The Fabulous Life of Ponteuf

Anyone Wanna See Japan?

Photos are posted. Beware the Inari, he's known to possess humans by climbing under their fingernails. Give him an offering of sweet sushi and sake, please.

(Art)ifice and Aesthetic

Japan is not pretty. There’s really no other way to put this, but it is true. Tokyo is downright ugly as a city, and Kyoto isn’t much better. The cities and towns that we flew through on the Shinkansen didn’t have any noticeable charm, and with the exception of a few blue fish scale style roofs, all the buildings carried some tonal quality of gray. The landscape might have been nice, but it was hard to see beneath the sprawl and telephone lines and industrial plants. We did pass a patch of rice fields between the airport in Narita and Tokyo – the bright spring of the rice plants, spindly against cocoa soil, was a cultivated contrast to the thick forested slopes of dark green and black that rimmed the small fields. This was pretty, an encouragement to slip away from the cities next time and head to the most remote area we can reach without speaking Japanese – I do think that the islands have a beauty of their own, but with some 70% of the population clustered around the main corridor (through which we admittedly traveled) it isn’t easy to spot.

None of this is to say that the Japanese aesthetic isn’t exquisite, I’d venture to say the most refined I’ve ever encountered. They’ve made an art of simplification, stripping down all excess until the essential core of an item is reached. Perhaps this is why the buildings have no style and are nothing more than concrete boxes – they fulfill their function in that way, and no additional decoration is considered necessary. I’d prefer to think that, honestly, than to just consider them ugly postwar shells, but either way I have no doubt that the interiors are perfect, spare without being empty, quiet and calm.

There was an ikebana show at the swanky department store in Kyoto yesterday; in the midst of shopping mania, impeccably dressed older women in suits and heels lined up to view the creations, some carrying their own, carefully wrapped in patterned paper, for entry into a judged show. Often no more than a few twigs and blooms, ikebana is emblematic of the pared down aesthetic that rules in this obsessively private and formal culture. At first glance, it appears both casually arranged and too simple to be worth any time, but if I force myself to look deeper, I see that every bit of every twig has been maneuvered and set just so, every blossom turned the most pleasing way, and I understand the care taken with small things, the immense attention to detail that could slip by unnoticed. The gardens take this to a new level; once I pushed past the (American?) need to categorize, label and move on, I found the gardens to be endlessly fascinating. I could have spent hours gazing out over a lily pad pond, hearing but only glimpsing the cleverly hidden waterfall at the back and watching the lazy movement of the koi.

If shopping is the national mania (and there’s plenty to suggest that it is), the packaging of the goods takes the aesthetic sense to a new level. Each item is carefully wrapped, sometimes twice, before going into a bag. Often a gift card or other trinket is carefully laid in the bag as well and the entire thing will always be sealed shut with a bit of tape or a fancy sticker before it is handed over ceremoniously. We bought four perfect cookies from a very high end shop in Kyoto. Each was wrapped in its own individual cello-bag and taped shut before going, in color coordinated order, into a longer bag and finally into a tissue lined carrier bag with a small ice pack. Four cookies cost us 720 Yen, and I’m fairly sure that at least half of that cost went to support the packaging and the close to ten minutes it took to wrap those poor cookies up. In each individual plastic package of the small cakes we bought in the Tokyo station we found a small package of silica gel as well.

Food, especially sweet or specialty food, is always sold in large packages, ready for gift giving and wrapped two to three times, and any purchase triggers the question “is it for a gift?” The wrapping isn’t less beautiful if you say no, but it may only be three layers instead of four, and almost always indicates a different sticker on the package. Paying is a ritual in itself – money is handed back and forth with both hands, if it is touched at all – often it is laid (with both hands) into a tray lined with nubbly plastic and moved between the cashier and the purchaser without obvious contact. This small transaction is emblematic of the rituals that seem to surround all contact in Japan: extremely formal and rigid, and polite to a fault. I’ve learned to not take my money and turn away until both the cashier and I have completed two rounds of domo arigato, gozaimas and bows. If I do, I feel odd and the cashier looks confused.

