Japan Trip 2009

We’ve just returned from our major vacation of the year (maybe of several years—our last big trip was our “Haute Route” trip in 2006). We were lucky enough to get to several different parts of the country, the highlight being a weeklong bike tour through rural villages near Nagano. Other parts of the trip included Tokyo, a rock climbing area called “Ogawayama,” a brief excursion to the Noto Peninsula, and finally, Kyoto. If I try to fit this all into one blog post, it will be very long and hard to read, so I think I’ll break it up into something like the following:
Part I: Tokyo – Asakusa, Tsukiji Fish Market, Takarazuka
Part II: Rock climbing at Ogawayama
Part III: Biking tour in Nagano prefecture - Rural villages and celebrations
Part IV: Kanazawa and Noto Peninsula – Driving on the left!
Part V: Kyoto – Sightseeing by bike

Here's part I:

Part I: Tokyo – Asakusa, Takarazuka, Tsukiji Fish Market (I'll try to update this with more pictures shortly...all photos here can be enlarged by clicking.)


Our first day in Japan, we blearily walked into the train station grocery to pick up some lunch, and were surprised to see...Boulder Potato Chips! Complete with the usual image of the Flatirons.




Still feeling a little zoned out from jet-lag, we started off with a visit to Senso-ji temple in the Asakusa area of Tokyo. A friend who used to live in Tokyo had recommended the river trip from Asakusa to the Hamarikyu Gardens, so we started with a little walk near Sensoji. The temple itself was under construction, apparently on the roof, so while we were still able to view the inside of the temple, the overall structure wasn’t visible. Above is the massive gate leading into the temple.

As you approach the temple, there’s a kind of pedestrian mall that’s filled with little shops selling various souvenir type items. Here I am having what I would call “kinako mochi on a stick.”

A side note here about language: I am not fluent in Japanese. I know a few words and phrases, and one or two points of grammar. I am what’s called “yonsei,” or fourth generation Japanese in America – my mother could speak it, but my father could not, so we didn’t speak it at home. In Hawaii, though, Japanese culture is pretty strong, albeit transformed by the Hawaii melange of other cultures. So, for example, I know the names of lots of Japanese food, and in some cases, don’t know the English translation. Thanks to a couple of years of “Japanese School,” (it’s like Hebrew school—after-regular-school lessons in language and culture), and rounds of karuta with my mother, I do know at least one of the Japanese alphabets, hiragana, and I have about half the katakana alphabet memorized. My kanji (Chinese character) knowledge is extremely limited, although I do know the difference between “man” and “woman” which is sometimes handy in rural toilets. So back to the kinako mochi…

Kinako mochi as I know it from Hawaii is a kind of rice ball rolled in a soy powder called “kinako.” I’ve never had it from a street vendor, or sold on a stick. The sign said “dango,” in hiragana, but whatever came before it was in kanji, so I have no idea what it said. Still, it was yummy! The other stalls seemed to be filled with groups of Japanese schoolchildren. Maybe it was a school field trip—we encountered many of these groups in Kyoto as well. In comparison with Kyoto, Asakusa seemed relatively free of foreign tourists—most were Japanese. In any event, the district definitely caters to tourists. Right at the entrance, there are a bevy of extremely well-muscled, tight-shorted, young Japanese men trying to get your attention—we finally figured out that they’re rickshaw drivers, although I’m not really sure why you’d want to ride a rickshaw in the streets of Tokyo. We saw them again in the Higashiyama area of Kyoto, and that would certainly have been a more picturesque ride!


The ferry ride on the Sumida River starts right near the temple, and goes under a number of bridges before arriving at Hamarikyu Gardens. This was our first view of a Japanese garden. If you’ve ever looked at Japanese art and wondered how the trees got to be so harmoniously formed, here’s how (Lin standing next to a highly supported tree--click to enlarge and you can see all the support and buttressing):


Since we were generally getting up really early, we decided to head down to Tokyo's famous Tsukiji Fish Market. This is the world's largest wholesale fish and seafood market, purportedly dating back to Tokugawa Ieyasu in the 16th century. If you have any interest at all in "non-traditional" sightseeing, deep sea fish products, or seafood in general, this is a must-see destination. Tourists were recently banned from the market, but have now been allowed back in, so if you go, keep a low profile!

To visit, all you need to do is catch the subway to one of two nearby stations, and then walk right on in. There are zillions of motorized carts zipping around, and many workers dashing to and fro. We got there after the auctions were already over (I think you need to get there around 5 to catch the auctions), but there was still lots to see in the wholesalers' stalls. Below is a short video I made including some stills and video I took while there. The first picture is of a guy cutting a frozen fish with the largest bandsaw I've ever seen! The final photo is Lin having a sashimi donburi breakfast at the market two blocks down the street--most likely the freshest sashimi we'll ever have! (The market features great food and kitchen tools--don't miss it if you're already down there for the market.)


Speaking of food, we had a great meal at Torigin Honten, recommended by Lonely Planet. It's a great yakitori and kamameshi restaurant in Ginza, which is the land of glass-and-steel storefronts and very high end shopping that I won't be able to afford in a million years. But tucked between two of these ritzy buildings is an alleyway containing this great restaurant, which had yummy food, no obviously western tourists (at least the night we were there, though the place has clearly been publicized in western travel guides), and an English menu if you ask for it.

