turn the wheel
A friend of mine, another UO student who was at Waseda last year, recently got back from a 2-week Winter Break visit to Japan. While I don't necessarily agree with her reason for visiting (ask me how I feel about long distance relationships where the distance portion is longer than the "together" portion, I dare you), I am, needless to say, envious that she got to go.

She writes, I really had a great time--it was almost better than the first time I went. I guess I can nod to that. A visit to a nostalgic place is much different than living there, especially when the visit is yours to do with what you wish and not goverened by the iron hand of a diaobolical Host Mother. [I'm not speaking for myself here.]

This is where I was last year, on the 29th of December. You remember this, Chrissu?:

12/29/03: From on foot

I now realize just how simple it is to get anywhere in Tokyo... by walking. The trains make everything convenient but it's TOO convenient. Convenient enough that people forget you can walk from Shinjuku to Harajuku in about as much time as the train takes, really. Convenient enough that the perfectly capable adults in my host family consider the 10(ish)km across the Yamanote circle from Harajuku station to Tokyo station to be a bloody far distance to walk. That, folks, is a little over five miles on a flat, paved surface. In Glacier I've done 10 mile days with over 2000 feet of elevation gain on treacherous rock and skree. And my host parents were yet more impressed with my youthful abilities when today I completed the very simple feat described above.

I won't bore you with the tedious details, save to say I had good company and saw many fabulous things. (Including a rare shrine to cats, a store in Harajuku called Cowpoo, about fifty mysterious and hidden bits of the past, and several free Sony PS2 gaming centers.) The walk ended after dark in the most crowded and teeming place I've ever been-- the Millenario lights show in Otemachi. Strangely and symbolically, Chris and I entered at the wrong end and went the whole way against a tide of literally thousands of people thronging to see beautiful but quite boring displays of lights. We walked on a sidewalk roped off for free pedestrian traffic and watched the masses crowd the streets, pushed like cattle from one end of a corral to the other, hardly watching their surroundings (much less enjoying them) and at all times assaulted by needless and obnoxiously loud instructions via megaphone. It was depressingly Japanese. People here will queue for anything, even if they don't enjoy it. When the new Apple store opened in Ginza (admittedly, the first of its kind in Japan), people queued the day before and thousands were in line the morning of the opening... even though SCARCELY any Japanese use Macintosh computers. Can't say I'm sad I missed that one.

I feel I am much more in charge of the city now. There is a lightness in my heart resulting from the walk. That, coupled with the long-awaited arrival of my USA Christmas package and the purchase of a brand-new winter coat (yay! sale!) made today a VERY good day. Soon, (oh yes, very soon) I will attempt a walk from the FAR SOUTHERNMOST station of the Yamanote circle to the NORTHERNMOST station... a total of *gasp* almost TEN MILES. It will take a while, surely, as the major roads jump about a bit. But with a compass pointing due north, no map is needed. And then I will have mastered this city for I alone shall be captain and steward of all the lands between the ocean and sea from the far north country to the western hills and I... eherm... sorry, been reading Tolkein.