It’s necessary to plan for twice as much time as you think you need for any transaction as the pleasantries surrounding even a ticket purchase are long. We asked the Conrad concierge to make us a dinner reservation one night – he and the restaurant had a ten minute conversation before we got to the essence of the situation and he explained that the tatami room was full, could we sit at a table? Manners here take formal beyond polite and into the realm of totally artificial, at least to the outsider, and there is an extreme reluctance to impose yourself on anyone else in any way. In stores, there is always an apology for the time it has taken to package your purchase appropriately, but the understanding is that simply does take that long and the apology is for politeness, just as the acceptance is. 

People here looked at Ponteuf longingly, but we had to approach them before they would talk to us. Once we did there was often lots of giggling and apologies for perfect English, but we rarely had anyone approach us. A candy store owner did, once, very embarrassed. When I left her store she asked if she could one more time, squeeze the armadillo. It isn’t that I find the people cold – they’re not, and more than once we had people offer help or directions, or gentle instruction at a meal – but they are so private that it is hard to see beyond the public mask they all wear. As a brash American, it is hard for me to understand this insular culture, and I attribute some of it to the necessary development of inner life when living in close quarters on a bit of land separated from the rest of the world by cold water. Things are done a particular way here, and always have been: that rigidity is still evident.

While I love the gardens, and I enjoy the temples and shrines (shrines, less formal and more quirky, are always more fun to visit), the “fine arts” of sculpture and painting leave me cold, and I attribute some of that to the rigidity of everything. Artists are never discussed for their talent, only for their skill – the artistic forms are learned. Looking at paintings in Himeji Castle, I had a hard time figuring out which were old and which were recent, so unchanging (to the untrained eye) has been the style. I read once that Western art tells you something while Asian art lures you in, but I’ve yet to be lured by the painting and squat sculptures as I have by the arching bridges and towering red tori.

The aesthetic and the artifice of the culture come together, for me, in a giant big bang when people watching. The men aren’t as interesting as the women - they fall into two categories: salaryman (in rumpled but beautifully cut suit) or effeminate hipster with spiked hair, lazy eyes and very expensive ripped jeans. No, it is the women that fascinate me. The schoolgirls in their perfect uniforms, penny loafers and scrunched down socks, pony tails and pleated skirts – they’re appealingly fresh faced and wholesome. Cute, not a word that I normally find descriptive, works extremely well. Out of uniform, the women seem to fall into three categories, though like the ikebana, there are millions of shades of subtlety within those brackets. Not shades of color, though. Women here wear black, gray, dark brown … or pale pink. The odd blue or taupe floats by, but for the most part, the palette is limited.

The most noticeable are the goth girls, wearing Gloomy Bear and layers of ripped clothes, spiky hair and high heels. On the other end of the spectrum are the girlie girls, silk roses in their hair, crystal necklaces, velvet belts and lace handbags and ribbons around the tops of knee high socks that almost reach pale pink pleated chiffon skirts. The middle range are the glamorous ones, some looking like a slightly young, slightly overdone Jackie O (would she really have worn six strands of pearls?) but still stunning in clothes that clearly cost more than I make in a month. Others in this category are mod, hip glamour, all high heeled boots with Burberry shorts. Rip a page from Glamour or Vogue, add one more accessory, and you’ve got 70% of Tokyo women. Slouchy cowboy boots with pink roses and glitter tassels, paired with shorts and a silk shirt? Tottering high heels with knee socks? If it exists in some high end store, there’s a woman in Tokyo wearing it with something it was never meant to go with – and yet, they pull it off. Maybe all the excess is a release from the severe aesthetic of formal Japan, a freedom from the manners and the rules and the tight sash of the obi – or maybe it is just another mask, another way of making it in a rigid world. We tend to think of dress as personal expression, but maybe in Japan it, like so many other things that Westerners see as personal, doesn’t reach to the real inner self. Artifice, aesthetic – regardless of what any of what I saw actually means, if it means anything at all, it forms a fascinating portrait of a country that may be unknowable, but that I’d like to keep meeting.

