October Holiday

The first week in October is one of 3 holidays in China during which many, if not most, people go someplace. We had planned to go to Beijing (where, it turns out, Tiffany Zhang and her family spent their holiday week), but the word on the street was better get out of China when the Chinese are on the move. So we went to Japan instead.

I hadn’t been homesick since we moved to Shanghai – anxious, perhaps, as well as sick, tired and culture-shocked – but not homesick. Being in Tokyo made me miss the US as nothing in China, not even the squat toilets, had done. I was surprised at how different it was from Shanghai and China. On the other hand, Japanese uses many (most?) of the same characters as Chinese, and some of the few I knew even have the same meanings. Although we know no Japanese, and outside of hotels and friends most people we talked to knew no English, it felt much more familiar and less foreign than if we had not spent almost 2 months in China.

Tokyo, however, seems so much more western than Shanghai in so many ways. Westerners don’t seem to stick out as much, although I suspect I’m more self-conscious in Shanghai as a resident than I was in Tokyo as a tourist. Women come in all sizes and shapes, and middle-aged women seemed much more visible than in Shanghai, at least in our neighborhood. Sure, there are plenty of small Japanese women, but my impression is that in Tokyo the typical woman under 35 isn’t a perfect size zero. And the men aren’t necessarily skinny either – remember, this is the home of sumo (emphasis on the O) wrestlers. Japan is a prosperous country, and memories of hardship are older than the Cultural Revolution. Streets are surely cleaner than in American cities; as in Shanghai, there are always people out cleaning up after the rest of us, but in Shanghai the dust and debris settle back onto the same spots in a minute. In Tokyo you can drink the water and it doesn’t leave a layer of scum on your hair.

Tokyo style is also different from that of the ubiquitous Shanghai xiaojie (see Fashion). Granted, at the time we were in Japan the daytime temperature in Shanghai hadn’t yet dropped below 27 degrees C, but I was struck by the styles worn by young Tokyo women. A short denim skirt, fishnet stockings and tall spike-heeled boots on a slightly chubby young woman is not a look often seen in Shanghai this October. Long shorts with boots were another common sight in both Tokyo and Kyoto. This fashion, I’d like to note, arrived in Shanghai somewhat later, once the temperature dropped below 22 degrees or so.

And then there were the salarymen (and -women). Our hotel in Tokyo was across from the Shinagawa train station and we crossed the street in a sea of people going to and from work or lunch. The men wear black suits and white shirts with unobtrusive ties. There are occasional exceptions in the form of dark gray or navy blue for the suits and light blue shirts. Women in uniform black suits with white blouses were also out in force and it was clear that it was literally a uniform in some cases. This color scheme is not the norm in Kyoto, where some men even wear shirts with patterns and women wear much less black. In China uniforms are common in many types of workplaces, from retail stores to garages to the Shanghai CDC. In Japan many women workers wear aprons rather than a full uniform outfit, but the white collar “uniform” in Tokyo leaves the same impression as actual uniforms elsewhere.

We've all heard that Japanese children spend more time studying than students anywhere else in the world. I can't attest to that fact, but we saw swarms of school children, in uniform, at every local cultural attraction and on every day of the week. Japanese school uniforms consist of skirts or jumpers for the girls, with jackets or middy blouses. The older girls, at least in Tokyo, hike up their skirts so they are very short. Younger boys wear shorts (I assume they change to long pants when the weather gets colder) and older ones wear pants and military-like jackets, mostly in navy blue with white shirts. Chinese school uniforms are much less formal – workout-style pants or even jeans, with polo shirts and usually a red tie or scarf at the collar. High school girls in Tokyo wear loafers with knee socks; school kids in Shanghai wear athletic shoes. We saw girls in their school uniforms on the train in Nagano prefecture on Saturday and Sunday, and this on a holiday weekend. We didn’t see any kids in uniform in Harajuku on Sunday afternoon.

Japan is incredibly expensive, particularly compared to China, although I believe that we could have saved a little money with better planning. We had some really pricy meals in Kyoto because it was dark and rainy and we didn’t know where to go. We also bought some nice gifts that were quite inexpensive by Japanese standards, though not by Chinese. And for those who remember when a foreigner’s first hit of caffeine came out of a can from one of the ubiquitous vending machines, rest assured that coffee culture has come to Japan. Starbucks is here, of course, and Tully’s coffee has a number of outlets in Japan. In Kyoto we frequented Caffe Veloce, across the street from our hotel, although the coffee at the hotel’s breakfast buffet was not half bad. In fact, espresso joints were the places where Japanese prices were often lower than those in Shanghai. This is not necessarily true in fashionable parts of Tokyo, but it did appear to be the case elsewhere.

I was still suffering from the world’s worst cold when we arrived in Tokyo, and it rained almost the entire week we were there. But for the fact that it was fairly warm in both Tokyo and Kyoto, and therefore muggy, it would have been like winter in California. We did have some good weather, though, notably when we returned to Tokyo our last afternoon before leaving, a sunny Indian summer kind of day.

We arrived at Narita Airport from Shanghai at night and barely made the last express train to Tokyo. The next day we got up late, as is our wont on vacation when it's not urgent that we organize ourselves at 6:30 am. Bill did his work for the week by meeting with Sony and some people from Sonic’s Tokyo sales office. At 5:30, after a bit of souvenir shopping, Julia and I met him at the Sony building in the Ginza and at 6:00 we were joined by our friend Mari, who teaches nursing at Tokyo Metropolitan University. She took us to a restaurant that specializes in tofu, which was very good. It’s always a treat to eat with the natives, since they know what and how much to order.

