Well, I’m just about wrapped up with Japan. Thursday and Friday were my last two days in the country, and I spent them both in Tokyo.
I got up early, as I always do on vacation, and took some time on the roof of my hotel taking in the city. Tokyo is huge – it sprawls out over I think hundreds of square miles, covering basically every bit of land in north-central Japan that isn’t a mountain. It’s mostly dozens or even hundreds of neighborhoods and smaller cities knit together without any break in the urbanization. The only way to get around is via subway. So, that was my first stop.
I headed down into the subway station near my hotel, which was very near, thankfully – just a block or two. Once again, the morning was dominated with thousands of people hurrying to work. Crowds are everywhere in Japan – the only time I was ever alone was in Sekigahara. Otherwise there’s always at least a few dozen human beings in your immediate area. Trains are crowded, streets are crowded, etc. The nice thing, though, is that everyone is extremely polite and courteous to each other – I think the Japanese would have wound up killing each other off long ago if that wasn’t the case. Anyway, I squeezed down past the crowds and towards the line. I asked the guard at the gate if my rail pass would work on the subway, but unfortunately the metro system isn’t a Japan Rail line (the state company) and is instead run by a private company. He pointed me to a nearby ticket kiosk, though. I wandered over, selected the English option on the electronic menu, and paged through the confusing list of ticket options – single way tickets, round-trips, 24-hour passes, but only on certain lines, comprehensive passes, etc. When the guard didn’t see me go through the gate right away, he came out of his booth and hurried over to make sure I was okay. He was a very helpful and courteous fellow, and together we got a decent 48-hour pass, which would last me until it was time to fly home the next day. He also insisted I take a map of the metro, which included guides to various tourist attractions in Tokyo, which actually came in quite handy.
I rode the metro and transferred through several stations. That was a lot easier said than done, though – the Japanese subway system is a tangled spaghetti mess of practically a dozen different lines all looping back and forth on each other, and the stations are maze-like collections of stairs and halls and platforms and gates rambling on for several stories up and down and hundreds of yards lengthwise, all underground, and all filled with thousands of people. Thankfully the signage is very clear and comprehensive, and I was able to wander more or less in the right direction, purchasing a single-round trip ticket down to Yokosuka. Yokosuka is a harbor suburb on one of the peninsulas jutting out into Tokyo Bay south of the main city. It’s most notable as the home of the US naval base in Tokyo Bay and the headquarters of our Far East fleet. My interest, though, was in Mikasa.
Mikasa is an old Japanese battleship permanently preserved in Mikasa Naval Park, right next to the US base. She’s a famous ship, though, with a distinguished history. Mikasa is the only surviving predreadnought battleship in the world.
See, steel battleships can be divided into two groups: predreadnoughts, and dreadnoughts. When the British launched HMS Dreadnought in 1905, they revolutionized warship design. Before Dreadnought, ships were a confused mess of designs as naval architects tried to figure out what worked and what didn’t work with the new technologies of steam and iron plating. Ships had hugely varied armaments, eclectic collections of guns, some even had rams, that kind of thing. No one had much of a clue. Dreadnought got rid of all the smaller guns, though, and radically went with a small number of big guns mounted in a few turrets. She also had fancy new turbine-based steam engines, instead of reciprocating engines. Her big guns could shoot further and more accurately than the guns on any other warship, and her fancy engines meant she could sail faster and for longer than any other warship, too. That meant that Dreadnought could defeat any other ship or even any other collection of ships afloat, because she could keep out of range of any ship that attacked her while pounding it into scrap metal. So, since Dreadnought, all battleships have followed her design of having a small number of big guns mounted in turrets, with a few smaller guns to ward off destroyers and small craft, and fast turbine engines, and are called dreadnoughts after the first ship. The Missouri, in Pearl, is a dreadnought.
The pre-dreadnoughts have all disappeared, except Mikasa. She has 4 big 12-inch guns in 2 turrets, a huge assortment of 6-inch guns, and even more 3-inch guns crowded onto her deck. The ship was designed to fight in the old way of sailing up broadside to an enemy and pounding away with everything. She’s been preserved as a museum ship because she won the most famous naval victory in Japanese history – she was Admiral Togo’s flagship at Tsushima (the island I sailed past last Friday), where the Japanese fleet had almost literally blown the Russians out of the water. So I was eager to see her.
