Times must be really tough. A Harvard source has also told me that the engineering and ESPP departments are in disucssions to form a high-end luxury hybrid car manufacturer, with the assembly lines to be manned by workstudy students.
Traditional Japanese breakfast, served in ryokan hotel room as we lounged about in yukata. Later that day, we had butter rolls, saltines and water for lunch.
Return to America tomorrow. The combination of sumo wrestling, bathing in hot springs, and fighting off a viral infection (thank you Osaka street meat) did not leave as much time for blogging as I hoped, but more highlights to come next week.
Japan, Day 2.
Jet lagged and still on Eastern Time, we got a very early 7am start to the day today. We started out at the Meiji Shrine, a temple to the deified emperor Meiji, who ruled through the early 1920s. We thought we had a geisha sighting at the Shrine, but alas it was only an upperclass woman in a very elaborate kimono dress getting married.
After Meiji, we headed to neighboring Harajuku, the hipster part of town here where you can see young teenage girls dressed in all manner of bizarre fetish clothes, like the Little Bo Peep girls in the picture above. The packed shopping strip (the picture on this post) is lined with stores that sell “bad english” tees that often have misspelled words, poorly translated phrases (“Give peace the chance”), or just phrases that don’t make any sense (“Clime Time Happiness”?).
Most bizarre event of the day: shopping at one of the larger department stores just off the strip. The 6-floor store was teeming with what had to be over 100 employees literally yelling through voice amplifiers at the top of their lungs some indistinguisable Japanese advertising the deals the store was offering. I’m going to post a video showing some of this. It was a shopping experience entirely unlike anything I’d ever seen, and really makes you understand just how important fashion is to Japanese youth.
Afterwards in search of food, we food on some back alley a “standing only” sushi bar, picture above. This is literally what it says it is: a small storefront, nothing more than 200 square feet, with a sushi bar and standing room only. For $15 a piece, Joe and I got a beer and the best sushi we have ever eaten. The salmon melted in our mouth like butter; the squid legs were also very sweet and delicious. I only hope this is a premonition of the sushi to come.
Afterwards we beat a hasty retreat from the sun and into the Sapporo Brewery headquarters - into their beer museum and tasting lounge.
Some initial impressions of this remarkable and highly unique country. In a place like Japan that is so culturally different from the U.S., the first thing you realize is the presence of many cultural anomalies absent from America. The dress and emphasis on fashion, and the ubiquity of the “Harajuku girls” even far away from the Harajuku district is most jarring to the foreign eye.
What we didn’t immediately pick up on however was the absence of a lot of things we take for granted in our public spaces back in the States. In particular, public areas in Japan have no benches, and the streets, despite being spotless, are totally devoid of garbage cans. It’s almost as if the public spaces are not meant for public consumption; everyone, even the Japanese, are guests there, and not meant to loiter. So don’t rest or sit down on a bench; and don’t leave any garbage around, even in a trash can - take it with you.
The parks here are not public parks in the American conception - there are no Central Parks with their great lawns meant for suntanning. Instead, the one’s we’ve seen are conceived as shrines and gardens for the Emperor. The public can walk through and pay homage to the Emperor, but this space clearly belongs to the emperor - not to the public. Whereas our parks are testaments in some ways to our democratic spirit, here they seem to reinforce the highly stratified society exemplified by the emperor. Perhaps the highly original and individualistic dress of the Harajuku girls, literally just outside the Meiji Shrine gates, is a reaction against this stratification and dedication to the group over the individual.
Japan, Day 1.
Joe and my 24-hour commute from his apartment in Boston to Tokyo, Japan is complete. We’ve just arrived and settled in to our hotel (small room, hard bed, comfy slippers). The travel wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be; we occupied the time primarily with Sudoku competitors, eating complimentary bread and cheese sandwiches, and trying in vain to get our Delta personal TV screens to work.
Initial impressions of Japan? Tokyo is a huge city, but we seem to have found a nice corner to stay in here in the district of Shinjuku. The streets are incredibly clean and busy; the lights bright; the skyline beautiful. There are an inordinate amount of people walking around with surgical masks on (we were given complimentary ones upon our arrival).
Joe and I will aim to update this blog daily. Our itinerary for tomorrow is to look around Shinjuku; visit the Meiji Shrine; people watch in Harajuku; and also check out the largest intersection in the world in Shibuya (you’ll know it from Lost in Translation).
