First week in Tokyo
The first leg of my RTW trip took me to Tokyo for some meetings; I went a couple weeks early to do some sightseeing. I had planned to travel around the country a bit but decided not to once I realized how expensive it is to travel in Japan (the 2.5 hour train ride from Tokyo to Kyoto is $260 CAD return), and since I had some work to catch up on anyway.
When I arrived in Tokyo I stayed in an awesome hostel called K’s House, which just opened last summer. It’s one of the best hostels I have ever stayed at, and a real bargain considering it’s in Tokyo — 2800 yen/night for a bunk in an 8-person dorm. (that’s about $28 CAD)
I love travelling solo! People always ask if I get lonely, but it’s really a very social activity, especially when you stay in hostels or do other activities where you are likely to meet fellow travelers. Every day you meet tons of new people, spend hours discussing and learning about the world, telling stories and jokes, playing games, and sharing food and drinks. The week I worked from the hostel I was constantly turning down offers to join people for dinner, play cards, or go out for a night on the town, and I wasn’t even trying to meet people.
One of the guys at the hostel was an Australian named Tony who recently moved to Japan, bought a hotel in a ski town (Hakone) and is in the process of trying to grow the ski tourism industry there, targeted to Australians, Koreans and others nearby. He was in Tokyo for a couple days to buy a bunch of TVs for his hotel.
He said there are over 600 ski resorts in Japan and they are all way underutilized — apparently there was some kind of development frenzy a while ago but it never caught on with the Japanese so now all the resorts are mostly empty. He said there are never any lift lines, and last year he had fresh tracks every day without exception. I think he said they average over 12 metres of snow per year. I had no idea Japan had such a good ski scene.
Another guy at the hostel was a Finn who’s on the board of directors of an airline alliance, has been around the world 56 times, and stays at hostels because business hotels are too stuffy and boring. We all agreed — we wouldn’t have met and spent hours chatting over drinks in some lame business hotel bar.
I was a bit worried that I would find it difficult to focus on work with all these distractions around me but so far it hasn’t been a problem at all — with my headphones on I can block out whatever noise there might be and I’m able to work anywhere. Sometimes I feel guilty for being antisocial but that’s not a big deal.
I spent most of my first week here working from the lobby of the hostel (on the leather couches, using the free wifi), doing a bit of sightseeing on evenings and weekends. My first weekend was spent wandering around busy areas like Akihabara, Shinjuku and Shibuya, all of which are full of bright lights, advertising and noise: audio/video screens everywhere, people trying to sell you things by shouting at you through megaphones; it gets to be a bit much after a few days. But I think those areas are pretty atypical.
I picked up a bunch of new camera gear on the way here, and I’m really happy with it so far. Unfortunately most of the photos I have from Tokyo are boring wide-angle shots of neon buildings or crowds of pedestrians. I think I have a tendency to take pictures whenever I see something really striking, but that doesn’t give a very good taste of what a place is really like because in a place like Tokyo I just end up with dozens of pictures of neon while other interesting stuff goes ignored. I’ll have to try to avoid that somehow. I really want to start taking more pictures of people, too.
Various things about Japan:
Everywhere you go there are cute Japanese girls in long black boots and short skirts, even in November.
Japan always feels like it’s about five years ahead of everywhere else in terms of technology. I remember that was the case when I came here in 1998, and it’s still true today. Technology is everywhere, and it actually works. Even their toilets are complex enough that they have several pages of instructions (though guessing and pushing buttons at random is more fun.) At one place I went for train sushi (where plates roll past you on a conveyor belt and you grab whatever looks good) when I was finished my meal they just waved a little scanner past my pile of empty plates, and it automatically calculated my tab based on ID chips embedded in the plates.
Mmm, sushi. It’s no cheaper than home, but it sure is good.
I don’t remember ever encountering a language barrier as severe as the one I experienced in Japan. I think the difference between Japan and other countries where I don’t speak the language is that Japanese people really dislike being embarrassed by speaking English poorly, and instead of trying to muddle their way through and try various ways of expressing things like most other places, they just shut down and say “no, I’m sorry” whenever they get too overwhelmed. That can be really frustrating when I know we would be able to communicate with a few more seconds of effort.
Japanese people are so consistently polite and well-mannered, it’s scary. Hundreds of pedestrians can meet head-on at a busy intersection and merge seamlessly with no bumping or shoving. I tried to think of something I could do to provoke an aggressive reaction from someone on the street, and failed — I think the most you would get would be a confused look and maybe a calm attempt to avoid whatever you were doing to them.
My laptop’s screen broke and when I went to meet the guy Dell sent to fix it, a miscommunication with the hotel staff made me 40 minutes late, and I found the engineer patiently waiting outside my hotel room. Then he apologized several times for making me wait while he repaired my laptop.
Overall Japan is a great place to visit — I have never felt safer anywhere else in the world, even at home. And it’s not excessively expensive, just a lot more than other countries I plan to visit on this trip.
(posted Dec 10, back-dated for the weblog archive)