Japan, January 2010

[whereishome]

I reckon it's about time I posted a trip report on AFF. I hope that mine can live up to the high standard of other posters.

Here goes...

The Trip Details/Plan
As some of you know, I spent a few years living in the wild north of Japan before returning to Australia. My GF still lives in Japan, so when we can afford the money and time we cross the equator - this was to be a special trip due to my return to full-time study this year, and hence the cessation of full time employment. She arrived in December and spent Christmas with my family, then we spent NYE in Sydney at Home Nightclub in Darling Harbour, 10m away from the coughle Bay fireworks (amazing!).



Together we would fly back to Japan, and I would spend a few days staying at her family's house in Saitama (near Tokyo), then a few days with a friend in Minami Azabu (swanky Tokyo - international finance is serious business, even for the IT dudes), then we would spend our anniversary at Tokyo Disney Sea Hotel Miracosta, and the following day (her birthday) at Tokyo Disney Sea. Then back to her family's home and a side trip myself to Nagano to spend a night at a hot spring hotel, see the snow monkeys then another few days with her family before flying out.

January 1
We travelled directly to the airport from the club (with a brief stop to pick up luggage from a relative who lived in the CBD) and awaited the opening of check in for JL772 SYD - NRT.

What a rockstar feeling - straight from the club to the airport!!

We're the first people to check in, which is good because the best flights I could afford that fit our timing was discount economy on JL so I was relying on begging very politely for an exit row.

The conversation between myself and the ground Staff went like this...

WIH : Would it be possible to get an exit row?
GS : Well, there are some available but your current seats are pretty good.
WIH : ??? I thought we were up the back of the plane? I'm kind of tall as you can see (6'4" actually)
GS : Oh, well the computer has upgraded you to premium economy on the bulkhead.
WIH : Really? Lovely!

Of course, I should have asked for not a bulkhead because we spent the next 9 hours across from a screaming 2 year old, but thankfully Mersyndol and G&Ts sorted that out - the hard part was getting the child to swallow the gin. Food was okay - I had the pork (my personal rule is no fish or chicken on planes). VOD entertainment was good - watched This Is It and a few Japanese movies .



Suitably medicated we flew for 9 hours in PE with larger seats, landing in the evening 15 minutes ahead of schedule to Tokyo winter. The advantages of traveling with a native : Resident's Passport check! Whilst the rest of the plane waited in the long, long, looooooong line at customs we shot through and headed for the train. 2 hours of train ride later we finally arrived in the burbs of Saitama Prefecture (about 1 hour by train from Tokyo proper).

The Future Mrs WIH's (henceforth abb. FMrsWIH) mum had cooked a whole bunch of traditional New Year's food osechi ryouri (Osechi - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - it looked pretty much exactly the same as the photos too) which we had to make a decent attempt on (lest we tick mum off).

With that, it was off to bed for the first proper sleep in about 36 hours.

Next : I go with the folks to do the first shrine visit of the year, at the busiest shrine on the east side of Tokyo.

 

[Hvr]

Look forward to the rest of your TR.

Maybe I've been lucky but even coming off full planes I've never had a long wait at NRT in either immigration or customs.

I

Suitably medicated we flew for 9 hours in PE with larger seats, landing in the evening 15 minutes ahead of schedule to Tokyo winter. The advantages of traveling with a native : Resident's Passport check! Whilst the rest of the plane waited in the long, long, looooooong line at customs we shot through and headed for the train. 2 hours of train ride later we finally arrived in the burbs of Saitama Prefecture (about 1 hour by train from Tokyo proper).
.

Look forward to hearing about your experience at the Snow Monkeys. I've been there a couple of times and love visiting them.

Did you see yourself on the webcam?
–쉎Œö‰‘ƒ‰ƒCƒuƒJƒ€

 

[whereishome]

January 2
After a good 10 hours sleep, I got up to see my FMrsWIH off to work and then went to Asakusa's Sensoji Temple with her folks for Hatsumoude (Hatsum) which is the first shrine visit of the new year.

I've waited in line for things in Japan before like concerts and comic conventions and signings and so on but this was insane. From getting off the subway at Asakusa to the actual lineup, which was about 2km long, pretty much the entire time we were there. It's the year of the tiger, and all the shops that line this road to Sensoji are the trappiest of tourist shops. When it's not New Year holidays, this place is usually pretty crowded just due to the general tourist trade. Asakusa has an image of being an old-style part of Tokyo, but you have to deviate from the main streets to find it. Oh, and does anyone fancy a bit of black face? For about $30 you can be the leader of the free world!



