I woke up on Sunday morning and pulled back the shades on my 30th floor hotel room at the Hilton, and this is what I saw. Tokyo stretching off into the distance. It may look just a little bit smoggy, but it isn’t. It is simply that the cloud cover is down low. The air is remarkably clean this week due to the rain drizzle that has been coming down. I spent most of the morning blogging of my adventures in Asia-Pacific, and I decided that the afternoon should be a good walking opportunity.
If you are not familiar with the Shinjuku area, it is the central point of Japan’s business and government section. Many businesses are in this area, as is our sales office, and there are all types of skyscrapers and large building.
Although I could not capture it all, this is one of the major government buildings that lined along the central Shinjuku roadway just a couple of hundred yards from our hotel. There are multiple buildings in the exact same style with covered walkways going over the street and to the buildings on the opposite side of the street. It is something like a scene from a futruuistic movie where man has gotten to some type of an utopia. Only, there are not many people about when I walked around. Even in Japan, the government workers do not make business happen on Sunday.
The great thing about this area is that there are a ton of very nice sidewalks that are just massive. And while the government is not around on the weekend, that is not to say that there isn’t still a lot of overall traffic in the area with people visiting some of the shops and restaurants around the area.
I decided to simply walk around and stretch my legs. I wanted to walk about 4 or 5 miles, so when I got back to the states I could still have a little bitof shape left so I can go walk the golf course. The first place that I headed is to Shinjuku station. It had been a little while since I had walked from the hotel there (and in reality, this is the first time I had been at the Hilton, as I normally stay across the street at the Hyatt). The station still had quite a few people, but nothing like rush hour on a normal weekend. I though that I may want to eat there when my friend David got in on Sunday night because the subway stations have a ton of little places to eat.
After I had gotten out of the station, I walked over some of the streets that surrounded the area. This area of Tokyo is great about have elevated sidewalks that go over the street so you don’t necessarily need to wait at lights. Although there are more than a fair share of these walkways, most people don’t want to climb the stairs, and they wait at the light.
Walking 4 miles in a crowded city is a very long ways, and you can cover a lot of ground and see many things. After I went to the subway station, I looped bck toward the hotel. Across the street from the hotel is a large park with shrine in the corner. Most of the park is not used by people because it is a gather place for the homeless people of Tokyo. However, the corner of the park has a shrine. I I want to see if it was similar to the Rabbit Shrine in my previous post, and you can see that instead of having one prayer rope with bell at the top, it had three, and it was much larger.
It also had a wedding going on (or more likely the wedding was someplace else, and after the wedding, the bride and groom came here to tae some photos). You can see the bride in the picture above.
As I continued to walk around, I thought that the following would be a very nice picture for my youngest son and daughter. Well, maybe especially my son. Next time he complains about not having something that he likes to eat (and really he is not a picky eater, so this probably won’t happen), I tell him that I plan to take him to Tokyo, and make him eat at the above restaurant where he’ll get “broiled pig & cow innards with RED HOT CHILLI PEPPER.”
Cars are at a premium in the Tokyo area. They are expensive, and the gas is even more expensive at $6-7 per gallon. The space to park the cars are also very limited, because there is little space, so you are going to use it for living and not parking. Considering that the subway and trains are great, you may still need some help getting a little further away form home. So, you often see the avove at the many condos that are in the area. Around the side of the apartment or the condo will be a special bicycle parking area. In this case, it was along the fron part of the building, but sometimes they will have very sophisticated double layer racks.
David rolledin that night, and I wanted to eat at the burger chain that was something like the Jpanese MacDonalds. This is called Mos Burger. We had a little problems finding one, but after we found it, I had a fish burger, and David had a hamburger. The meals were served fresh, and took 10 minutes to get to us. It was much better than MacDonalds.
We then got up and went to our first customer meeting. One more person from the USA joined us, Brad. Ebitani-san met us and we headed off to Yokohama. I like ramen, so Ebitani-san has a special place that he took us.
