Muggiest place on earth

June 10, 2005

It's a good thing it's not particularly hot in Japan this time of year, because the humidity here is pretty much visible. You'd have to be here to believe it. I'm sitting in front of some fountain in Shibuya, a ritzy shopping-and-looking-impressive sort of district. Here's a picture. I have no idea if this particular fountain has any significance, but there is a distinct shortage of place to sit down in Tokyo, and this place actually has a little terraced sort of thing around the fountain for people that have been on their feet all day and need to sit down before they lose their minds. Which pretty much describes me. It's about quarter to seven and already getting dark. The cars have their headlights on, and the stores are putting on their outside lights as well. It feels only a little bit later than it is, and I slept until close to seven this morning, so I think I'm just about functional. A guy today told me to expect it to "really hit around day four." Well, hey, thanks. You should expect nightmares not tomorrow night, but the one after.
I went to Tokyo Baptist Church this morning. In addition to a desire to see a Japanese church in action, I wanted to go because this is an international church (over forty countries represented) conducted in English, and they had a coffee hangout deal afterwards. I figured I might be able to meet an English-speaking person or two. As it turns out, I met three Americans, two of whom were named James, a guy from the UK, also named James, and two Japanese guys who spoke English. Oh, and a Swiss guy named Hans, which I think means James. I had a really crazy experience with an older Japanese man named Kenjy. He looked like he was around sixty, but Japanese people get to be about six hundred before they actually look old, so who knows. Anyway, he came up and said hello and then tried out his English on me for a little while. He was very friendly, but also very difficult to understand. Let me give you a very quick rundown on the pronunciation challenges the Japanese face when attempting to speak English. Number one: this one's obvious; "L" and "R." There is no "L" sound in Japanese, and the "R" is sort of somewhere between an "L," an "R," and a "D." Number two: there is no "F" sound in Japanese. This one sometimes becomes "P" and sometimes becomes "H." Obviously, I have no idea the rules that dictate which is which.
The light in the fountain just turned on. Or got brighter. I forget.
Number three: the only consonant sound that can appear by itself in Japanese is "N." Every other consonant sound is followed by one of the five vowel sounds, which makes basically any imported word about four times as long in Japanese. Take "McDonald's" for example. You can't put two consonants in a row, so it becomes what sounds like "Makudonarudosu." I could probably come up with a host of other issues the make the gap between Japanese and English very wide, but this gives you a good enough idea.
Now, what made my "conversation" with Kenjy interesting was his choice of topics. I kid you not, within the first three minutes, he goes, "Patika pysisa?" Particle physics. It's difficult enough (OK, it's actually completely beyond me) to talk stations and train stops and weather. I sort of expect certain English words, so it's not nearly as much work to figure out which ones just came out. But this guy started talking about Einstein (I made an explosion gesture up by my head and said, "His hair was crazy.") and aeronautic engineering and all of this. Apparently he was a pilot and aeronautic engineer who worked on the design teams for the X33, the F-15, and the 777. Which would intrigue me to no end if I could understand a word of what was being said. I felt like I was missing out on so much.
After drinking coffee and playing with my empty paper cup for about 25 minutes or so, Toshi, one of the Japanese guys that I had by this point nicknamed James, invited me to go along to lunch with a few people. We went down the street to a placed called Monsoon. It serves food from several Asian countries that aren't Japan, and it was really, really good. On the menu to the left of each item was a flag to tell you whether the item was from Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, Laos (and of course I was like, "Sweet! Laotian food!" Sadly, the moment was lost on every last person in the restaurant.), Korea, etc. I had the best green curry chicken ever. Ever.
Hans and I walked around the corner ten minutes or so to his stop, and I set off from Shibuya Mall -I mean station- to walk around and be a tourist-y dork taking pictures and video of really normal stuff.
The first place I went was Yoyogi park, where I spent a couple of hours. The area just outside the park is a really popular spot for teenagers that get in groups and wear costumes. Gothic stuff, sailor uniforms, radioactivity-handling suits (is there a name for these?) with floppy disks in the clear plastic pockets, insanely frilly fairy tale garb... There were a lot of groups represented. There was also a handful of people playing guitars and singing, but without any sort of tip jar or empty coffee cups. Apparently it was just for the experience of playing. Which was nice and much easier to watch for a few minutes at a time.
Inside the park, there were people skating, a rockabilly club of some sort that were dancing around and playing air instruments (I'm serious) to 50's rock and roll (which featured a lot of lyrics about being "rock and roll"), and about fifty rock bands that had brought their equipment out to play for everyone and maybe get some notoriety. Yoyogi Park is ridiculously huge, and I have no idea how far it goes. I stopped after after walking
