Another Giant City

I do some exploring while on my own my first couple of days in Tokyo, but I'm still not back to 100 percent, and I find that after two or three hours of walking around I'm ready to go back to the hostel and relax or take a nap. But I manage to see some nice temples in Asakusa, the old neighborhood where my hostel is located, and stomach a bit of tempura at a famous nearby restaurant, where I'm seated with a couple of American businessmen who kindly tell me that "konichiwa" does not mean "thank you" (*slaps forehead*). I see a couple of very nice parks and gardens, and a couple of great acrobatic performances in Ueno Park, and visit a couple of hip hop shops in the busy and popular area of Shibuya. And I stop by the Tokyo Dome and get the scoop on a boxing match the following weekend: I had wanted to catch a Daisuke Naito fight--he's one of my favorite current fighters to watch and according to the mother of one of my mom's former students (I met the two of them for a very nice visit to the Edo-Tokyo museum a couple of days later) he's also "very nice"--but the fighters who were fighting looked to be pretty good as well. ___________________________________________________ Meanwhile, I spend almost no time exploring the Tokyo nightlife. There was an R&B night that I wanted to check out at a club in Shibuya called "Harlem", but again, my body was telling me to go easy, so I spend most of my nights hanging out at the hostel and going to sleep early. I meet a couple interesting people, including a Swedish girl who is planning to take the Trans-Siberian rail back home and already has her next flight booked for Easter Island (I never went too long feeling especially adventurous on my trip), and spend plenty of time in my bed, a wooden box that sort of felt like a big coffin, but I guess afforded some decent privacy. The one time I do a little walking around at night, it's too early to see anything too exciting, although I guess it was sort of interesting getting accosted by a woman outside of a "massage parlor" who grabbed a tight hold of my arm while urgently whispering "Seckesa! Seckesa!" before I freed myself from her grip. ___________________________________________________ My proper visit to Tokyo really starts when I met Akiko in Shimo-Kitazawa, the place where she grew up and lives now, on an uncharacteristically warm day. It's a quirky, artsy neighborhood--the type of place where on Valentine's Day, you could walk out of a restaurant and find four nerdy guys on a mat at the intersection yelling to the passing girls (as translated to me) "We want chocolate! Give us chocolate!" Unfortunately, like in many of the most interesting neighborhoods in the US, a real estate and development crunch is not being kind to current members of the community, but for now, it definitely seems to be maintaining its character. We walk through these great little commercial streets and then along one residential street with a stream running down it (the urban planner bells in my head were ringing loudly) to a park where there is a small festival celebrating the plum blossoms, and then stop for a while at an empty little garden set up next to the park, and then walk back through a few other residential streets with beautiful homes and yards until we find a nice cafe, where I satisfy a long-held craving for pizza. It was sort of a perfect little tour, and it made me wonder what I missed out on by not having friends in places like Hanoi and Guangzhou. We finish by visiting the 25th floor of a nearby building called the Carrot Building, where there is a big lounge with these amazing views of the lights of Tokyo, going off endlessly in every direction. Akiko says it's a place she's always been able to go when she's needed to wind down, and I could see why.