We again decided to take advantage of our jet-lagged early rising to sit in line for tickets to the Takarazuka Revue. Takarazuka is an extremely interesting cultural phenomenon in Japan. They are an all-women’s performing group, formed in 1914 by a railroad owner who needed an attraction for one of the stops on his railway line (you can get a pretty good history of Takarazuka at the wikipedia page here, and more than you ever wanted to know here at the “TakaWiki” page maintained by their English-speaking fans.) The group performs musicals in the western style, plus song and dance numbers, sort of along the lines of the Ziegfeld Follies or Busby Berkeley (now that it’s the 21st century, these “revue” sections look like part Vegas floor show, part Broadway musical, but in 1915, I assume it was modeled on then-current American theater entertainment). All the men’s roles are played by women. The company toured to Hawaii when I was young, and my mom took me to see it. I forgot all about it, but then years later, in New York, I saw a documentary about the group and figured there must be more to it than just cross-dressing, if my not-at-all-flamboyant mom had taken me to see them! Incidentally, the woman next to us is asleep in the picture, but she was pretty entertaining herself--when we got there, she started talking to us in a stream of Japanese, and when we said we didn't speak Japanese, it only made her try to talk to us more! The two women to the other side of me are wearing the ubiquitous face masks--Japan takes swine flu extremely seriously. We had to be scanned by their fever-detector guns before they would let us get off the plane at Narita Airport.

Anyway, while it turns out that while Takarazuka fans are mostly women, they come from all walks of life, from housewives to schoolgirls to more “trendy” young people. I imagine that such a group in the U.S. would likely feature a lot of lesbian performers, but Takarazuka was founded with the idea that young women retiring from performing would go on to be “good wives and mothers,” and it seems that this does still happen. I even heard that a number of prominent politicians are married to ex-Takarazuka stars. And, notably, women are not in charge of the company. The group is divided into a number of separate “troupes,” each of which is run by a man.

The show itself is hard to describe if you're not already a fan. It's over the top in just about every way, but if you're willing to suspend your disbelief and turn your kitsch tolerance on high, it's pretty entertaining. The only thing I can even remotely compare it to is if you've ever watched Iron Chef on Food Network (the Japanese show, not the American spinoff), Chairman Kaga is similarly over-the-top, eccentric, yet oddly awesome. Here’s the flyer for the show we saw, "Zorro, the Masked Messiah."

And here’s the flyer for an upcoming show. In addition to the featured show, there’s also a more loosely formatted, song and dance feature that's mostly to show off a bunch of standard broadway style dance moves (including a "Rockettes"-style kickline!), and some very Liberace-like costumes!

Today’s company resides in two theaters dedicated entirely to their performances, one in Tokyo, and one in the town of Takarazuka. All performances are sold out, as far as I can tell, except for a handful of seats that they save for “day of” sales. It’s a formula any American producer would kill for—a dedicated school producing performers exactly in the mold of the company, two theaters solely for the use of the company, continually running performances all guaranteed to be sold out, and an incredible fan base (each star has her own “fan club” and the online network of such fans is amazing just in English—I can only imagine what it must be like in Japanese!).

The “male” stars are undoubtedly the most popular, although I understand that both “male” (otokoyaku) and “female” (musumeyaku) stars have their fans. We sat in absolutely the last row, so we and a number of people around has had binoculars to better see the stage. We noticed during the final song-and-dance numbers, where alternately large groups of “men” and “women” would perform, everyone’s binoculars were trained onstage during the numbers featuring otokoyaku, and not so much during the musumeyaku ones!

A note about actually trying to get tickets. If you speak Japanese, you might try calling in advance to get tickets. Tickets go on sale a fixed date before the beginning of each run, and the diligent TakaWiki page updaters will see to it that you can get a list of upcoming shows well in advance. If you don’t speak Japanese, and don’t mind sitting in the back, you can do what we did and try to get “day of” tickets. The box office opens at 10 am. We got there around 7:30, and were about fifth in line for that day’s matinee performance. (There are two lines, one for the matinee, and one for the evening. Even if you don’t read Japanese, you can probably figure out the signs indicating which line is for which show. Ignore all the lettering and look for the time--the one that says 13:30 is for the matinee, and the one that says 18:30 is for the evening show.) The day we were there, there was virtually no line for the evening show. I assume this changes according to the popularity of a given show and given performers—it was also a weekday when we were there. By the time the box office actually opened, I’d guess there were maybe 40 or 50 people in line. I’m not sure they were all able to get tickets. The seats reserved for “day of” sales are all in the very last row in the house (bring your binocs), but sometimes they get returns, so a very small number of better seats might become available. This was the case the day we were there, and the two young women behind us in line were ecstatic to see that they could buy two seats near the front. Apparently they had been waiting three months for such an opportunity! Since we were in front of them, I guess they were holding their breaths hoping we wouldn’t buy them first.

That's it for Tokyo! Stay tuned for Part II, Rock Climbing in Ogawayama...