Our second full day we were shepherded around town by Yoshinari, one of the Sonic guys. Our Tokyo tour started with the fish market at 7:30. Yoshinari borrowed his brother’s car to take us around on Sonic’s dime, and they were very generous indeed. He was playing opera arias in the car when he picked us up at the hotel, and told us that he had studied music (he’s a tenor) but gave up the idea of singing professionally. Apparently he’s giving a recital in California in December; maybe Bill will be able to go, given that he’s spending so much time in the states.

Navigating the Tokyo fish market is a bit like crossing the street in Shanghai – you dodge trucks, bicycles, motorized carts and carts pulled by humans. Inside the market we saw fish of all sorts and sizes, live, dead, packaged or laid out. We saw giant hunks of frozen fish being sawed into smaller hunks, and $80 a pound – or was it $800 a pound? – sashimi tuna (that’s wholesale, of course). After wandering through the market and avoiding collisions with moving people, fish, knives and vehicles, we went to a random nearby restaurant and had the best, freshest sushi ever for breakfast.

After the Meiji-jingu shrine, which covers many hectares in the middle of town, we visited the Senso-ji temple, whose entry is preceded by a street of trinket stands. This is where Julia and I spent most of the previous afternoon, buying presents for her friends. When we were done with the temple (and one doesn’t confuse shrines with temples in Japan), we insisted on going to the Tokyo National Museum. Yoshinari said he had never been, and Julia objected on principle, but we bought everyone tickets and spent an hour or so looking around. Then we were off to dinner at Roppongi Hills, a fancy mall in a neighborhood frequented by foreigners. We parked in one of those garages where you drive onto a conveyor and your car is spirited away – possibly compressed and stored on a shelf while you are gone, and later reconstituted so that you can drive off. We had dinner at a restaurant that serves deep-fried everything-on-a-stick. If you like a particular item you are allowed to ask for a repeat; otherwise they just keep bringing different things until you tell them to stop. I fear we were too moderate and stopped eating long before any self-respecting beer-drinking Japanese male would have done, but it was very good and we were pretty full. We all agreed that we like Japanese food, and even the deep-friend everything was lighter than much of the street and restaurant fare in Shanghai.

In Kyoto we saw a few temples and did a lot of walking. Once again we stayed across the street from the train station, which is actually quite convenient. Along with temples, Kyoto seems to be home to a slew of French bakeries. During one of our walks we saw 4 or 5 in a 2-block stretch, and stopped to sample the wares at one of them. The Japanese like the French language, and sprinkle it liberally around on shop and restaurant signs. They appear to have learned the art of French baking as well. The pastries we bought were excellent, much more authentically French than the bakeries in Shanghai.

After Kyoto we took at train to Nagano and from there to Yudanaka, home of the snow monkey park, where you can hike 1.6 kilometers through the forest and pay 450 yen to watch monkeys bathe in the hot springs. Rather than stay at the ryokan in the park, which would have required us to hike about 20 minutes in from the end of the road in the rain, we stayed at a place in town near the train station, with indoor spring-fed hot baths. As ignorant Americans we didn’t take full advantage of the baths, bathing only once a day, and I later learned that I should not have washed off after bathing if I wanted to reap the full benefits of healthful minerals.

Aside from the notable lack of English translations outside of Tokyo and the lack of street signs everywhere, the most annoying thing in Japan was the difficulty finding an ATM that would give us money. Even in Kyoto we had trouble finding ATMs that would take our cards. The guidebooks warn that you need to keep cash handy outside the big cities, but we had been spending so much money and emptying our checking account so rapidly that we arrived in Yudanaka without enough cash to pay for both meals and the hotel. Our host kept telling us that the rain would surely stop, and we should wait to go to the monkey park until then, so we spent a morning in the town of Obuse, home to the Hokusai museum, where, sure enough, it wasn't raining. After several desperate tries, barely willing to spend the money to buy our dear daughter a chestnut ice cream cone, we finally found an ATM at the post office that would allow us to extract some money from our bank account. We were so happy that we went and ate lunch, even though the restaurant did not serve chestnut rice as the hotel owner had informed us, and we were able to afford the train fare back to Yudanaka as well.

The rain was waiting for us back in Yudanaka, but so were the monkeys. The owner of the inn drove us to the trailhead for our trek to see the monkeys and we called him to pick us up when we were done. The hike reminded me of walking in the Berkeley hills with friends in February – mud, rain and a little chilly, but you can stay warm if you are walking uphill. With temperatures above 30 degrees C for over a month, this was the coldest we’d been in a long time. The monkeys were cool, needless to say. See the live monkey cam from the park here.

After our quick trip to visit the monkeys and experience cold wet weather, we took a morning train back to Tokyo and spent our last afternoon in Harajuku, the fashionable shopping area for hip young things. Julia would have been happy to stay in Tokyo after that – it was her kind of place. We visited Kiddieland, the famous toy store, and ate in a basement restaurant called J’s that served pizza. We saw some of the infamous costume girls and watched other people take their pictures. The weather was glorious, and the only problem was that we had to pick up our luggage at Tokyo station before 6 pm, so we couldn’t stay in the neighborhood for dinner. We had a free hotel room near the airport for the night, and managed in our confusion to hop onto a local train to Narita instead of the express. We found the bus to our brand new nondescript in-the-middle-of-nowhere hotel, and, after one last hair wash with clean water, the vacation was over. I hope we get to go back to Japan some day. Next time we're in Kyoto we'll buy a good vegetable knife ("cai dao" en chinois), assuming weapons are still allowed in checked luggage.