Tokyo Adventures

Tokyo Adventures

Two weekends in a row, I took the 2 + hour bus ride to Tokyo station to get my city fix. The first was an overnighter. Welsh Joe and I first got over-enthusiastic about being in a large English section bookstore. Then we spent a long time looking for the capsule hotel whose location on a map I had remembered less than perfectly. We nearly gave up and went into a hotel together to ask their rates and maybe see if they knew where the capsule hotel was. The cheesy Greek façade, hourly rates and the too late-noticed sexy costume shop told us we were in a love hotel, an infamous Japanese establishment. The two of us must’ve surprised the clerk asking him for a room so early in the night.

Apparently, these "love hotels", as theyre actually called, arose out of a lack of privacy due to living with one's family into adulthood. I'm gonna jump on a few tangents here, but it’s way more common for adults to live at home over here. In fact, I read that a million adult men, like 23-40 yrs, unemployed, live with and rely on their parents, rarely even leaving the house. There are surely many more million whom live with parents and DO have a job and a life. Another interesting fact, Japan has a declining population rate. They’re expected to drop from 127 million (now) to 100 million by 2050, which would have all sorts of effects.

OK, so back to the capsule hotel, which luckily, was practically across the street. It was good fun. The dimensions of my bed chambers were about 3’ by 3’ and 7’ deep. Our sleek black and white capsules were outfitted with a TV, ac/fan/heat and various other remote controls. They look like they’d be great generic beds for a spaceship in a low budget, made-for-TV Sci-Fi flick. We were in the heart of Shibuya, though, which is like Tokyo’s hip youth central. Some crazy fashions were seen, possibly crazier on the guys than the girls, a rarity.


Tokyo 2

The next weekend, I joined the crew on the way to Tokyo, but let them go off to the Tokyo Video Game festival and spent the day taking a long exploratory walk. Two of the more exciting sights…

I stumbled upon a few thousand (!) of Japanese high school Goths, the least threatening of all the Goth species. They were dressed up for a concert in this park and were waiting around for the stadium to open up. Plenty of red or black colored contacts, clothes striped in black and pink, men’s ties, heavy make-up, face paint, and lots of cutesy photographing of each other. The only other acceptable costume was a black or pink French maid uniform.

I decided to check out the temple for the war dead of Japan, 2.4 million enshrined here. There’s a museum there I checked out, which has some controversial historical facts, and opinions. I only read that which was translated into English, which was only a brief history of Japan’s wars from the mid-19th century through World War II. Wait I mean, the Great East Asian War. I learned some “interesting” “facts” such as

-Japan throwing out the Western colonizers in SE Asian countries led to Independence movements through not only E. Asia but throughout Asia and Africa. They even took a little credit for helping Ghandi.

-America gave Japan no choice but to go to war and waited expectantly for the Japanese to make the first move at Pearl Harbor.

-the Japanese looked to end the war in 1942 but Roosevelt wouldn’t allow any compromises to his goal of unconditional surrender.

-They also loved to rag on the Russians.

I wonder what else interesting I would have found if I could read Japanese. Outside, I received some pamphlets on the Nanking massacre, (in which somewhere between 100,000 and 300,000 Chinese civilians were killed by Japanese soldiers); that it never occurred and was part of a huge conspiracy.