And all this lineup to get up to the shrine proper, throw your money into the big box, clap your hands to get God's attention, pray then get out to allow the 90 000 000 000 people behind to get theirs in as well!
Afterwards we went to a nearby food place (not really a restaurant, just your average kind of Japanese food place) and had a late lunch. Butanokakuni is a slow cooked pork belly (just mispelled pork as 'cough', which is also legitimate in this case) and a pretty average shoyu ramen.

Afterwards, I parted with the folks (who were no doubt impressed by my stoicism in putting up with the cold, the crowds and long lines, as well as my devout prayer and excellent backspin I put on the 10yen I hurled into the money box at the shrine), and went off to Akihabara to see what had changed, and to buy some memory cards and stuff for my camera.

I pottered around a bit and took note of what the prices were like for certain things I was planning to buy later on, met FMrsWIH after she finished work and went back home.


Next : Tales of bars, karaoke and true love

Also, I think I'll have to can the photos - apparently I can only load 1mb worth, so I'll have to think carefully...

 

[bossreggie]

I'm enjoying the TR. I have never visited Japan.... However it is an option for later this year en-route to England. I look forward to reading more.

 

[drron]

Love Japan.Interesting to get an olmost insiders view.Another looking to see the updates.
As to photos i resize mine on Picassa so that I can fit my 6 allowed in a post-just remember though the smileys count as an image.

 

[whereishome]

Thanks for the replies! Hvr, I ended up changing plans as you will read. bossreggie, I recommend - you need at least 2 days to check it out I reckon. Airport to city travel is at least 2 hours each way. drron, I'm finding that I'm discovering more everytime I go back - when FMrsWIH moves here (next year) there'll be a lot more domestic travel.

Anyways, on with the report!!!

January 3, 2010
I headed into Tokyo to meet with some friends visiting from the USA - all professional animators who justify their trips to the IRS by visiting various animation producers and directors and comic artists in Japan.

We headed to a donburi restaurant in Akihabara for lunch. Donburi is "rice bowl" cooking, where a bowl of cooked rice is topped off with a layer of something. My mate wanted to visit this particular one to check out the "challenge bowl". Basically it's 2kg of rice with a load of seafood on top and if you can finish it, then get it for free. Otherwise it's ¥4000. We declined the mega-bowel bowl and I ended up with grilled salmon bowl, the others rocked the sea urchin and other things I won't eat (since I know how they live and what the water purity is like in most parts of Japan!)



Afterwards, we headed off to Mandarake to help one the guys sell some extra books he'd bought at Comic Market (comic market is the worlds biggest indie comics event, held twice a year in Tokyo (700 000 attendees and 40 000 artists/groups over 3 days). After being offered a laughable sum from the second hand buyback, the gentleman in possession of the books decided to pay the postage back to the US and sell them in his comic book shop where he would break more than even.

We then stopped by Yodobashi Camera whilst another of our group looked at camera lenses (FYI, there are cheaper places than Yodobashi but not as foreigner friendly - speaking Japanese is kind of a must). Anyone fancy some Disney Character jaffle or waffle makers?



By then it was the afternoon and I headed off to meet up with a good friend who I used to work with up north, who managed to make the transition working for a multinational finance company in IT based in Tokyo, and meet up with FMrsWIH after she finished work and together we met up with yet another friend who works as an editor for one of the national English language dailies in Tokyo.

Our editor friend had found a neat little English pub under the railway tracks near Ueno station. From there all I remember is 12% beer, karaoke and more drinking and embarrassing myself on a train platform on the way back to the suburbs.


January 4
The next day, after profuse apologies to FMrsWIH (and copping a severe and justified amount of 'displeasure') we headed off with her family and her sister's family to a Japanese family restaurant. Family Restaurants or famiresu are kind of like Pizza Hut or Sizzler or something like that, but without the buffet bar. A chain restaurant. Well, we ended up in a Japanese food one.

Here is mine, and one of the nieces set menu selections. Quite delicious.


Driving home with her dad was interesting "Oh, you must be careful about FMrsWIH - she has very good hearing. And a very good nose. So does her mother. They're like dogs." FMrsWIH who was riding in the back voice her disagreement at being compared to her mother. I should point out that there was no malice in dad's observation - he just kind of followed his train of thought without thinking. Which I can relate to.