continuously in pretty much one direction for probably thirty minutes. There was no end in sight, and I was afraid I'd never find my way back out. This is an incredibly fun place to watch all sorts of people having a ton of fun on their one day of the week that they aren't at work. There were Frisbees flying all over the place, dogs playing catch, people playing catch, pet rabbits just sitting there, a couple of drum circles, and basically just a huge crowd having a great Sunday afternoon. On the way out, I saw my favorite thing of the whole day, which I'm including a short video of because I'd never be able to do it justice trying to describe it. This guy was doing a combination of DJing, dancing to techno, and speed painting. It was awesome. He'd pick one of the spectators, cue up some beats on the boom box he was wearing over his shoulder on a long strap, and start a portrait in black paint. At the end, he would add highlights with white, gold, and light blue pastels. It was awesome. I got a couple pictures as well as about ten minutes of video. The next time you're over this direction, swing by Yoyogi park and look for this guy.
From the park, I continued down Koen-dori, which means park street. But don't be misled. This isn't actually a named street. There are like six of those in all of Tokyo, and heaven forbid they start naming more and make getting around an easy thing. I didn't capitalize it up there because that's not a name. It's just what it was. Anyway, I came down here to the main shopping area of Shibuya, and the first I did was visit the eight floor Tower Records store, which was tall and crowded and awesome. I love record stores, especially big old monstrosities like this one, and it was on my mental list of things to see at some point. I came across it by accident, but I was glad I did.
After Tower, I wandered around to Seibu, which I had heard of but was not at all ready for. There is a train line called Seibu here, too, so I guess it means something significant in Japanese. But the maybe not. Ikebukuro, which is a major station in town, means "River Bag," and Ueno –I think it's Ueno; it's one of the big ones- means, if I remember right the definition given me, "Top Grass." So you could basically call it Sod Station. Anyway, Seibu consists of four buildings. The footprint of each one, the actual square footage of each floor, is about like if you put your average American mall Sears and your average American mall JC Penney together. Each of the buildings has eight floors and a roof area, and three of the four (I think) have at least one basement as well. Each floor is
completely open, with each vendor in its own area separated by walkways between them. There is everything from school supplies to art supplies to furniture to a little bit of food, but most of the space is occupied by way way upscale clothing companies. One Hugo Boss suits and stuff sort of store, a Hugo Boss Green and Orange label store (Boss has different label colors for their different lines, as I understand it; green and orange are the "after work" but still insanely expensive lines), a Burberry store, a Lacoste store, a Dolce store, a Prada store, and on and on and on it went. There were $193 t-shirts, $220 jeans, $560 linen blazers, $685 shoes, $37,000 necklaces, a pair of earrings for 82 grand. You know, basically just one big bonanza of impulse buys. On the way down to this fountain, I went by the Levi's store, and they had 505's, which I happen to like a great deal and which I paid 30 dollars for in a "normal" store, for 200 dollars. This type of fashion is just a world I do not live in, but I figured as long as I'm in a portion of the globe I don't belong in, I might as well go look at some of these things.
It's now 7:30, and I have a lot more that I want to do tonight, and that brings you up to right now anyway, so I'll finish this later.
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OK. 11:30, and I couldn't really put a definite finger on anything particular that I did between the fountain and this train back to Kiyose, which is my stop. I pretty much just wandered around, took a bunch of pictures, watched some people play some crazy arcade games that I forgot to take pictures of, and wandered around some more. My feet hurt. Two things of note, though.
Japanese fast food may be different from American fast food, but it's still fast food. When it comes to a Japanese meal for 420 yen ($4), it pays to know what you're getting yourself into. And I haven't cashed in yet. If I hadn't been very very hungry by the time I dropped into Yoshinoya for a bowl of rice with stir fried beef on top, I would probably have considered it sub-par. Maybe even poor. There are some parts of a cut of beef that you just can't cook into submission. These parts should be buried with the rest of the cow, in my opinion.
I also ran into a couple of guys who were out from Canada filming some field reporting for something having to do with Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise and "War of the Worlds." The reporter for You Talk Daily (their show, which I hadn't heard of) was doing a few takes of "Thanks Veronica! I've just landed in Tokyo with Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg, who are just minutes away from starting the "War of the Worlds" world tour! Of course, he was lying, unless he's been using the International Date Line to travel through time and space. You can do that, you know.
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Alrighty. I am back at home after a long-ish walk from the station, and I believe I will grab these pictures from my camera and capture the video from my camcorder tomorrow and send this then, because I am tired. And because I am an Apple snob, you'll have to to get Quicktime (from Apple.com) to see the video. Thanks for tuning in, props if you made it all the way through, and you'll get another chance later if you didn't.

Kent