I taught English in Japan for a couple of years, so I felt a certain sense of nostalgia on arriving in Tokyo. The smell of food cooking and frying, the humidity and feeling of the air, the orderliness of everything, the sounds of announcements: all of these things are barely perceptible in everyday life, but they hit you like a wall of familiarity when you return.
One thing that wasn't familiar was the train employee stationed next to the ticket machine at Narita, who spoke English and was there to help people buy their tickets. In my time in Tokyo I would come to see that a lot more people seem to speak English than they do in more rural Japan or the Kansai region (Kobe, Osaka, Kyoto, and environs). I bought the cheapest ticket from Narita to Asakusa, where my hostel was. This involved changing trains and taking the regular commuter line, but
only cost ¥1,200 as opposed to the
¥2,500 or so that it would have cost to take the express train.
I arrived in Asakusa at around 10:00 pm. I usually don't have much jet lag when I travel, in either direction, because I can sleep on planes and my sleep schedule is often unsettled. I ended up waking up at around 4:00 in the morning, however, and decided that this would provide a good opportunity to visit the renowned Tsukiji fish market.
Although I had lived in Japan before, I didn't actually see all that much of Japan when I lived there, as the
cost of transportation is too high to travel very far during the weekends (a
Shinkansen trip from Osaka to Tokyo is about $150 each way); most of my
experience in Tokyo comes from when I visited the country in 1993 with
my grandmother. And in 1993 I didn't visit Tsukiji—even though I had wanted to—because as a teenager I felt that I would be out of place and in the way during the commercial auctions that Tsukiji is famous for. Ugly Western tourists who really have interfered with both the auctions and the wholesale have resulted in the current situation: in order to see the Tuna auctions you have to
queue up and get tickets for a tour, and you can't visit the wholesale market before 9:00, when most business has already been conducted.
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| Welcome to Japan: on the morning train to Tsukiji. |
Tsukiji to Setagaya
I arrived at Tsukiji to find out that it was closed (I should have
checked the schedule, I guess). I wouldn't have been there early enough to take the tour, anyway, but I couldn't even see the market. Instead I wandered around the area for a little, stopped at a nearby 7-Eleven to get some of the snack foods I had missed (there are some great Pizza chips in Japan), then headed to a nearby Yoshinoya for a similarly missed beef bowl.
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The market's riverside port.
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Saying hello to old friends.
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I then decided to head to the Imperial Palace. It was really surprising how well I remembered it, despite it being almost 20 years since I had been there. I often knew where things should be, and what I would see around the corner. It was kind of eerie at times.
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Palace grounds.
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This is Japan.
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