Day 85-86: What Lies Beyond
Tokyo has a lot to see, but Japan, with its thin shape and
fast trains, is as much about the day trips, the little locales one or two
hours away from the bulging metropolises, the little temple towns tucked away
behind miles of steel track and Shinkansens. Well, over the past two days, I
got to see two different areas about 1-1.5 hours outside of Tokyo’s
Asakusabashi station, where my hostel is tightly situated. Yesterday was
Yokohama, Tokyo’s sister city. Today was Kamakura, a city farther out the same
direction as Yokohama. Both gave me a different perspective on Japan, the old
and the new, as it were.
It is unfair to call Yokohama a ‘little locale… away from
the bulging metropolises’ since it is a city of about 3 million people, making
it the 2nd largest city in Japan. I’m not sure how a major country
like Japan can have its two largest cities within forty five minutes of each
other, but it works. From Yokohama, you cannot see Tokyo at all. It is a nice
city on its own, a city of culture and a massive urban experiment. The drive
from Tokyo to Yokohama took me through many different tunnels, all brightly lit
with massive lanes, and highways that criss-crossed up and down over the Japan
coast. We also passed the Port of Tokyo, which was about thirty times cleaner
and more organized (at least from afar), than the Port(s) that lines the New
Jersey Turnpike. Finally, we reached Yokohama, and in particular my dad’s old
work colleague’s section of Yokohama, home of the experiment.
The great experiment is really what I’m calling a new part
of Yokohama, built on reclaimed land. It is structured and organized to be a self-contained
city within a city, with tall modern housing buildings across from office
buildings whose bottom floors are mainly malls. Everything is in this little
area, the place to work, the place to sleep, the place to eat and the place to
shop. My dad’s colleague’s only real complaint was that there was no place to play,
as he had a young daughter and there are few parks or play areas in this little
district of Yokohama.
We parked his car at the apartment garage and then set off
to the heart of the experimental district, to Queen East, a large office building
and mall. The mall part rises about five stories from well underground to a
long escalator above it, with restaurants and shops at every level. My dad’s
colleague and I found a nice little Kaiten Zushi restaurant –the sushi
restaurants where they go around in conveyor belts. I was a little unsure what
was going on when I saw approximately no one take sushi from the belt, but he
told me that in many of these kaiten restaurants the ones on the belt are
essentially for show, and the customer tells the sushi chef which one they
want. We had a bunch of sushi, all tasting far better than anything I’ve had in
the US. My favorites were probably the Unagi (eel) and Sea Urchin. I have a
favorite sushi place in New Jersey, but Sushi Palace mainly serves rolls. After
eating at these sushi places in Japan, it seems like a farce to go back (though
I know I will).
After lunch we went for a walk around the waterfront of The
Great Experiment (the area has a name, but I’m not quite sure what it is),
which gives a side view of the real Yokohama afar. Walking around this area it
seemed to be like any posh waterfront area in the US, or more recently,
Australia. Instead of walking to the other end of the city, the normal end, we
decided to take the ‘Sea Bass’ speedboat that runs through three of the most
popular areas in the city. From the water, I got a good view of Yokohama. The ‘Great
Experiment’ area is really nice, even with its own mini Amusement Park with
giant Ferris Wheel and decent sized Roller Coaster. We then sailed past a few
ship docks and then a giant pier, where the boat stopped for the first time. In
true Japan style, this pier had a long, glistening glass building that took up
most of it. On the roof of this behemoth of a building was a park. Not a
rooftop garden. A park. A long, grass covered park that even had slight hills.
After we went back around that pier, the boat continued
further down the coast of Yokohama into the Central area of the city. When we
get off, we entered into I guess the original downtown Yokohama (much of what
we had passed was reclaimed over the last 50 years). Another large park was
right off of the pier, which my dad’s colleague pointed out as being one of the
advantages of living more centrally in Yokohama. We spent the next two hours or
so just walking around Yokohama Central. We walked through one of the oldest
hotels in all of Japan, then through Japan’s largest Chinatown, which was so
dense and packed, with lines queueing up in front of every stall despite it
being well past conventional lunch time. We walked through the well designed
government buildings, and even a quick trip inside the Cup Noodles museum,
which was almost humorously full and busy. Finally, we returned back to the
Queen East and to his apartment high inside one of The Great Experiment towers.
His apartment building is designed like one of those hotels where
all of the rooms are on the walls of the hotel, with a large open atrium in the
middle. I was a little surprised that there was no roof, since rain water would
be quite annoying, but hard to argue with how beautiful it was. We then met his
wife and daughter. The daughter was quite shy, even after telling her mom that
she was excited to practice her English with me. We were in the apartment for a
bit, where I played a board game with her, which got her to open up a little.
In her defense, she was four, and I was exactly the same around strangers when
I was four too.
We left from there to dinner at a Japanese Korean-BBQ place,
which I was told is the term used for those types of restaurants. Despite me
having gone to a lot of them in Osaka, I told them I hadn’t been as to not
create any doubt in their mind whether they chose a good place to take me. We
settled and I laid back, letting him do the ordering and the cooking, and while
I would like to think I did an adequate job when I went on my own, I quickly
realized how much better someone who knows what they’re doing is. The first course
was tongue, roast (which I called ‘normal meat’, much to the delight of my dad’s
colleague and his wife) and intestine. The next round was pork, more intestine,
and little bowls of different innards, like stomach, heart, and two others. All
were quite good, and cooked better than I ever had. In my defense, it cooks
better when you put more meats on the grill at once, which was hard to do when
I was alone.
