Hello Kitty And The Jaws Of Life

Sunday found me in a happy place: Looking over the wing of a 777, feeling warm from the airplane wine, digging the Bukowski in my hand and the Arctic Monkeys in my ears, and strapped in low around the hips next to my best friend. We'd just spent the previous six days making sweet sweet tourist love to Tokyo and we found out that, once again, TV rarely lies. Tokyoites really do eat a lot of sushi and noodles, they're ridiculously polite, and, at night, ladies in kimonos put tipsy, black-suited dudes into cabs.
Just like the trip to India a few months ago, Japan started for us in the departure lounge of IAD before the plane ever left. Most of the passengers were Japanese and all the announcements were in Japanese as well as English. The initiation continued on the flight where we had our first rice balls (so simple, excellent) and were served shrimp flavored chips alongside green tea.
In Tokyo, it felt very ordered and almost sedate, not at all like guide books choose to describe it. I'd never use words like frantic, hectic, or frenetic. Yes, there are lots of people in a small area and with that comes a certain energy, yet, this is largely a low rise town and the wide streets allow for lots of breathing room. Though you may cross the street within a cloud of hundreds of people, you'll never bump into any of them. Likewise, the metro is large and has lots of stations and its also very organized and easy to navigate. There are lanes for entering and exiting each car and people actually obey them. Metro riders also do, as requested, refrain from using their cell phones while riding the train. On escalators, standers dutifully stay to the left while walkers use the right side. Somehow, this same rule never works on the DC metro. These are not negative things at all, but they are notable for their mellowing effect. This is in direct contrast to the images I've seen before. I guess TV was wrong on that one. Either way, we've loved the place. Everyone we met was uniformly nice, the prices were not as high as we had expected, and we ate extremely well. In addition to the rice balls, which can be filled with all manner of fishy bits, we also enjoyed slurping udon out of big bowls of broth and we appreciated the curry rice for its homey, satisfying heft on our first night.
We stayed at the Hotel Villa Fontaine Roppongi Annex (A-, good location, good breakfast included, friendly and helpful staff, comfortable "large for Tokyo" rooms) which was the perfect location for zipping off to all parts of the city. The metro turned out to be our best friend this week and we got good use out of our PASMO cards.
On Wednesday, we toured the grounds of the Imperial Palace (very 1970's in style and not so grand) and then strolled north through the imperial gardens up to the Nippon Budokan Theater. I was dreaming up a concert flyer as we took pictures: Live! At Budokan! Lee Sings The Strokes Greatest Hits! Later, at the Yasukuni-Jinja shrine, we ate yakisoba (fried noodles) and okonomiyaki (a sort of savory pancake with cabbage) with an intimidating group of guys from the country's self defense forces.
On Thursday morning, we got up arsch-früh to check out the action at Tsukiji fish market. This place is amazing in the variety of items available as well as for the casual way we saw three guys work together, using a 60" knife, to break down a 300kg tuna (estimates, yes). While dodging mini pallet trucks and guys in rubber boots, we saw the dangerous O-faces of a box of fugu, spotted boxes of wiggling shellfish, watched a guy in thick rubber gloves use a bandsaw to cut up a hulking tuna and we found real wasabi and soybeans in the vegetable section.
On Friday, we metro-ed to the surprisingly packed Kabuki-za theatre for one act of kabuki. This turned out to be a good decision as the loud whining of the actors proved to be pretty grating on the ears after an hour. Still, it was very cool to see the staging and music used in the production and I probably would've appreciated the actors' word more if I spoke the language. I was especially impressed with the latter portion of the act as it consisted of a 15 minute long fight scene with lots of acrobatics and sound effects. Good fun overall. That afternoon, we explored the streets of Shinjuku and I got my first view of a real pachinko hall (I miss you Bob Barker). Later, we hung out in Shibuya with all of the young kids. This place feels like Times Square x10. There's lights, shopping, and hipness everywhere.
On Saturday, we checked out the mega planned town center of Roppongi Hills. This place is big (27 acres) and it comes with its own guide books and information centers. Its supposed to be the future of urban living in Japan, and, I have to admit that it certainly beats out all of the planned communities I've seen in the US. Later that evening, we hung out with the "my parents just don't understand" crowd in Harajuku. This is the neighborhood where all the kids dress up in anime-inspired costumes and pretend to be full of attitude. To me, it seemed pretty harmless and silly. Maybe I'm just old, but no one was rebelling there. Its not like they wear the outfits to school or to go shopping with mom, so I don't buy it. Still, this was fun to see and there were a bunch of crepe shops selling all kinds of over-the-top fillings. TV tells me that Japanese are big on obsessing about things. Almost like they need to choose a hobby and then go nuts. I guess this all fits in to that scheme. The Meiji-Jingu shrine next door provided some relief from all the teen angst. We finished off the evening in a surf-themed bar down the road that felt like the inside of a Hollister store.
On Sunday, we took the airport limousine to Narita International and watched the rain from inside the departures terminal. While waiting for our flight to Bangkok, we spent our last few yen on rice balls and fried chicken.