And then she handed me two grand in cash

To pick up where the story left off, I spent a couple days in Tokyo before going to the quarterly meeting of DA corp., after which I was to go to Osaka to assume my duties.

After the misadventures of my arrival on Saturday, I spent the night at Kimi Ryokan, and as I mentioned in the previous post got to take a bit of a morning stroll around Ikebukuro. Sunday evening however, the company was putting me up in a hotel near the office, in the beautiful New Pier Takeshiba district.

(a note on the pics I post, you can access all of the relevant pics by clicking on the images, they are linked to the associated flickr sets, organized by location)

View from the hotel at New Pier Takeshiba

View of the area. Not very residential.

This left me back in the predicament of relocating my substantial baggage. A reasonable person would probably have taken a cab to the hotel on the opposite side of Tokyo. Instead being me, I decided to haul my bags back to Ikebukuro station, on the JR ring-line around Tokyo (the Yamanote line, it’s more expensive than a normal subway line and doesn’t go to the heart of the city, but is a great ring route that gives you access to a lot of Tokyo without having to change trains, as opposed to the normal linear subway lines. Ended up being perfect as it goes from Ikebukuro to Hamamatsu-cho station, which is only about a half mile from the hotel), and over to the hotel. I had managed fooled myself into thinking that the awful experience of hauling my luggage the previous night was somehow unique and would be entirely different Sunday morning. This was wrong.

An aside, nothing gets stares in Tokyo like a white guy in grungy jeans and a T, drenched in sweat, carrying luggage for a family of four on the fucking subway.

In either case I made it and found myself showered, shaved, and settled into the comfy western-style hotel room by mid-afternoon, so I figured I should make good use of my free time and see some of Tokyo. Unsurprisingly I was dying for a meal, so I checked out a travel guide to find a good area to scrounge around for something. If I haven’t said it already, Tokyo is a massive city. Massive in a sense that I couldn’t previously comprehend. NYC is highly populated, LA is quite large, and London is both, but none of these have struck me like Tokyo. You just keep walking and there is just more city and more people. I haven’t even been able to find a full map of the city with any reasonable level of detail, it is just too expansive. I’ll see if I feel the same when I return there, but even in Osaka I have found the sheer scale of the urban environment impressive. So of course there are countless places in the city that would be ideal for exploring a bit and grabbing something cheap to eat, but I picked one: Akasaka.

Akasaka on a sleepy Sunday afternoon

I found Akasaka in an interesting, or perhaps uninteresting, state. For the entire stretch from Akasake-mitsuke station to Roppongi-itchome station (about 3/4 mile), the place was packed with stores on top of stores, a theme I’ve rediscovered several times since elsewhere, punctuated by the occasional skyscraper representing some major company or institution. Nevertheless, relative to the retail density it was barren. I took this to be a quality of Sunday, since a lot of places were closed. Exploring for a while I settled on some nondescript place to eat, one of many that subscribe to a simple low-service system: you pick your meal from a vending-machine type of device that spits out a receipt, which you hand to the service staff who then cook up whatever your receipt prescribes. It’s one of a number of alternatives to traditional waitservice I’ve found here, and the places are usually pretty cheap (5-8USD a meal). Like most places I’ve eaten so far, the food typically has a lot of either rice or noodle, fish or fried ham (katsu), and cabbage. Meats or other vegetables can be present but are usually pretty sparse. There is rarely fruit. Going to a grocery store earlier this week I discovered why: fruits and vegetables are crazy expensive here, perhaps twice the price of those in the US. I suspect it is because of a locally-based agriculture system, given some of the tell-tale signs I’ve seen before in other countries with this phenomenon; fruit and vegetable selections tend to be both highly limited and widely variable, with each day bringing a different set of 4-6 different vegetables along with perhaps one or two that are insanely expensive and therefore likely from overseas. Chicken and pork aren’t particularly pricey, but they are terrible. The ham is OK but very fatty, and the chicken is not the big white breasts you grill in the states, it’s a bit stringy and grossly emaciated. You can get better stuff at gourmet grocery stores of course (for that matter, as far as I’ve seen you can get almost anything somewhere), which have everything from Italian deli meats to bon bons, but that obviously comes at a price.