Later in the evening, we headed off to the city to meet up with some of FMrsWIH's friends in a Darts Bar. Basically, you pay ¥100 per player and the computer scores for you. If you have a members card to the darts system, you can play in tournaments over the internet and maintain a national ranking for televised competitions - kind of like those poker tourneys where you get entry through playing online.


I proved that just like pool, my darts skills improve by the glass and we headed home after a few hours of Cricket.

Coming up, more craziness - I move over to the other side of the city and bunk with the expat crowd for a few days, then Disney!

 

[whereishome]

Well I suppose I now have to procrastinate on the impending assignment deadlines and add a little more to my trip report!!

January 5
This was the day I (tearfully?) parted ways with the betterer half and headed from the burbs into the inner city. A friend works for a multi-national finance group, looking after their IT infrastructure and he was nice enough to let me crash on his couch for a few nights.

Tokyo can be divided into two halves - ****amachi and yamanote. The ****amachi area covers a lot of eastern Tokyo like Ueno, Asakusa, Akihabara and Kanda. The Yamanote area is more away from the coast and includes such well-known Tokyo locales as Ginza, Shinjuku, Shibuya, Roppongi.

My friend works in Ebisu, which is a pretty high falooting area - his nearby apartment (which is tiny in comparison to the rent) counts the French Embassy as a neighbour, and is a stop away from the expat haven of Roppongi.

Expats in Japan can be quite simply divided into two groups - those that can speak Japanese, function outside of the foreigner-friendly bubble of the premium hotels, bars with English speaking staff (and inflated prices) and those that can't. My experience has been that learning the language opens up infinitely more possibilities for work and play, so I guess I gravitate towards that sort of thing.

My first night in the Azabu area involved a trip to Naka-Meguro (the very end of the Hibiya line), a darts bar (again with the darts!), followed by a trip to a yaki-niku/ghengis khan (jingisu kaan) restaurant and a bike-courier loft bar.

Naka-Meguro has a lot of different cuisine available, reflecting the "international" nature of the area. Great Mexican food is available (which we go to later), but first - Ghenghis Khan.

Jingisu-kaan is lamb, cooked on a hot iron plate at your table. The iron plate sits over either a gas burner or a bucket of hot coals. Upon entry, you stash your jacket/coat in a locker (because all that smokey, fatty meat will stink you up). Order drinks, select your platter of raw meat and veg from the menu and once it arrives you can begin cooking.



This place has helpful Japanese and English instructions on a massive wall poster, although English is kind of loosely appropriate in this case.

Spread meat to the grill with fizzle to the sizzle. Wait till meat get smokin' flava with da juice drippin' to charcoal. Then eat up with dippin' to the bangin' special soy sauce.

Do not try to check the temp with your tongue or hand. It get smokin' hot, for real though.

After which it was off to the Kinfolk Lounge for drinks. John is Australian and lives in Tokyo, Ryan is American and lives in LA. Together they run a bar / bike frame company. The Kinfolk Lounge sits on the first floor of a traditional Japanese house. The place is amazing, cozy and uniquely welcoming, with bike frames hanging from the ceiling but not a overload of bike-related decor - Check website here for mad photos. The Kinfolk Lounge

January 6
After a good long sleep-in, I headed to Shibuya to go book & CD shopping. On the way I stopped at an excellent French-style boulangerie near Hiroo Station for some brunch.

When Japan opened its borders after years of self-imposed isolation, the Meiji Emperor imported foreign experts to modernise Japan - Beer from Germans, Bread from France, Military from Prussia, etc. Tasty, tasty breads.

In the evening I met up with another friend who works as a software developer, writing games for NintendoDS and XBox - near to his work in Naka-Meguro is a fantastic Mexican place, with actual Mexicans working in the kitchen. Which may sound odd, but it does make a difference.



After a whole bunch of Margeritas we retired to The Tap Room, run by an American-founded Japanese microbrewer called Baird Beers - delicious, 50-odd beers available and most of them on tap. On the web at Nakameguro Taproom

I enjoyed brews with names like Old Glory and Misogynist cough - very delicious, and stout goes well with a cold winter Tokyo night.




Well, back to assignments - coming up, the American Bar, Korea right in the middle of Tokyo, a discount coupon to a schoolgirl themed-bar and Tokyo Disney...