cocopunk

The 14 hour flight is both tortuous and easier than you’d expect. I only watched one movie (The Godfather Part II, 3.5 hours) among other mindnumbing activities and TV shows. The rest of the time, you eat miniature food and try to sleep.

Why was I in Japan again? Why do so many people make return visits to Japan?

One thing I’ve learned over the past couple years is that you don’t need to treat every trip as a once in a lifetime experience. If you’re lucky enough to have the resources you can just go to a place. So I booked a ticket six months ago without particular thought given to what I was going to do.

That was part of the appeal: I honestly have very few thoughts while traveling in Japan. Maybe it’s the ‘everything works as expected’ nature of Japanese infrastructure and day to day life (speaking, obviously, in broad superficial terms). Maybe I’m just envious that the MTA isn’t this efficient. But despite all the challenges of language and cultural barriers and sticking out like a sore thumb, I find Japan is just a relaxing place to be.

Or maybe that’s the nature of vacations. So I don’t have a tale to tell. I’m merely recounting my steps.

I arrived at the hotel in Ueno just ten minutes before check-in and the clerk politely chastised me for not including my middle name on the reservation even though they asked for ‘full’ names. But he’d let it slide, just this once. I had no idea what to do after that; the flight leaves your body physically ignorant of the time of day. So I walked to the park.

It was about 4pm and I walked around the lake where families ride in pedal boats shaped like colorful ducks and the ducks ride in people-shaped boats (not pictured). After that I went to check out a local shrine —Yushima Tenmangū — a few blocks out of the way.

I had also passed through Ameyoko on the way there (short for Ameya-Yokochō, literally ‘candy store alley’), a lively street market with post-war origins below the train tracks. It was packed with people and Ueno altogether was bristling.

Then finally I took a nap. It was 6pm in Tokyo and 5am in New York, where I had started the day. I lay down for an hour and found it hugely difficult to rise again but you’ve got to push through the day or else you will be wide awake at 2am.

So I went out to get some more photos of the market and Ueno’s nightlife. And it was clearly not just busy with tourists, but locals hanging out after work and college kids having a good time in the many, many shops and restaurants. (This was just one week before Golden Week, the weeklong holiday in Japan, and I’d wager some people were already kicking back.) I couldn’t bring myself to research where to eat and just grabbed some snacks at the conbini before finally crashing.

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On Monday morning I was awake around 6am and made an itinerary based on the fact that most shops don’t open until 10: first a walk through another part of Ueno Park to visit the Tōshō-gū shrine, then to Akihabara, then the Shiba area, and finally Shinjuku in the afternoon.

I particularly was taken with this shuttered stall in the park. I collect images of rundown Japanese structures for an illustration project and this tickles an itch. It’s totally mundane yet has such character, such a deep backstory that you’ll never know the details of. Used and maintained but weathered like an old leather shoe:

After a stroll in the park, I caught the Yamanote line at Ueno Station and went to Akihabara. Still too early for the shops to be open so I walked to the Kanda Shrine as well as a nearby Confucian temple called Yushima Seidō.

Those were all good and nice and lovely, but now that it was past 10 I could visit a different sort of temple: Yodobashi Camera.

I had never before because I thought it was just a big Best Buy, essentially, and that’s not entirely wrong, but everyone says to go. So I went.

And it is just a department store that primarily sells electronics, but it’s also like a less tacky Don Quixote (a chain that sells trinkets and souvenirs) in its absurd and somewhat chaotic scope. There’s just everything, and so much of it. 5 floors, I think. Do they have the thing you need? Yes, of course they have that.

I played with some cool cameras and was particularly tempted by all the nice pens and notebooks in the office supply section, but what I actually did buy were a few toys, including a model subway car. (Shohan Shinjuku line, not for any reason beyond the nice stripes.) Looked for the Enoshima Electric but they didn’t have it.

After that, I got back on the Yamanote line, clockwise direction (it’s a circular route), and went to Hamamatsucho Station to walk to Zōjō-ji. In the context of tourism it’s particularly known for being the temple with Tokyo Tower in the background.

I left the station at the wrong exit and somehow got lost on the wrong side of the tracks and the wrong side of a river from where I wanted to be and probably spent half and hour and 0.5 wasted miles to eventually find the way.

An interesting surprise at Zōjō-ji were its hundreds of Jizō statues, each wearing red knit caps and scarves and accompanied by flowers and plastic propellers. There was a nice breeze and they all vibrated with energy. In this context they represented unborn children.

The end destination of that day’s itinerary was the camera shops in Shinjuku. I walked around the big park surrounding Zōjō-ji (Shiba kōen) to Akabanebashi Station and got on the Oedo line. Shinjuku Station, the busiest train station in the world, was interminable as always. The most striking thing was, from this train line at least, you go up three or four or five escalators just to reach the surface, like you’ve returning from the earth’s core.

At Used Camera Market, a little shop maybe twenty feet wide, one camera did catch my eye, a Canonet QL17, a rangefinder with both automatic and manual settings, but it was marked as nonfunctional. I have enough broken cameras at home, I thought to myself.

There were plenty of fascinating vintage cameras but nothing was an absurd deal, though I was only looking for >$100 cheap stuff. There were also bins of junk cameras if you need spare parts or something to put on a shelf.

… And when I got back to the U.S. the following week I ordered a broken QL17 on eBay. I’ve almost got it working. Sort of.

After that, overwhelmed again at the thought of researching a place to get lunch, I did the reasonable thing and went to the same ramen place I had visited two years previous in Golden Gai, ‘Sugoi Niboshi Ramen Nagi‘. It was good. My soul didn’t leave my body like the first time, but it was excellent. And they have the old style of ticket machines with hand-written buttons, I love that. (You order and pay for your food by getting a paper ticket from the machine and handing it over.) Searching for ticket machine restaurants on this trip became a preoccupation.

Then back to Ueno to rest. (On the Oedo line from Shinjuku Station, if you’re wondering.)

While writing this in my notebook, sitting on the hotel bed at 4:36pm, I began to feel like I was on a cruise ship and the sea was thrashing about. There was an earthquake happening and the building quietly creaked and swayed, but not so much that I stood up. It turned out to be a 7.4 off the coast of northern Japan.

To close out the day, I got dinner at a curry place called GoGo Curry with a logo of a gorilla and a theme song that plays on loop while you eat. (And yes, I did choose it because they had a ticket machine, though it was a touch screen. Not quite as charming but more practical.) It was good, even very good, though only in that chain restaurant way.

Afterwards I walked a bit around the Ameyoko area taking more nighttime photos and went home. The next day I had a 10am Shinkansen to catch.

12.3 miles walked, 32,530 steps.