Japan, Day One: Tokyo

We've wanted to go to Japan for a long time. It's so far, though! The flight seemed beyond anything I wanted to deal with. Then a couple years ago we had a catastrophic experience coming back from Paris that involved both of us having a terrible flu during a three-hour deicing delay on the runway followed by a 9 hour flight to Miami, and when all is said and done surely a flight to Japan couldn't be worse than that, right? Plus I work with people who fly to Asia for 3 day meetings all the time. so lately it's been seeming more like a normal and tolerable thing. Anyway, what else are we going to do? I bought some tickets.

When we go to Europe it's easy to figure out what to do and see - in every city and country there are famous sights and popular neighborhoods and I have some general familiarity with the culture and history. That was not the case for Japan. After I bought the plane tickets we got a couple of travel books but the whole thing still seemed overwhelming, and I put off planning until it could no longer be avoided. I had originally thought maybe we would spend the first few days in Tokyo and then play it by ear, but my company's Asia CEO told me late September is a busy holiday time for Japanese and that I should be sure to have reservations where we wanted to go. The pressure! I managed to work out an itinerary and only panic-changed it a few times.

We started in Tokyo, arriving Sunday evening after leaving our house on Saturday morning. The 14 hour flight was pretty rough. It's never great to notice you're thinking to yourself with genuine gratitude, "Only five hours to go!" But we made it without incident and managed to pick up our reserved portable WiFi device at the airport and find the right train to get to our hotel, the Royal Park Shiodome. I picked this hotel because it was in a great part of town but also a few minutes from a major train station - I'd originally booked a different place where my company has a corporate rate, but it was a long way from the train and I suspected getting around Tokyo was going to be exhausting enough without adding a 10 minute walk each way to the subway station.

Our room was on the 28th floor. It was a pretty sweet view. We fell asleep.

Unfortunately we were both wide awake by 3:00am, our first indication that jet lag to Asia was going to be a whole different thing than the European version. It got light in Tokyo very early, by 4:30 or so.

Around 6:00am we got up and walked to the fish market. They used to do early morning tuna auctions here but have recently moved them to a new area that was too far to walk to. Still, the market remains with lots of stalls selling the day's catch, plus various items.

We couldn't figure out what these were so I took a picture to remind myself to check - later someone told us they're dried scallops. "For a snack."

This whole place is filled with delicious, poorly translated food for sale.

The first food we bought was from this man. A skewer for 200 yen, which is a little less than two dollars. A+!

Sushi is the star, of course. I was so excited to try this fish market sushi. My boss talks about it constantly.

You can buy other things in the market, too. Like this coffee spoon boy.

And fun pottery.

Note giant fish head on ice outside this restaurant.

We found a little place to sit down and order some breakfast. They handed us menus with pictures on them (common everywhere in Japan, we quickly learned), so we pointed at some things to order more or less at random. It turned out to be a fortuitous choice because that dish on the right is three kinds of tuna and it absolutely blew our minds.

Let's look more closely at the delicious, perfect tuna.

Eating that tuna, I couldn't help but think to myself that the whole trip was already worth it. Even if everything else sucked the rest of the time, I would still go back to Japan for the tuna.

From the fish market, we walked up to Tokyo Station so we could exchange our train vouchers for a 14-day rail pass. These passes can be used on almost all the trains in the country without an advance reservation - you just show up at the station and walk onto the train. It was an interesting walk of about 20 minutes through the Ginza neighborhood, a big fancy shopping district. It was a national holiday (and also still only around 8:30 in the morning), so not too much was going on.

This building in the distance with the walkway connecting the towers is where my company's Asia HQ is located! Exciting.

Unfortunately when we got to Tokyo Station I realized I'd left the rail pass vouchers in the hotel, so we walked all that way in the heat for nothing. Ben was a good sport about it.

We decided to go to the Roppongi area to see the Mori Art Museum, a contemporary museum with rotating exhibitions on the 53rd floor of a skyscraper.

This was our first experience with the subway, which turned out to be quite easy to navigate. The Japanese mass transit system is more orderly than any other public transportation I've seen in my life. Everybody waits for the train silently in single file lines. It's also dead quiet on the trains - there were times during rush hour when we were packed into the cars like sardines and nobody said a word. I never heard a single Japanese person talking on their cell phone in public, ever. One guy was on his phone in the train but he had his hand over his mouth and was whispering into it so quietly I couldn't hear him from three feet away.

We did get off on the wrong subway stop on this initial journey and had to ask questions about how to get to the right one, but it all worked out. This is where we figured out that it's better to buy a day pass for the subway rather than buying individual tickets.

With your ticket to the Mori Museum you can also visit an observation deck on the floor below. This was great because I always feel stupid paying money to go up in a tall building but I secretly like looking at the view. You can see Tokyo Tower here, which is taller than the Eiffel Tower but looks much smaller compared with the scale of the city. Tokyo is enormous.

The observation deck was not crowded.

Here I am pensively looking out at the city.

The museum itself was devoted to an exhibit by Shiota Chiharu, someone neither of us had heard of before. Like most contemporary artists she seemed to be a bit of a kook but there were some interesting things, including this room full of old suitcases hanging from red strings. Some of the suitcases slowly rotated.

When we left the museum we were too hungry. You should never get too hungry on vacation! Every major fight we've had on vacation is due to hunger. We walked around the mall in Roppongi looking for food and not finding anything that sounded great, and meanwhile Ben was convinced he was getting suddenly sick and also it was 85 humid degrees. All this somehow led to us eating lunch at Shake Shack.

Shake Shack is delicious, though! It was a good decision.

We decided to go to the Nezu Museum, which has changing displays of ancient Japanese art and historical artifacts. They had a bunch of samurai weapon parts and some interesting pottery. You couldn't take pictures inside but here's the outside.

After this we were sweaty and tired, so we went back to the hotel for a shower and a break, to rest up for our evening activity: BASEBALL!

The Tokyo Yakult Swallows were hosting their crosstown rivals, the Yomiuri Giants, in the very last game of the season. We got there just in time! The Giants are like the Yankees: they win all the time and everyone who isn't a fan hates them.

The stadium was a little smaller than a major league park and the seats were tiny. I had to sit kind of sideways.

Japanese people love baseball. They were much more into every second of the game than anything I've ever witnessed at an American stadium. Each player has a specific song the entire crowd sings every time they come up to bat. Because both teams are based in Tokyo, the fans were pretty evenly divided and there was singing pretty much continuously through the entire game. I thought maybe it would trail off a bit after the first time through the lineup but it did not.

They have designated routines every time the teams score, too - Swallows fans had tiny umbrellas they opened up and twirled around while singing their song, and the Giants fans all waved orange towels in the air. Meanwhile, smiling young Japanese girls in short skirts roamed the aisles constantly with backpack kegs full of beer. Also, at one point two cheerleaders came out and did a routine behind home plate with a suited up mascot dancing energetically. We were getting pretty delirious with fatigue and the whole scene was feeling more and more like a dream.

We got some soba noodles for dinner. Lots of people had brought food from home, though, and others had ordered a plate of small hot dogs they ate with chopsticks. DELIRIOUS.

We left in the 7th inning. We were too tired and it was all feeling too weird. It was Amazing Night game.

We covered a lot of ground in the first day and were feeling pretty excited about all the days to come!