Tokyo

Just like in Taiwan (and in my holidays more general) I tried not to rush in Japan and make Tokyo my surrounding rather than a destination that needs to be explored. Of course I did many of the things that are on a travel bucket-list, but besides I also worked on applications for two days and spent lots of time just strolling around neighborhoods. That’s a luxury I want to savor as long as possible, I guess with a regular job and 4 weeks of holidays per year you’d think twice if you want to spend one fourth of that crashing at a friends apartment with no plans whatsoever.

Japan is definitely one of the weirder places I’ve seen, but then again, not as weird as you’re sometimes made believe. Besides children’s books of a literal buttface and soft-porn animes in every convenience store I also found Tokyo to be an extremely calm, clean and pleasant city, especially given its population of half of Germany. Except for the famous areas that you usually see on photographs (Shibuya, Harajuku), there’s not more light pollution than in Berlin or London. The air is crisp and clean like in no other big city in Asia I’ve seen, so clean in fact, that on good days you can see Mt. Fuji 130km away. And the Japanese’s extreme courtesy and respect for rules makes even the rush-hour mania in public transport endurable. The efficiency of public transport is incredible, each day millions of people take trains from the suburbs to the city center and return within a few-hour time window – and it works. It can get very, very crammed, but it works. As a tourist, as long as you have google maps (this app deserves accolades and eulogies and I’m happily giving all my data to google as long as they continue to improve this service and let me use it for free) getting around by metro is a cakewalk. I don’t know about the time before smartphones though, if you’ve ever seen a map of the Tokyo urban train services, it’s one huge clusterfuck. Travel times in Tokyo are actually not that different from Berlin if you live in the center, since the city is fairly centralized. Only when you’re on the way out, you realize how crazy big it is. When I took the train to the airport, the first 30km were only buildings, no forest, no farms, no countryside (and I didn’t even cross the city, I started from the center).

Everything you see on this picture is sea and city, all buildings

The famed punctuality is a true cliché in my experience. I took long-distance buses three times in the last 8 days and each time they didn’t deviate more than 5 minutes from the stated arrival time. It certainly helps that Tokyo has adventurous, wound flyover highways cutting through its core. My assumption is those were built at an earlier stage of Japan’s development when tunneling was not feasible and roads/cars were more important in city planning. They don’t really look appealing from down below, but if you’re inside a vehicle driving on them you get a pretty nice view of the surrounding area.

Now what did I actually do? I went to Mt. Fuji and no matter how many mountains you’ve seen, it is a breathtaking sight. The mountain is just so smoothly shaped with its perfect snowcap, you might think it’s man-made (or god-made, if you prefer religion). And since I already was in an area with volcanic activity, I got naked in an Onsen, a Japanese hot springs bath that seems to be the equivalent to the sauna for Finnish people (also in its significance for social interaction – but obviously Japan is a little more prudish and separates men and women).

I ate Kobe beef. As a steak lover, this was a wish coming true. Seeking a compromise between affordability and taste, I opted for rumpsteak, which has great taste but not the fatty, extremely fine marbled texture for which Kobe is famous. It was still an amazing experience, but maybe I should’ve pushed my worries aside and just gotten the real thing. Then again, 100€ for 100gr of meat? Well, I’m sure I’m gonna be back in Japan at some point, probably with more money and less time to spend it.

I got quite drunk in a skybar. The Peak is on the 41^st floor of Tokyo’s possibly most famous hotel – the Hyatt in Shinjuku. Confusingly, the peak is not the actual peak, the actual peak of the building is home to the New York Grill, which is a fairly random name, but make no mistake, this is the place where many of the scenes of the cult movie “Lost in Translation” were shot. It’s also unaffordable. The Peak however has an amazing happy hour, where a reasonable amount of money buys you into 3 hours of all-you-can-drink liquor/sake/beers/wine just in time for sunset. This kind of pricing is maybe not the healthiest incentivizing, but it gives you a good economical rationale for drinking more than you should. I started to really like sake this week, especially after Charlotte took me to a bar only serving that. The options and tastes are innumerable and go way beyond what I knew from my prior experiences.

I don't know if filling up the cup until only the surface tension of the sake
keeps it from leaking is a thing in general or specific to this bar 

I went to a concert of my favorite band who just happened to be in Tokyo at this time. No J-Pop, that’s a cultural experience I was happy to skip. The band is called Jungle, comes from London, plays very listenable and danceable Electro-Soul/Funk and does some of the best live shows on this planet. I was really happy to see people actually dancing and moving along, after my decision to never again go to a concert in China. Chinese people have the urge to film every second of the performance while standing still and holding their smartphones over their head. It seems to be more important to show everyone you went there than to actually enjoy yourself.

I visited the Ghibli Museum. Studio Ghibli is Japan’s Disney, but it really is soooo much better than Disney. Its movies are known for appealing to children and adults alike, having very profound conflicts at the bottom of their storylines and don’t go down the easy, predictable path of most Western blockbusters. The co-founder and most popular director of the studio Hayao Miyazaki might be the best animator that ever lived. This video explains a lot about his approach to filmmaking, his recurring subjects and why his characters have a degree of humaneness that is usually not seen in characters played by humans. Personally, I also really love his depiction of Japan and Europe, wavering between timeless fantasy and a beautifully romanticized version of the time of the industrial revolution. The museum was nice too, a bit focused on children and Japanese visitors, but nonetheless entertaining with some creative tributes to the history of animation. But who cares about that or the many other minor things I did last week, go watch a Studio Ghibli movie!

The Tokyo nightlights picture is a must have