Teri's NZ Adventures

Japan Week 3 Part 2

Author: Teri

Okay, where was I? Right.
So Thursday was the last day of my trip that I went into Tokyo. I got up bright and early to get the to Tsukiji fish market. The guidebooks tell you to go for 6 am as that’s when the fish auctions are. Unfortunately, the train wasn’t able to get me there from Yokosuka before 7:30. I learned from the brochure at the entrance that foreigners aren’t appreciated in the auction area anyway, but I was still disappointed.
The market itself, however, has quite enough to see. You could buy every kind of sea creature you can think of in this market. They just had them sitting out in bins. The tuna were larger than me and frozen (I learned later that freezing them is standard practice to kill a number of bacteria so they can be eaten raw). Some of the crabs were seasoned and alive. There were bandsaws with buckets under them containing fish heads the size of dinner plates. There were flounders and sea cucumbers and some really ugly spiny fish that I would not want to prepare. Octopus, squid, all sorts of shellfish, 2 foot long lobster and king crab the size of my torso, roe of all sizes, fish the size of my thumbnail sold in bulk and a number of things so strange I can’t even describe them.
The locals travel around the market on these bumper-boat like scooters that take up the whole width of the aisle. In other parts of the market, you can buy bulk quantities of fruit and prepared goods. Unfortunately, the prepared goods were all being sold in mass quantity. I had been planning on sushi for breakfast, but I didn’t want a whole sushi boat full of unrecognizable items. Mostly I just wanted some tuna maki. No such luck. I grabbed some onigiri from a vendor and ended up with no fish in either. At least they weren’t salmon or raw squid or something.

Leaving the fish market, I headed up to the bay area of Rinkai. Here they had an aquarium with fish from all over the world, sharks, rays, crabs, lobster, penguins, tidal pools and eels. The bluefin tuna looked bigger dead. The penguins were adorable. They also had these adorable things called mudhoppers, which looked like tadpoles but could fling themselves impressive distances by folding their tails under them and pushing off.
The aquarium was full of screaming elementary school students, so I was glad to get out of there. Grabbed a few collectable stamps on my way out and tried (without success) to take a picture of Tokyo Disney across the water.
Despite the rain at my departure, I decided to turn down the island instead of heading straight back to the train station, and I found a lookout point with a large amount of information about how that area of Tokyo had once had a wall built between it and the bay for tsunami protection and it had become a slum, so in the 80s, they took the wall down and designed the island as a conservation area, which improved the city. I also took some nice pictures, but they’re a little grey due to the drizzle. Incidentally, this island also had a ferris wheel that wasn’t running due to inclement weather.
It was around 1 when I went to leave the island, but this restaurant right by the train station had 10 dumplings for 200 Y, which is a steal of a deal, so I went in. They have this thing at some restaurants in Japan where you pay for your order using a vending-machine like device at the front door that spits out chits with your order on it. I had avoided them before because they were all written in Japanese and it seemed dubious that I’d be able to figure them out. However, I really wanted those dumplings, so I memorized the kanji, went in, put some coins in the machine and pushed the button. Once I had a chit, I stared blankly at the restaurant, not sure if I was supposed to sit down or deliver my chit first. A nice waitress (who I’m sure was entertained greatly) led me to a seat, took my chit and gave me some water, returning with the dumplings later. Success!

At this point it was early afternoon still, but was drizzling again so none of my outdoor activities were available to me. I pulled out my handy museum guide and flipped through it to figure out whic one to go to. I settled on a museum where they had reconstructed a street from the Edo era (early 1900s) inside the building. A demure English guide, who was kind but not as outgoing as our wonderful guide at the Edo-Tokyo museum, took me through a sandal-maker’s shop, a candy store, a residence, a bachelor pad attached to a metal working shop, a family home and a shrine. I got to pull a stick from the box like in anime and look up my fortune, which they had translated into English. It told me to get a career in soils … ?
I played with some Japanese elementary school toys, which were different in form, but similar in concept to many North American toys of the same generation.

I stepped out of the museum and couldn’t decide what to do, so I wandered through the much-reduced drizzle for a while, finding a couple more temples, a playground, a woman feeding some stray cats and some potlights in front of a garden that looked mytical with the rain steaming off of them. I went through a giant toy store and thought about going to yet another museum, but decided to head back instead.

In the following couple days, I put my suitcases back together, bought a couple more souvenirs, sent a Christmas parcel home, finished a book in a Starbucks, sipping an American coffee with a Japanese twist and watching the outfits on the people going by, went to a slightly more traditional Japanese restuarant, where I finally found some sushi I wanted to order, bought a bunch of snacks at the grocery that looked unique but edible and all of which ended up containing red bean, tried the local beer and chu-his from a street vendor (the chu-his were not good), watched some local kids perform hip hop in the mall and said my goodbyes.

The train ride from Yokosuka to the airport was long (almost 3 hours). For the first half of it, the half I had seen a lot of from my back and forth trips into Tokyo, I watched an episode of Glee. It took the whole time since I had to keep pausing to wait for the trian noise to quiet down. The second half of the trip was quite enjoyable though as we passed by things I hadn’t seen before, including rice fields, livestock farms and beautiful shrines.

Now it is time to get up here in New Zealand and make a plan for myself. I hope you’re all doing well.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 30th, 2009 at 5:32 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.