wanted to catch some sleep.