Day Two: Old and New
Posted by Trejkaz Fri, 29 Sep 2006 05:57:46 GMT
I’m writing these next few entries from the laptop because I get some free time but no decent net access for the time being.
Day two was a culture tour with a few bonuses.
The day started out with a visit to Tokyo Tower. I’d forgotten that the tour was going there (I had planned it as something to do on my second week) and it was supposed to be the second stop on our trip, but we ended up rearranging it to be the first stop to make the trip simpler for the bus driver.
I got some photos of the city from up there, but also some photos of the cemeteries on the ground almost directly below the tower. Seen Otogi Zoshi? They mention an urban legend that Tokyo Tower was built on a cemetery, and then dispel it by saying that it was built on a hill which happens to overlook the cemetery/cemeteries, which is of course exactly what happened. In fact, we were told that Tokyo cemeteries no longer allow new burials, so the majority of the dead are cremated.
Unfortunately we didn’t get time to explore the space underneath the tower (there is a whole park down there) and I’m not sure if I’ll dedicate any time to that in my second week here. But it was a good first stop and useful for getting an idea of the metropolitan layout from high up.
Next stop was the Meiji Shinto shrine, which was a pretty location and a good example of traditional design, though not very old as much was rebuilt after the war. Actually the shrine is right next to Harajuku and we did spot some interestingly attired people hanging out not far from the front gate. I noticed a couple of locations in the vicinity where spiders had built themselves happy homes, and it wouldn’t be the first time I saw that in this city either.
We did spend quite some time in there learning about the shrine, and even happened to spot a shinto wedding which was occurring in the shrine on the day, although this particular Sunday was considered to be the unlucky day for that week, according to our appropriately superstitious tour guide. I didn’t get a lot of photos in this particular location and the photos I did get didn’t turn out so well because the location of the sun in the sky resulted in a lot of glare off some rooftops.
Next stop was the Asakusa Kannon Temple, and actually we got to check out the entire surrounding area. Actually, this became more of a shopping trip, going through various shops in the Nakamise shopping arcade.
A group of four of us split off and had lunch in a nearby restaurant where I ate the best katsudon I’ve ever eaten. Even food in random places here seems to be better than food in the best Japanese places in Sydney. Either that, or we just have really good luck in picking the good places. This particular place was one of the sorts where half the seating area is on cushions on the tatami mats, but thankfully there were free seats in the front area where we were able to sit on benches.
After eating, we roamed the arcades, which contained a lot of random stuff but nothing appealing enough to buy. We were intercepted by some college students doing surveys as part of their English class and after that, we ran back to the temple area and made it to the bus with a minute to spare.
Next stop was the Edo Tokyo Museum. I got a few photos there but only a couple look like they are any good. There were many scale models of buildings of older times, and a lot of the same sort of thing you would see in any museum. Nothing against museums, but it just seemed like we ran out of things to see reasonably quickly, it could have just been that we had too much time to check it out. I also scoured the shops downstairs looking for interesting things, but didn’t find anything worth the price tag here either. Made it back out to the group with about 15 minutes to spare, and played DS (now finished Hard Campaign in Advance Wars DS twice.)
Incidentally… there are a lot of people with a Nintendo DS on this tour. Seems they’re quite common. Also, I’ve seen them randomly on trains extremely often. Haven’t seen a PSP, however, with the exception of the Tokyo Game Show, where I walked past an entire group of people playing them at the same time. Oh yeah… it was in the Sony booth, so you would sort of expect them to think it’s worth the money (which it really isn’t… yet. It’ll get there, I swear.)
The sightseeing part of the day was now over and we went to a sumo match. However, timing for this tour was remarkably good as this was the final match for the season! So seats were sold out, and there was much excitement. The place was huge… I have some photos which will be posted somewhere in due time.
Most of the bouts (the earlier ones, basically) were uninteresting – they were over in a few seconds, the winner received their cash, and that’s that. What was more interesting was learning about the way sponsorship worked. At the start of each match a bunch of flag bearers would walk around the ring, each with the name of a sponsor, and supposedly each flag represents a certain amount of money (we were told around $1,000, although I don’t have the resources to check this fact right now, could someone with free time figure out if they were telling the truth?) For the low-profile bouts, often there was only one sponsor. Bigger bouts had more sponsors, and actually the final match had 49 sponsor flags. Some of them were multiples, so a single sponsor put forth more than the minimum amount.
Other than the cash prize ($49,000 wouldn’t have been bad for a single bout, considering the number of bouts in a season) the grand champion also received a bunch of other prizes and trophies, sponsored by various companies. I’ve never seen a single person accept so many trophies in a single session…
That was the end of the day, and we were pretty buggered. But you know, we’re gluttons for punishment. So a few of us got the idea that we might want to do something else.
Earl, one of the tour staff, offered to take us out somewhere. We ended up going to Akihabara late at night. Was it 21:00 or so? It was late. So late that most of the shops were closed. There were a few open though, and while Earl went to play Guilty Gear XX against the locals, we browsed through a few stores. What we found in the stores which were open could mostly be described as pornography, but I’ll go through more of that later. A lot of what we seem to find in Akiba is DVDs which wouldn’t make it back through Australian customs because the contents are illegal (or at best questionable) in this country.
I did happen to run across a model of Ruri Hoshino which stood around 120cm tall. It would have been damn tempting, except that it went for somewhere around $4,000. I don’t have that sort of money to spend on what is more or less, a figurine, no matter how tempting it is.
Found no Suzumiya Haruhi stuff on this trip, but I had no idea of the flood which was going to hit a couple of days later.
Went back to the video arcade to meet up with Earl, who was on an 8 win streak, and started to lose the moment we arrived. Jinxed.
After that, a short train trip and we were back in the hotel… and practically dead from the day’s activities.