The line was long, but we were in in about 10 minutes. We must have had good timing, however, because the line got very large behind us as we got into lunch.
This might be a good time to talk about a story from Ebitani-san. During the Tsunami, there was a massive power interruption. if you remember some of my posts, all of Jpan depends on the trains. However, after the Tsunami hit, all of the trains stopped. So, he was in the office, and what should he do? There was only one choice. He decided that he needed to walk home.
The problem with this is that home was 25 miles away. However, he had no other choice. So, he stepped out of the office, and he simply started walking. As he tells it, the streets were full and the cars were gridlocked. However, all the sidewalks were filled with people. He said that although everybody knew that this was a big deal, there was a sense of kindness about everybody. I supposed that in America, there would be looting. In Japan, they were all going to walk home.
He walked for 5 hours. All the time, he was thinking “I should buy a bicycle.” However, he had no way of calling or getting to the internet to find a bicycle shop, so he simply kept walking. At the five hour mark, he found a bicyle shop. There was an old man and old woman that were running the place. The shop should have had about 20 or 30 bicycles, but they were down to four. Even though he didn’t want a nice commuter bike, it was all that the shop had, so he bought the Bridgestone bike and pedaled the rest of the way home for another 1.5 hours.
He arrived at about 11:30 at night.
Maybe the other interesting thing about the bicycles in Japan is that most of them are true commuter bikes. We really don’t have this type in the USA much if at all.
The commuter bicyle is set up to be used by either sex, but the bike is what we would call a “woman style” bike, with a lower cross bar. The bikes all have fenders and a rack. Kick stands are a must.
There is a lock on the back wheel and a key to the lock. The lock simply is thin and light and keeps the back wheel from turning. The bike could easily be picked up and carried away. However, they simply don’t need to worry about this in Japan. In most cities in the USA, the bike would be gone. In Tokyo, I would walk by untold number of bicycles secured with nothing more than this little lock. Amazing!
At the restaurant, we sat at the counter. DAvid complained that sitting next to the kitchen could make us hot. He is a big baby sometimes. If he was too hot, then he should take off his coat. He seemed to enjoy the noodles, however. He said that this was a good business because noodles were very cheap. However, Nagata-san, who was with us, said that the trick waas not the profit, it was making a ramen that people would come in for. Many people wanted to be in ramen business, but not many had a line up for the shop.
This was the first time of Brad in Tokyo eating ramen. So, I told him that he needed to take a big bite so we could send a picture to his wife. Ebitani-san seemed to enjoy the big show.
Brad was wondering why the Japanese systems were not selling so well in the USA, and I said that the Japanese could not understand the way that we bought PCs. So, to show him, I took him and DAvid to a stereotypical electronic store in Japan. There were 11 floors of electronics in this store. There are special rows for each major manufacturer of PCs, with separate rows for separate types of PCs. There were sales people all over the place, and some floors had people with megaphones calling out the selling features of PCs.
When Japanese come to USA to sell, they ask “Where is my row? Where is my sales person? Where is my megaphone?” It is very different that USA.
Afterwards, we went into the backstreets to find a place to eat. We went around and around in circles. I wasn’t all that hungery, and I said that I was going to pick up riceball for dinner at 7-11, if the guys didn’t decide a good plce. They went around in the same circle about 4 times, and when I finally got our my camera to document this strange path of find a place to eat, my companions said “oh, no, now this is going to appaer on the blog. We were waiting for this.”
The first place that they picked smelled strongly of cigarette smoke, and I said that I was going to leave. Brad agreed, and even David didn’t like the menu much. We went out again, and found a really great little sushi place.
The fish was very, very fresh, and normally David won’t eat roe (salmon eggs), but he tried and liked it here.
“It doesn’t taste fishy, “he said. “This is good.”
Seemed a bit ironic to say it didn’t taste fishy, but I did agree that it was very fresh and tasty.
Back to the hotel and a good night’s sleep.