So I walked around Akasaka for a bit and took in the neighborhood, changed a bare minimum of money at an ATM (Japan is very much a cash society, so its pretty hard to get around with credit card alone), and then took it on the road for a bit. I figured if I headed east I would eventually find myself deeper in the heart of the city, so I’d be sure to see something or other. Turns out I was partially right and very much wrong.

This would be a good point to comment on city structure. In most American cities there is a characteristic feel to the architecture, whether you realize it or not, that is rooted in the growth period of the city. The gilded age for San Francisco, or the 20’s and 50’s/60’s for Chicago and New York, mark periods where the cities experienced cultural and economic expansion. Tokyo and Osaka are not like this, they are very much modern cities. Each of the few neighborhoods I’ve seen in both cities has had its own character, moreso than the locales of manhattan, but is always brutally urban and modern in basic principle. Osaka was apparently bombed to oblivion in WWII, which may account for the lack of older architecture, but both Osaka and Tokyo are almost timeless in their modern look; their growth can’t easily be placed in any decade of American architecture, even since the second world war. Rather, there is a pure modernistic tone, driven I think by the very minimalistic design of buildings that acts as a sort of… unifying force that enforces some measure of cohesion between varied structures. Maybe in time I’ll be able to discriminate periods of growth, but for now all I can say is that if you walk and walk and walk you will find more and more city until long after you’re tired to death. Taking the Shinkansen from Tokyo to Osaka, passing through Nagoya and Kyoto, I of course saw both rural expanses and suburban environments much like Brookline or Cambridge/Somerville or the East Bay. Still, it takes a good time, perhaps twenty minutes on the bullet train, to escape truly urban environments of apartment buildings, stores and offices. Tokyo and Osaka both are very much modern, urban environments.

One might think that this would make them well-organized and easy to navigate with ample signage and clear primary routes. That would be terribly, terribly wrong. In both cities streets of every breadth and level of foot traffic meander and double back with no particular aim; there are rarely signs of any use, and people that live in the area frequently don’t even know what the names of the major streets are, or really any street but the one they live on; with the winding streets and tall buildings obscuring any landmarks, holding onto mental compass points doesn’t last long; the size of streets is little indication of their utility or their ability to get you where you wish to go, since major roads are really arteries for vehicles and have absolutely nothing to do with actually getting about your current locale; finally, whatever you are looking for is probably tucked away in a 4-8 story building with 4-8 other things each of which has its own little sign next to twenty neighboring building in the identical situation. All of this combines to mean that most visitors to these cities will spend a good deal of time very very lost. Furthermore, being lost in these environments is not particularly fun, because while wherever you are there are plenty of buildings, there are only so many locations where shopping and entertainment are concentrated, so you will quickly find that you are, in fact, nowhere.

So needless to say, that’s where I found myself as I worked my way east. I should mention that, resolved to carry myself proper when finally unencumbered by luggage, I was wearing jeans and a blazer in the summer heat, making my navigation of this urban jungle a sticky affair. Despite this it was plenty fun and elucidating. I wandered around for about an hour before coming across anything other than deserted office buildings, shuttered lunch places, and some swanky-in-intent apartment buildings. The thing I came across was a temple.

I don’t know the name or the significance, and I could never find it again, but it was a fairly large grounds with a good number of people milling in and out. Basically there’s a mall/park, of which I’m about 75% the way up in the above picture (coming from the far end), that leads up to the main building of the temple. You don’t actually enter the temple (I’m sure some can but no one was), and the ‘entrance’ shown above is not actually an entrance, it is a pool of water which you toss a coin into and pray. This involves, if I remember correctly (which I’m sure I don’t), a bow and then two claps of the hands. It was interesting to see how different people clapped; some slow and patient, some rapid and punchy, some quick and firm, but with a pause in between, etc. Along the two sides of the mall, under the tree groves (to the right and left of the image above), there was a sort of antiques fair, or perhaps more accurately a yard sale. Various people selling obscure wares, from 50s comicbooks and assorted sculptures to chotchky’s and kid’s toys. Sorry no pics, not sure why.

