Sunday, Oct 11

Today, we traveled to Tokyo. We hopped on a local train from Oji to Osaka (30 minutes) and then transferred to a subway for the short trip to Shin Osaka (4 min) where we caught the Shinkansen for the 3-hour trip to Tokyo. This trip actually went by very quickly – an efficient train system is certainly a great way to travel. The highlight: Mt Fuji. About an hour before arriving in Tokyo, the train flies past Japan’s highest mountain at 150 MPH. Many people who did not have window seats on the left side of the train stood up and found a window at one of the train doors. I was among those and, with any luck, I may even have gotten a good picture of Japan’s most famous mountain.

Upon arrival at Tokyo Station, we transferred to the subway and headed back to the neighborhood we stayed in during our first two nights in Japan. We’re staying a different location (about a 5-min walk away) of the Homeikan Ryokan we stayed in at the beginning. This location (Morikawa Bekkan) is bigger and doesn’t have quite as much character as the Daimachi Bekkan location, but it is still quite nice. It took a little bit of doing for me to get checked in at the ryokan since Mike L and I will be staying here after the group leaves. We wanted to try to set it up so we did not have to change rooms. After a brief discussion, we got it straightened out and should be all set.

After getting settled in, Mike L, Tuna, Greg, Eric and I headed out to the Ropongi district. Ropongi has historically been famous as the entertainment district in Tokyo – lots of bars and really drunk (mostly foreign) people at night. It also now contains the Ropongi Hills shopping/living/office complex and that’s what we had come here for. First, we needed a bite to eat and most of the fancy restaurants we passed were not yet open (or in our price range), but we finally stumbled across Yoshinoya. This looked like a chain fast food place and the rice dish that I had for about 600 yen was just what I wanted.

Next up: we headed over to the Mori Tower at Ropongi Hills. For 1,500 yen (~$17), we bought a ticket that got us into both the Tokyo City View on the 52^nd floor and the Mori Art Museum on the 53^rd floor. Kind of a steep price, but I thought it was worth it. We had arrived about an hour before sunset and spent several hours there enjoying the great view of Tokyo, watching a great sunset over the mountains and seeing the lights of Tokyo come alive. Definitely a great place to see the city and surrounding mountains (including Fuji).

After we had made our way completely around the observation level, I noticed a sign saying you go up to the roof for an additional 300 yen fee. We figured we’d already spent 1,500 yen so what’s another 300? The pictures are always nicer when you don’t have to worry about your reflection in the glass – especially at night. Similar views and we were up there just as the sun was setting so it was really nice.

Since our ticket also got us into the Mori Art Museum, we decided to check that out. It’s a modern art museum that seemed very similar to the Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA) on the Boston Harbor that I visited a few months ago. The one pleasant surprise: your admission to the museum also got you a free English language (or 6-8 others) audio guide. A nice touch.

The exhibit we saw was a Chinese artist by the name of Ai Weiwei. He was one of the people who was the visionary behind the “Bird’s Nest” – the main stadium for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. This exhibit consisted of several sculptures, a few videos and a couple of photographs – all of which required the audio guide to explain what they were about. One example that stuck in my mind was three photographs of the artist. In the first, he is holding a vase. In the second, he has let go of the vase and it is dropping to the floor. In the third, the vase had shattered around him. Apparently, this was a 2,000 year old Ming Dynasty vase that he had actually destroyed. His point: a precious piece of artwork can be destroyed in just a few seconds. In its place, he had created new art. Whatever. While some of the stuff we saw was a little bit thought-provoking, a lot of it (including these three pictures) did not really seem like art. Clearly, I just don’t understand.

After the art museum and another quick trip around the observation level, we went back to the ryokan and then out to dinner. The group split up tonight for dinner on their own and the five of us headed over to the Ueno neighborhood in search of a “conveyer belt” sushi restaurant. There were plenty of places in this neighborhood to choose from and we did indeed find what we were looking for. An interesting experience. Picking food off the conveyor belt was easy enough, but there were several plates that just had pictures on them. I could only find the sushi roles (as opposed to the sashimi going by) in these pictures and it took me a while to figure out how to order one. Eventually, I figured it out and had a good, filling, inexpensive meal. Each plate was just 136 yen and I only had 5 (though others in the group had as many as 12).

After dinner, we hopped on the JR to head back to Shibuya. Shibuya was every bit as crowded with young, attractive women as it was during our first visit there two weeks ago. This time, we walked through “love hotel” hill. A love hotel is just what you might imagine it being: a place where couples can rent a room for an hour, an afternoon or all night. Since it was just five straight guys walking around at this point, none of us actually got the true “love hotel” experience.

By now, it was getting a little late, but we decided to find a bar and pound our only beer of the evening before heading back. We finished a little before midnight and raced over to the subway just in time to catch the last Ginza line train out of Shibuya. Unfortunately, when we got off that train to transfer to the Namboku line, we found that we had already missed the last train of the night on that line. Oops. We were at least four miles from our ryokan and I didn’t really want to walk all the way back. Neither did Tuna so the two of us hopped in cab (with the other three in another cab just behind). We asked our driver to take us to the subway stop closest to our ryokan figuring he was likely to know where that was. Ten minutes and 2,400 yen later, there we were. This was my one and only trip in a car in Japan so I guess it was interesting enough. But a lesson that came out of this: in Tokyo, make sure you have actually made your last subway transfer of the night BEFORE the system shuts down at midnight. Lesson learned.

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