I got to the Yokosuka train station at about 10:00 that morning. It was a bright, sunny day, absolutely gorgeous weather. Apart from the rainy day at Himeji, I had fantastic weather for the trip – I’m told it was unusually nice for the time of year, and that Japan isn’t always that nice. I walked a few blocks through the streets until I came to Mikasa park. There’s a big, grassy area, an open plaza. a statue of Admiral Togo, and, of course, the ship itself. She sits in a concrete drydock safely out of the water. I headed over to a little electronic ticket booth and got myself some museum tickets, poked my head into the giftshop (empty except for a pair of chattering employees, and nothing I particularly wanted to buy), then boarded the ship.
The upper decks are mostly preserved as they were, with an English audio tour available. I had the ship to myself, it seemed, and I wandered up the portside, past the main gundeck, looked in on the radio room, bridge, con tower, and eventually over to the starboard and down into the main decks. Below, the ship has been converted itno a museum on the Russo-Japanese war and the rise of the Japanese Empire. You see here a lot of the pro-Japanese bias you had in Hiroshima. Lots of Japan heroically defending Asia from Russian & Western encroachment, not so much on Japanese colonialism itself. But the museum is well-done, with lots of artifacts, great exhibits on the course of the war, the battle of Tsushima, and Mikasa’s career (short, since even as she fought Tsushima in 1905 Dreadnought was making her obsolete on the other side of the world), and even a collection of models of every ship in the Imperial Japanese Navy (which I would have freaked out about if I hadn’t seen the same thing at the Yamato museum a few days earlier). There’s even VR simulations of standing on the bridge of the battleship during the fighting against the Russians. Towards the stern, you can tour the officer’s mess and quarters, the captain’s cabin, and the admiral’s cabin. I was a bit disappointed that you couldn’t go into the engine room, magazine, or any of the turrets, however.
After a few hours of messing around, exploring the VR, playing with the fire director on the bridge, and walking around the park, I was ready to move on back to Tokyo. I tried to get back to the bus station without using Google Maps (which had been my lifeline in Japan since getting my Japanese SIM installed in Hakata – it tells you exactly which train to take and exactly which platform to be at, at what time). It was only a few blocks and I was sure I remembered the way. I did not remember the way. I got turned around several times, stumbled into hte gates of Yokosuka naval base once (the guard was American, so that was nice – actually Yokosuka has lots of Americans in the streets and lots of business had English signs, obviously catering to servicemen), and finally found myself in front of a streetside burrito truck. Well, it was near to noon at this point, and I hadn’t had lunch, so what the hell, I bought a chicken burrito. It was heavenly – like, unbelievably good. The tortilla was perfectly crisp and flaky, the chicken nice and hot, the seasoning perfect, the cheese perfect. I do believe that the best burrito I’ve ever had was from a food truck in Yokosuka, Japan.
After my burrito, I DID find the train station again, without using Maps, and headed back to Tokyo Station. From there, it was the short walk to the imperial palace.
The palace grounds are an enormous park in the heart of Tokyo. Most of the living quarters of the imperial family are closed to the public (naturally) except on special tours, and the majority of the compound is behind ancient moats and high walls, with guards on all the gates. But you can still walk around some of the gardens, notably the East Gardens. I joined hundreds of other tourists and explored. The gardens are large, and crowded (as always), but not as nice, I felt, as the Hiroshima city garden or the Himeji castle gardens. They’re grander in scale, but don’t have as many little nooks and crannies to hide in, no tranquil gardens with a little stream, waterfall, or pond in the center, or secluded little teahouses. Even the old imperial gardens in Kyoto felt more intimate than these. Lots to see and gawk at, and it took me hours to explore all of them, but honestly I preferred the earlier ones to the imperial gardens.
From there, I travelled to the nearby Akibahara District. Akibahara is a famous shopping district dedicated to anime – like a Mecca for anime fans. I’m not a huge anime fan, but I do like some shows and movies, so I thought I’d check it out. I emerged from the subway late in the afternoon, and walked a few blocks through the crowded streets. The first thing I noticed is was how…small…it was. Just a couple of city blocks – you can walk from one end to the other in minutes. There wasn’t a lot to tempt me, honestly – there were lots of shops selling merchandise, but it was all figurines and collectibles and other things I have no interest in. There were lots of girls dressed as anime maids or other characters trying to tempt me into cafes, or holding signs and waving them in the street, but I wasn’t really interested in that sort of thing, either. One news reporter did try to interview me for a story they were working on, until they learned I was American and not from a Commonwealth nation. On the whole, the entire place was kind of…lame. Oh, well, at least I can say I went.
