Ginza, etc.

June 14, 2005

Lads and lasses.
You knew I'd get here eventually. I am on the fourth floor of the Ginza Apple store. Like I'd come all the way here and not see this place. If you have a fast internet connection, check out this video. Apparently I am not the only one enthusiastic about this place. It is five floors high, with a regular Apple store on the first floor (a fun place in itself; if you’ve ever been to one, you know), a media concentration with video and music and stuff on the second floor, a theater with free product and system demonstrations on the third floor, a software store and internet café here on the fourth floor, and the Apple Studio on the top floor. I’m not sure exactly what that is, but it sounds good.
I spent another morning walking around doing pretty much nothing specific. I did stop in to a little place in Ikebukuro that I get the impression may be sort of the Japanese equivalent of Waffle House or something. I got a thing that’s a bowl of rice with a pork cutlet on top. The cutlet has been battered and fried and then cooked into the middle a fried egg. It’s actually really good. Fast food, certainly, but tasty. This may sound to all of you like a kind of boring way to spend a morning, just walking around. Just walking down the streets here, though, gives you an awful lot to take in, and I could spend a week just walking around and not “doing” much of anything. It’s cool to see how the different areas of town can be very, very different from each other.
For example, Ikebukuro, where I spent the earlier part of my day, has some shopping and the famous Sunshine-dori, which a major pedestrians-only street with pachinko places and theaters and a lot of entertainment. Roppongi Hills, where I went last night, is a very upscale shopping district but also has a good amount of “normal” retail. It’s just down the street from Roppongi, which is absolutely dead during the day and is Tokyo’s biggest source of international night life. If you want to see more than about three or four Westerners together in one place, Roppongi is your place. Unfortunately, it’s also an area with a lot of drunk international tourists flopping around and what can sometimes be the sleazier end of the party scene. So I passed on that. Ginza, where I am now, is sort of like Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. You can’t afford anything here, but it’s fun to gawk at.
I’m going to a very famous seven-story paper and stationery store when I leave Apple, and I’ll be sure to let you know what the rest of the evening holds. There is a place by Yurakucho station that is supposed to be a hot spot for yakitori stands. Yakitori is basically just a skewer of charcoal-grilled chicken. It’s the big Japanese working man’s food for going out with co-workers at the end of the day. Sort of analogous to wings in the US, I think. Anyway, this spot is underneath the tracks and is supposed to be a real experience. We’ll see.
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The Apple store was right outside the exit of Ginza station, so it was pretty much the first thing I saw. I spent most of the remainder of the evening looking at all the expensive shops and noting how many designers have actual boutiques. I don’t know how exactly I was thinking they got their stuff out there without boutiques. Chanel has a whole building here, as do Ferregamo, Bulgari, Burberry, and Brooks Brothers. There are shops for Louis Vuitton, Prada, Anna Sui... You name it, it’s here. I don’t know a whole lot about the fashion world, though I do find it kind of interesting, but I do know expensive stuff when I see it. And when a crowd of couple in tuxes and black dresses are crowded into the Helmut Lang store to toast a new line with complementary glasses of champagne, that’s expense and pretentious behavior like nobody’s business.
My mission in Ginza was to find and probably purchase things from a couple of stores. I don’t know if you know anything about getting around in Japan, but finding anything specific is pretty much impossible if it’s any smaller than Lake Michigan. The address system is pretty difficult. Japan is divided up into 47 prefectures, and each one has a few cities in it, and past that, I forget what happens next. But eventually you get down to an area called a chome, which is roughly like saying “district.” Inside each chome, the various areas (sometimes a block, sometimes a few blocks) are each numbered, and then each individual building has a number. Not in any sort of consecutive order down the street or something random and weird like that. Nope. In the order of construction. Yeah. So 47 might be next to 12 and across the street from 3, and so on. This is all nice, oh, I don’t know, say, when you’re back in the US and don’t have to worry about it. It’s a real big pain when you’re looking for a specific address and it all works on this system and one in every ten buildings actually has its address marked on it. Needless to say, I found neither building and left the area utterly defeated. Shops were starting to close, so I figured it was time to cut my losses and head out.
I went a couple stops down to Yurakucho, left the station and passed another Yoshinoya, the place where I had the mediocre beef the other night. I wasn’t up for eating there again, so I went on down the road. To make a long story short, I wandered for an hour trying to find a yakitori place that wasn’t completely packed full and never did find one. I didn’t even find many yakitori places at all, actually, but the ones I did find were completely full (ippai), as was pretty much every other place. The ones that weren’t had their menu entirely in Japanese. Most places have all of the writing in Japanese and the prices in normal Arabic numbers. And the majority of places have pictures on the menu, too, so all you have to do is point, smile, eat, and pay. But these places even had the numbers in kanji, which I couldn’t quite decipher (I learned the numbers once, and then promptly forgot them). So I wandered back toward the station. I was tempted by a Wendy’s, but I decided not to get American junk food. As it turned out, I took the option of Japanese junk food. Out of hunger, desperation, and a sense of the greater good for my feet, I somehow wound up back at Yoshinoya. Just like the first time I ate there, I didn’t really mean to or want to, it just kind of crept up and made itself available at the right moment. The food was not quite as good as the first time. Kent zero, Yoshinoya two.
It’s pretty cool that after a day of not really accomplishing much of what I set out to do, I still feel like it was a very worthwhile and productive day. I mean, I’m on the other side of the world, and I got to see more of Tokyo today! How often can you really say that, you know? It’s such a privilege to be here.
My feet hurt very, very badly right now. So badly, in fact, that A) I think I might have broken a bone in my left foot, and B) I’m considering staying in tomorrow to revive my feet. This many hours of pavement every day is no good.
Alright, I’ve decided that jetlag is a myth, but I’m still sleepy after a long day. So good night to you all, thanks for reading, and be good! Here are a couple of pictures I forgot to send in the last e-mail (Tokyo Tower and the view from the government building) and a shot of the Apple store.

Kent