TOKYO.

Tokyo. It's been so long since I updated. This is largely because, first, I was on my autumn break, and then because I have found no way to write about my autumn break, during which I went to Tokyo with 2 friends. Tokyo is absurd. Absurdly big, and also straight up just absurd. Now I ain't no country bumpkin; I've lived in Chicago for three years give or take, and when I was growing up we'd go to NYC every now and again. Maybe it's the novelty of being in another country, but Tokyo blows them both out of the water in sheer incomprehensibility of size and variety. One of my companions was a fine young lady with a GUIDEBOOK and PLANS (which was good for me personally, because my vacation plans generally involve sleeping late and then going in a vague direction that I leave to be decided), so we went relentlessly to every place that the Rough Guides book deemed notable in that city. There are many. As I said at the time, we touristed the HELL outta that city. I'll try to talk about some of them in the way that I remember it: Totally discombobulated and with little sense of orientation or conception of what links them together, because trying to organize in my brain has delayed this post long enough already.

One person says anything about postmodernism and I swear to high heaven I will reanimate Robert Maynard Hutchins to devour them.

Anyway! So I lied about being unorganized: this will go pretty much chronologically with tangents wherever I feel appropriate. In order to get to Tokyo, because we are poor college students, we forwent (forgoed? forgoned?) the iconic Shinkansen (bullet train) in favor of its humble cousin, the highway bus. This is euphanistically named "Dreamu bassu." Nightmare would perhaps have been more appropriate.. I kid! Seriously though, the ride was from 11 to 6:30 and they had the unpleasant habit of stopping at least once every hour and a half or so. This was for reasons I never woke up fully enough to comprehend beyond that special kind of unadulterated hatred that being woken up at 12:30 (and 1:30 and 3 and 4:30) can bring. We arrived at Tokyo Station (which requires a separate special mention for being a giant, absurd, incomprehensible building- that had construction detours on top of it. I'd say we spent about 3 hours over the course of the trip in that building, 1 of them simply being lost. This is compounded by the subway/train network it connects to. Here I am going to detail the designing of Tokyo's mass transit system for you in a dramatic scene:

INT: a conference room. Smartly-dressed BUREAUCRATs gather around a table with a map of Tokyo on it. The MINISTER is present, chowing down on some soba noodles.
Bureaucrat: Alright sir we need some mass transit up in this business
Minister of Transit: Very well!
MINISTER casts his soba noodles onto the table roughly
Minister of Transit: WHEREVER THEY FALL, THERE SHALL THE SUBWAYS BE BUILT
Fade to black, I get about 15 cinema awards, and this is why the transit map looks like a horrible tentacle monster (my awards give me the right to mix metaphors)) (hey I bet you forgot this entire parenthetical phrase is actually in the middle of a sentence, this pretty much makes me a terrible writer, if it were not for awards (see above))

at about 6:30 and started our touristing RIGHT OFF THE BAT by heading up to Ueno, stashing our stuff in a train station locker there, and sinking our teeth into the park there by around 7:30. Good way to ease into Tokyo from Kyoto.. very empty so early in the morning, and there were things we could deal with, like temples and shrines and crazy homeless dudes singing ohwaitnotthelastone. Kiyomizu hall, a part of former Kaneiji, was something I was looking forward to and totally let down by. Something I was not looking for at all but loved was, as a map labelled it, the FOUNTAIN OF FROG. Pretty underwhelming but hey what a name.



North of Ueno is the National Museum, which we hit up because they were having an exhibition of priceless treasures that have been hidden away in the vaults of the Imperial Household, in addition to their already considerable collection. Lemme tell you, I'd be hard pressed to put a price on any of those things.. it was a lot of Edo period stuff, folding screens, screen paintings, pottery, and sculpture. It was all just totally incredible- extremely well preserved, beautiful stuff. The centerpiece for me was a series of screen paintings by an artist whose name I wrote down on the back of my reciept (which I can't find) so I wouldn't forget it. He went through and did a tree and a bird for each month, a lot of really sublime stuff- also did some cool scenes of just random animals around, a lot of chickens.. dunno. Pretty fantastic. The rest of the museum was great- the whole thing is basically a piece of art, very much late 1800s impressive Nationalist architecture. Not sure if it was burned down in any of the earthquakes/fires/firebombing that separates the early Meiji from now, but that's definitely the style. As for the works themselves, if you see a piece of art that gets put in a history class powerpoint to describe a couple centuries at a single go, it is probably here. The totally sweet fire jomon pot? In there. Picture scroll with the animals parodying humans that's considered to be the progenitor of all manga? Oh it's there. Really cool stuff everywhere you look. After a few hours the museum foot was hitting us pretty hard so we hoofed it outta there to our next destination: Electric town Akihabara! This was probably our most visited location (after the Ueno/Asakusa area, but that's where our hotel was).

Akihabara, for the uninitiated, started as a loose collection of guys hawking electric parts under the JR tracks, and grew to be the gigantic mecca of all things involving lights, electricity, radio, computer, and later video games, anime, manga, and the horrible perversions these things create. On this trip, we only spent a little time wandering around, popping into a shop here and there. General observations were made, though: The gender ratio on the street was approximately 100:1 m:f, and the ratio in regards to advertisements/huge posters/sides of buildings was totally opposite. In shops this time around the highlight was probably the pillows shaped like a woman's lap and legs, which you could buy in school girl skirt and high socks, office lady stockings, or the less subtle but more honest lingere varieties. On the one hand there is no denying this is weird as all get-out, but I feel kind of bad playing it up because it was really only in one shop, and like I feel like people always always apply these ridiculous excesses of Japan to the whole country.

Man who am I kidding that place was weeeird. Anyway after that we went to a whole different kind of weird, because it was a Sunday and that is when the serious cosplayers (people who dress up) come out to show off in Harajuku. We went to check it out as there is apparently one particular spot on a bridge to go to, and there were indeed people in some seriously interesting get-ups. The most awkward part of this is, surprisingly, not the costumes themselves. Those were indeed interesting.. a lot of hair gel, a lot of bandages, a lot of unlikely applications of coats and zippers etc. The most awkward thing, though, is that we were not the only tourists to have heard of this.. there was probably an equal number of gawkers and people in costumes, and there were not many Japanese people amongst the gawkers. The worst were the ones that would get right up in the poor cosplayers faces to take pictures without so much as saying hello.. I felt so uncomfortable about the whole thing I didn't take any pictures myself (poor all of you). I did take a picture of one of the main shopping streets in Harajuku though so feast your eyes on this absurdity.



Then we went to the hotel and SLEPT. Anyway I've gotten through one day, after a huge post, so I'll leave off there for now. There's a whole week left folks! I guess it's good as I don't plan on doing anything terrifically interesting in the near future (visiting some more temples for my BA research tomorrow, but honestly who wants to read about that when you could read about the GHIBLI MUSEUM, MEIJI JINGU, and A TRIUMPHANT RETURN TO AKIHABARA FOR A MAID CAFE? All of these and maybe more coming next time!). Hang on to your hats and/or alternate preferred headgear, dear readers!