As the sun started to dip towards the horizon, I wound back into the subway system and traveled the short journey to the Tokyo Tower. The Tower is a big orange Eiffel Tower-like construct in the heart of Tokyo, and I thought I’d explore it. I came out of the station a few blocks away, and I remember when I turned the corner onto the street the tower sits on – it’s enormous. You really have to crane your neck to see the top, and the sidewalk had like a dozen people all crouching down to try and take photos of the massive thing. I snapped my own, of course, and then walked over a short hill and then down onto the Tower grounds and into the lobby.
Once inside, you can buy a pass to the top, of course, which I did. I was herded with a group of about 10 tourists (a Japanese family, a Japanese couple, and a Peruvian family – we chatted a bit in Spanish, which was a welcome relief from Japanese) onto an elevator, which quickly jumped up a few thousand feet (it felt like) to the main deck, which has the gift shop, cafe, and whatnot. Then it was another shuffle around the tower to a second elevator, and another ride to the very top observation deck.
It was spectacular. The top deck itself is all polished mirrors and glass, with soft lighting steadily shifting between a variety of colors while dramatic music swells in the background. I arrived just as the sun was setting, and managed to get Mt. Fuji at sunset. We had been given special tablets which let us look out over the city while a nice-sounding man told us what we were looking at, which was basically all of Tokyo. The whole city lit up below me, and you could spot every major landmark – the Tokyo Dome, the parliament building, Tokyo Disney, Akibahara shopping district, Shinjuki Station, the scramble crossing, Tokyo Bay, you name it. There’s no earthly way for me to describe the experience with words, so I won’t even try. I spent I think more than hour up on the deck, just gazing at the city, which sprawled out below me. You could see the lights of tens of thousands of cars crawling around on the various streets and highways, the arteries of Tokyo. You could see the lights of hundreds of skyscrapers, each one of them tiny below you, but enormous if viewed from the ground. Eventually I mustered the will to travel back down to the main deck, where I just sat and stared into the city for a while. It was my last night in Japan, and I was feeling very sad. It had been an amazing trip – the best in my life, I think, because it was mine, and it was the greatest adventure I’d ever had – but all good things must come to an end. I knew, once I left the tower, it would be back to the hotel to sleep one last night. So I knew once I left this deck, I might never have this view again. I lingered.
Finally, I headed back to the elevator. On the way, I paused again and watched a lengthy video on the history of Tokyo and of the Tower, which was built to be a sign of hope and inspiration to the Japanese people as they rebuilt the city following its near total destruction in the war. Again, didn’t really mention how the war started. Ah, well. On a whim, I took the stairs down instead of the elevator – why rush? – and made my way through the cool nighttime air down 88 flights of steps back to the bottom. Still following my whims, I crossed the street to the Tower and found a fancy Italian restaurant. I felt a little awkward dining alone, but the wait staff said it was fine, so I settled into a table and treated myself on my last night in the country. I had some wonderful seafood pasta (crab), a gin and tonic, and nursed a cup of coffee while watching the dining room, which was lively with couples coming and going, mostly. The waitress and the host were very attentive to me, and made me feel welcome, even if I was somewhat scraggly and underdressed after a week living out of a backpack.
By 9:00, it was time to head home. I took the subway – the spaghetti mess of the map actually pretty easy for me to navigate by now – and a middle-aged Japanese woman actually sat next to me and talked to me. Japanese people never talk on public transit, and they certainly don’t talk to me, so I was pleasantly surprised! She had decent English, and wanted to make sure I was getting on all right in the country.
The ride was short (I never took the subway longer than a half hour, no matter where I was going. Compared to my 45-90 minute bus rides in Gwangju, it’s spectacularly efficient), and I staggered back to the hotel, pretty wore out. I don’t remember hardly anything of the walk back or of falling into bed there. Just one night to go.
Gwangju Dreaming 