So having found something I figured I should quit while I was ahead and asked a security guard (there are always security guards somewhere nearby, I don’t care where you are, especially during the day [effective?]. This is despite there being only 1.3 robberies/100,000 population annually) where the nearest train station was. He gave the answer everyone gives me when I ask directions: just down the road, really close. This of course meant it was 10 minutes away for someone that knew how to get there down a succession of what would be described as ambiguous roads if roads could be ambiguous, and half an hour away for a traveler asking 3 people for directions.

In either case I found the place and made my way back to New Pier Takeshiba for some dinner and sleep. The Takeshiba area has a sort of down-town, contemporary feel to it; sort of like a financial district (although it is not the business heart of Tokyo by any stretch), with large, spaced-apart skyscrapers with big gleaming glass and marble lobbies and Starbucks’ in the corners. During the week it’s packed with business people, but curiously enough on the weekend it earns it’s ‘new pier’ title by providing passage for hundreds of people to mini-cruise ships that ferry them to islands out in the bay for a day of surfing and beaching.

So we finally get to the title of this post, wherein I was handed a sum of cashmoney that perhaps someone in a less… legal line of work is more used to. The next morning I woke up, threw on a suit, and checked out to head over to the office building just next door where I met my contacts in person, received whatever orientation I required (which was interesting enough, because out of the couple dozen people I met that day, only 2 could put together fluent English), and introduced myself at the quarterly meeting. The meeting would have been fun I imagine, given the frequency of laughter at most of the speakers’ jokes, had I understood enough Japanese to actually get it. That’s a recurring theme too, places that seem like they’d be a lot of fun if I could speak the goddamn language better. In either case, the only real fact of interest before I popped on the train to Osaka and settled into my new place (by which you’ll find in my next post I mean spent two full dawn-dusk+ days working and what I would describe as carousing and my coworkers would describe as mid-work dinner before actually getting a chance to settle in), was my method of payment. As I mentioned Japan is a cash-based society, and most corporate employees in Japan get handed envelopes every pay period containing their appropriate salary amounts, in cash. Just imagine if every other Friday, in any other country in the world, a huge number of coworkers would make their commutes home with hundreds or thousands of dollars in cash on them. There would be mass muggings every week, robberies every night, it’d be chaos. Instead Japan has such a low crime rate that people feel comfortable walking around with these large sums in easy to spend, totally untraceable cash. Thus, I got handed a 2 grand advance on my salary, which I was expected to put in my pocket and convey, carrying loads of very steal-able and tourist-looking luggage, from Tokyo to Osaka.

I should make a quick note on safety in Japan. It’s amazing, and amazing feeling. I never realized how I was always on my toes, always cognizant of potential crime, until I came to a place where I don’t even have to think about things like making sure my door is locked, or keeping track of my luggage, or even dropping something important and not realizing (most of the time when people find something on the ground, rather than turn it in somewhere they simple place it on the closest, most exposed but raised object nearby such that when the owner retraces his or her steps, he’ll come across it). It’s quite relaxing actually, to a surprising extent.

A final note on photographs. First, I’ve gotta apologize there’s a lot I don’t take pictures of, mostly because as easy as it is for me to access my camera (that’s not the issue), it is a pain to pull out the camera and snap a shot. Mentally, unless I’m there to take pictures, its hard to get myself to stop whatever I’m thinking about or looking at and instead pull out the camera. It’s an important thing to do, I know, but I find it somehow… restricting, if nothing else than in my head, since I don’t feel as free to be involved in where I’m at and focused on what I’m doing when I have to step back and make a record. Hopefully I’ll get used to it. Second, to some the subject of my photographs might be kind of odd. I don’t really take pictures of people (and right now I don’t have any people to take pictures of anyway heh), probably for the reason just described, and I tend to take a lot of pictures of what might seem random. Basically I like to take shots of what I’m experiencing or where I’m at, try to convey what its like. A picture of a landmark might be beautiful, and I take plenty of them, but it doesn’t necessarily capture what its like to be there. So I take a lot of photos of ordinary things; places I live, streets I walk on, stores I frequent, and sites I see (from a sort of pedestrian perspective). When I feel artistic then I try (poorly) to compose the images to convey the sense of being there, but for the most part I just try and snap the most descriptive pics possible, and hope you get the idea. In either case, that’s the story on that.

So that’s my notes on the first few days in Japan, we’ll see how much of my observations hold true. I’ll catch up soon with my first week in Osaka.