Tokyo - Day 9

The hot canned coffee poll is quickly becoming redundant. I've passed the 50 mark (seriously), and it won't be long before I reach the final tier of 150+. I accept that challenge, I'm already at the point where my travelling basically involves bouncing from vending machine to vending machine. Think Fry in Three Hundred Big Boys.

I've put a new poll on, one that matches today's event. I won't tell you exactly how I reacted, I'll leave it up to you to tell me what perception all my friends have of me. Needless to say, I looked like a tard.

Earthquakes are very common in Japan, but for the most part the are mere tremors. The Japanese also have their own measurement scale, called Shindo. Being an Australian, I've never had the experience of feeling the earth literally move, and I have to say the whole thing was very unnerving. It was even more unnerving based on where I was at the time that it happened. But I'll get to that.

I've reached a point in Tokyo where I've done everything I had hoped to do, and there's nothing left to do here that really interests me. So I've moved me plans to go to Osaka and Kyoto forward by a couple of days, and will spend the rest of this weekend just catching up with friends and enjoying the wonderful food and drink that is available.

Today I caught up with a friend of my housemates, whom I met at their wedding back in January. She speaks almost no English so this was a huge challenge for me, as I couldn't back down to English or simply nod and walk away like I was getting accustomed to. No, I had to speak Japanese. As much as my head hurt, I feel like I did a pretty decent job at carrying a conversation in another language. But it wasn't a very natural sounding conversation.

You see, I've found that there are two levels of Japanese that I can speak at. One is the really boring, totally useless, beginner stuff. You can't really make a friendly conversation out of this stuff. Imagine sitting down with a good friend of yours and starting a conversation with 'I like dogs, do you like dogs?', or 'Yesterday I met Jack. Jack got fat'. In fact, the only useful one-sentence conversation I've come across is "I'm drunk".

The other level of Japanese sits more in that intermediate range, where I am still strugging. But this is the stuff that a half-decent conversation is made of. While I can run off the beginner stuff without too many problems now, saying something like "I was surprised that when I was in northern Japan, people there seemed to avoid me" is much more difficult. After two or three attempts, the listener can understand what I'm trying to say, but it in English it would sound more like "Surprised! When I in north Japan, people afraid me was!". Think of that nice Chinese guy that does your laundry.

I had hoped that my friend would be able to show me some sights and take me somewhere nice and traditional for dinner. I'm selfish like that. I know it shouldn't have surprised me, but given that she lived over 90 minutes from Tokyo itself, she hadn't seem much of the city for a while. A bit of a role reversal took place, and I found out about some places I had visited that she hadn't, so I took her to those places and showed her around. I couldn't let the opportunity to take someone along to the lookout that I visited two days ago go by. It was again approaching sunset, so off we went.

This is where it happened. The lookout, to reiterate, is on the 53rd floor of the Mori Tower in Roppongi. It's a new building, and the earthquake was relatively small by Japanese standards. It measured at a 3 on the Shindo scale, which translates as barely fucking perceptable. I have my own earthquake measurement scale, based on my own experiences with earthquakes. Since this was my first time, on my scale this translates more as oh my god, I'm going to die. At first I thought maybe it was just wind, somehing I had felt once before in my apartment and that was pretty unnerving, but this lasted for far too long. What's more, the building wasn't swaying in one direction, but all directions.

Really, it wasn't strong. While the building moved (I think) quite considerably, it wasn't strong enough to make anything else move. We were sitting down having a drink watching the city, and it wasn't even strong enough to make the bottles move. Nevertheless, I freaked a little, mostly because it didn't occur to me what it was. Neither my friend nor I knew the word for this in each others language, so she typed it into a translator on her mobile, and showed me the translation of 'it was earthquake'. Childish as I know it seems, I wanted to bolt down the stairs. I felt like there was this spectre looming even after the shaking had stopped; 'what if it comes to finish me off', I thought.

I'm going to cut myself off right there, because I know how retarded I sound. I'm just telling you how it really happened. I won't, however, tell you what my real reaction was just yet. I'll leave it for you to vote.

In lieu of any real news to offer you, I'd like to branch out now and talk about two things that really have surprised my about Tokyo, and Japan in general.

First and foremost - trains. Connex/QR needs to be flown up to Japan to get an idea of how a rail system should be run. The defensive argument here would be that, yes, Tokyo has a better railway system because it is bigger. Bullshit. Tokyo should have a worse railway system for precisely that reason. There are at least 30 surface and subway rail lines in Tokyo, and easily over 200 stations. It took me a couple of days to break out of the habit of running for a departing train, until a friend of mine made the astute (and obvious) statement of 'umm, there'll be another one in like 3 minutes', and there was.

There are numerous efficiency improvements that Tokyo has embraced, which I sincerely hope Australian rail companies will follow suit on. First, in the idea of the Yamanote line. This is basically a huge circle in the middle of Tokyo that just goes round and round to every major stop. As a tourist, this was incredbly useful because all of the common tourist stops (Tokyo, Akihabara, Ueno, Asakasa, Harajuku, Nihonbashi, Ikebukuro, Shinjuku and Shibuya) are on this line, and those that aren't (namely Ginza and Roppongi) are only a one or two station transfer away. I'd love to see something like this in Melbourne.

The second great efficiency is six-door trains. I've seen these only on the Yamanote line so far, but they're a huge improvement on the two-door trains in Melbourne and Brisbane. When a train arrives at a station in Tokyo, they play this little jingle (different for every station) and you have until the jingle ends to get on. That jingle lasts only about 5 to 10 seconds. A six-door carriage makes this surprisingly possible.

The other little bit I have reserved for a slow news day is toilets. The whole concept of an assembly line must have been lost on loo makers in Japan. No two toilets, public or private, that I have visited are the same. The only thing that seems to be a trend is that everything, of course, is electrical. No chains to pull on at a urinal: when you walk away, it flushes itself. The option of hot or cold water at a tap is controlled by a button, not a tap. And, outside of your hotel/home, you never have to use a tap to control water flow. It's all automatic.

But simply the coolest thing I've seen in Japan is their version of a air towel. None of those 40w air towel crap. The air towel machines in Japan basically involve putting both hands inside a box, and letting this monster blow away your top layer of skin. Within 5 seconds, your hands are dry.

I know the above little tidbits are really quite boring, but I've put them in hear more for my benefit. When I finally get back to Aus, I want to remember even those little details that make Japan so unique.

Take care everyone,
Mike