Tokyo 2017: Lost in Franslation

Yeah, I'm back from Japan, and yeah, I went with that title. I couldn't help it - the movie and its soundtrack kind of informed large parts of the time I spent there, since I listened to the music as I rode in on the bus from Narita Airport and since I went to the hotel where the movie was set. There's obviously more to the city than Lost in Translation, but it made for a nice backbone to the trip for me.

View from the hotel in Lost in Translation

First things first: Tokyo's amazing, and you really need to go. It's big and sprawling, but orderly, clean and well-run. There's shopping, museums, sights to see and amazing places to eat. I feel like I could have spent way more time there, even just walking around the city - and if I'd had even more time I'd like to have gone out more into the rest of the country.

This is, of course, despite the fact that Tokyo was being hit by a typhoon and the fact that the government was holding an election. While I noticed the typhoon, because I was out at the Tokyo National Museum that day, the election completely passed me by until I saw mentions of it on social media the next morning.

That kind of leads into one of the points I made in my last post, about language. I was warned ahead of time that English-speakers aren't very common, and while this turned out to be true, it also proved to be unimportant. Almost everything important was signposted in English, especially on the Metro, and the unlimited 2G data on my roaming plan meant that in a pinch I could just use a maps app to get around. This turned out to be helpful for getting around on foot between spots that were closer together than they seemed on the transport maps.

I also determined that I had just about enough Japanese to accomplish the fairly limited range of things I needed to do. Restaurants, museums, stores - all of it was completely navigable, and I found the people working in customer service to be very patient. Heck, there were even some normal folks on the train back from Kamakura who were either able to speak a little English or give easy answers to my basic questions. It's probably different if you go to the real countryside, but for where I spent my time, I got on perfectly well.

The locals seemed to be pretty patient in general - a refrain I kept telling myself was that to them I'm kind of a barbarian, and so barbaric behavior is expected of me. This ranged from taking pictures of everything, to asking confusing things in restaurants, to not knowing the proper greeting when entering a store or restaurant.

In terms of activities, I feel like I struck a good balance between seeing museums and exploring neighborhoods. My first full day there I walked from my hotel in Akasaka to Roppongi, which is nearby, and caught a couple of art museums and a couple of malls. The second day, when the typhoon hit, I was at Ueno Park for the National Museum, and the rest of the time I was hopping around between neighborhoods on the Metro, including checking out the nightlife in Shinjuku and Shibuya (the site of the famous crossing with all the big animated advertising).

I even managed to check out a couple of residential neighborhoods, places that looked quintessentially Asian to me - narrow streets that from the outside looked like alleys but happened to be where all the residential buildings were. When I went to Kamakura on the Tuesday, I determined that this layout was common to both big cities and smaller towns.

Kamakura

The other notable thing about the built environment was much green space there was, and how much you could find if you just turned down a street. In the park next to the Canadian Embassy (which has a rock garden that my guidebook highly recommended), you could see little shrines dotted around among the trees. Others could be found on random corners in Tsukiji, near the fish market, and in Roppongi, just off the main drag as I walked back to my hotel that first day.

I was also lucky enough to have a friend of a friend who I was able to meet in town my first night, when I'd just got off the plane. She introduced me to a couple of friends of hers, who took me first to an Italian restaurant (done Japanese style, though) and then to a little hole-in-the-wall sake joint where the sign outside and the menus inside were all in Japanese only. Certainly you could eat perfectly well if you stick with places that have Western signage, but if you know someone there, have them take you to someplace local; failing that, you can use startups like Vayable (which is actually founded by a former classmate of mine, though I haven't used it myself) to get someone to show you around. In places where you can't read the language, and are in fact as helpless as a child, that's a fun way to visit places you'd miss otherwise.

Spotted at Tsukiji Fish Market

If there was a negative, it's that the bookstores didn't have much in the way of English books. It's kind of a shame, because there were loads of bookstores everywhere I went, but at the same time, most of what I did find in English was stuff I could get back home. On the other hand, it was nice to see how many bookstores there were, all dotted around the city. Contrast that with Singapore or Hong Kong, where most of the bookstores were pretty terrible.

So Tokyo comes highly recommended. There's loads to see, do and eat, and it's easy to get around. Once you figure out certain things, like which side of the escalator is for standing, or how to determine which platform your subway train leaves from, it's pretty easy to navigate. And if you turn even minimally adventurous, for example by walking down the narrow alleys of Tsukiji Fish Market or dropping into the cat cafe in Akihabara, you can have some amazing, unique experiences.

Yep, this happened

Go check it out. Now!