After we finished dinner I headed to the train station deep
in the basement of Queen East (the last part of ‘The Great Experiment’ which I
guess does allow people easy access to leave it. I first took the subway to
Yokohama station, then the train from there to Tokyo Station, and then the
local JR train to the hostel. All those trips took about 40 minutes, another
showcase of the breathtaking efficiency of the Japan Rail system.
My next day was a little quieter, as instead of going from
Japan’s largest city to its 2nd largest, I ventured out in the same
direction as Yokohama, but a little further out, to Kamakura. My dad’s
colleague told me about Kamakura as an option if the weather was bad, as I had
planned to go to Mt. Fuji, or at least get close enough to get a nice picture.
Since the forecast was a little dicey, I decided to put off Mt. Fuji and do
Kamakura instead. From the quick overnight research I did, Kamakura seemed to
be a larger version of Nara, an Old-Japan city, full of temples and shrines.
Kamakura was about an hour and fifiteen from Tokyo Station, making
this my first long-distance trip on a train that isn’t a Shinkansen bullet
train. Still, the long distance JR trains are extremely reliable and
comfortable. The hum along smoothly without ever having to stop ‘because of
traffic ahead’, the omnipresent nuisance of American train travel. The trip to
Kamakura allowed me to do a little more planning of my trip. The forecasts
showed the potential for rain in the afternoon, so I wanted to get everything
done first.
Kamakura has a ton of temples and shrines, so it was quite
an assignment to limit it to the ones worth seeing. In the end, after doing my
research on the JR WiFi available on their trains, I settled on the Hasedera
Temple, the Great Buddha, the Shrine of Tsurugaoka, and the Kenchoji Temple.
These four are not only, at least to me, the four best sites but are also
easily reachable from each other. Unlike Nara, Kamakura is not a small walkable
city, but a large one that happens to have a bunch of sites to see inside.
The first site was the Hasedera Temple, at the end of a busy
lane deep inside Kamakura. Once you enter the Hasedera Temple grounds you
escape the business of the lane and enter into a scenic garden area with the
temple partially hidden by trees. It really is a beautiful setting,
unimaginable when you consider just how cramped the city seems outside. This
was a little paradise. The temple itself was large but a bit hollow. The real
treat was the gardens around it, the little ponds, and the rows of stone people
representing the dead.
From there, I had to walk about ten minutes back in the real
world (the busy streets – I can’t describe just how cramped and un-Japanese the
streets of Kamakura are) to get to the Shrine of Tsurugaoka (there’s a second
name that’s even harder to spell). The shrine is in an ever more open area,
housed behind a ornate wooden gate and side pagodas and up a steep bank of
steps. The steps looked a bit daunting, but after seeing older Japanese men and
women climb up I really had no other choice. The temple from the top had all of
the things most of the shrines in Japan do, like the smoke that people wave on
them to wash away their faults and bless them with good luck, the little area
where you toss a 10 yen coin and pray before you enter inside. Most of these
temples and shrines are a little barren inside, with some nice paintings on the
roof.
After I left that I went to the Great Buddha, which is as it
sounds, a ‘Great’ large Buddha statue, that had I would estimate 200 people
around it, most of them not tourists. The ‘Great Buddha’ area also had a little
idyllic pond next to it, and that was a good hideout from the mob at the Buddha
itself. Strangely, they keep the immediate area next to the Buddha empty, which
did nothing more than make my head-on picture of it less cluttered without any
people.
The Kenchoji temple was next, but it was a little
disappointing compared to the others. It was also getting a little cloudy, so
my pictures were a bit off and I was trying to hurry through the last stop
before heading back inside the train and back to Tokyo. I was able to get in
right as the rain started to come down hard. I made it back to Tokyo and that
rain had changed to a constant mist, which is more annoying in a way. At least
it let me walk around.
I had a place in mind for dinner, another Katien Zushi
place, this time in Asakusa, a northern district of Tokyo. In the rain, I
ventured down every nook and cranny looking for this place, called Maguro-Bito,
but couldn’t find it. Tripadvisor had reviews of the place as recently as May
13th. Of course, there is the fatal flaw with the site, you can
review a place at any point. Hell, when I get back I want to go review
everything I’ve seen throughout this trip. I have a recommendation for the people
that run the site. They should make reviewers say when the visited that place.
Anyway, I finally gave up and returned to Ueno, which I know
has another Gaiten Sushi place near Ueno station. This one is known for having
all of its sushi 126 yen, which is a great deal. It doesn’t have any specialty
sushi, but was still just way better than the sushi we get in the US. After, I
walked around Ginza during the light mist that was subsiding, checking out the
various bars that were still full near 10:00. Japanese work late (the trains
are still full of suits around this time), but they party late as well, as most
of the bars were full of suits at that time of the day on a Monday evening. I
finally returned to my hotel around 11:30 ready to go to sleep after a long,
long day, with an exciting one to come tomorrow as I get to spend a day with my
long-lost friend.