Taking Fresh to a Whole New Level

On our first night in Tokyo, we got stupidly lucky. I really didn’t want to leave the Conrad – there was a spa, and room service, and the only Gordon Ramsay restaurant in Asia, and I wanted to stay put. We’d considered going to Disneyland for a few hours, but by the time we got out the door it was clear that we’d spend most of our time in transit, so we decided (or rather Mike decided, and I acquiesced because I knew that I’d later regret staying in) to find dinner and check out Shibuya before succumbing to the bed.

I actually took a guidebook to Tokyo with us, albeit a small, Lonely Planet city guide, but it worked well enough and it listed an Izakaya place under the train tracks that was run by a native English speaker. We knew izakaya, having eaten and loved it in Vancouver one cold Friday night, but we weren’t sure how far we would get with a menu of Japanese bar food without a translation, so the English speaker seemed like a good choice. Of course, the book failed to mention that the Romaji name, Shin Hi No Moto, would not be posted and also failed to give the name in Kanji (bad Lonely Planet) so we walked up and down a strip of what looked like seedy bars for a while before asking a woman in an open shop. Luckily for us, doko is where in Japanese, so it was easy to remember for its similarity to dove in Italian and she walked us down the street to a square of light on the sidewalk flanked with Guinness signs. Ah ha.

Climbing the few steps up, we spotted a white guy, and so knew we were in the right spot. He only had seats at the bar, which became ours for the duration of our time in Tokyo, and in those seats we learned more about sashimi, simple Japanese food and Shochu than we’d ever thought possible. I don’t know if we looked like someone else, or if he’s just kind to hungry travelers, but Andy took us under his wing and fed us. By the last night, I said “sashimi” and he picked out what I ate, which is the best way, I’m convinced, to eat anything new. The food we ate may not translate on paper to anything special, but the simplicity of the preparation, the straightforward sauces and garnishes and the sheer freshness of the fish made everything memorable. Simple salt grilled fish tasted sweet, with the tiniest hint of brine. Tempura’d everything was ethereal, but the lotus root might have been the best, all nutty and firm underneath a cloud of batter. Squid innards doused with sake and baked in tinfoil reminded me of sucking the head on crawfish, but the miso grilled cod stole the show. Buttery and rich, it melted on the tongue – sweet, sour and salty all at once. It takes three days of marinating to reach that stage of perfection, and it isn’t a taste I’ll soon forget.

The first night, we started with sake, but a few inquiries got us a great lesson in shochu. Distilled spirits of rice, wheat or sweet potato, shochu can be drunk straight on the rocks or cut with various sodas or juices. We tried it one night with fresh grapefruit – we were given a bottle of soda water, a grapefruit cut in half and a juicer, and it was good. Good also was the kumquat shochu he had us try, though alcoholics that we are, we both liked the straight stuff. Similar to schnapps, it’s a bracing swallow, and the moment before the flavor hits is reminiscent of the nasty stuff that goes into punch in college, but if you can survive past the shudder, the mellow grape-nut essence of the wheat or the sweetness of the rice comes through. On a more accessible but no less wonderful note was the Cassis and Oolong blend that we drank like water. That’s a drink we’ll be incorporating into our repertoire.

The sashimi, though – I’d wanted to have one very expensive, very good sushi meal in Tokyo, and we had one quite expensive quite good one, but riding in the cab from there back to Andy’s for a nightcap of shochu (and, as it turned out, more sashimi) Mike and I decided that although it was good, it didn’t blow us away. At home, a sushi meal usually has a highlight or two, and the rest of the fish becomes filler. Here, all the fish was as good or better as the highlights at home, and we discovered the pleasures of sardine and different kinds of mackerel. We like that cheap oily fish – it walks a fine line between great and foul, and that excitement is what keeps me coming back to it. At Andy’s, though, sashimi reigns, and the whole fish that came to us on a plate, sashimi artfully arranged along its middle, blew any of the carefully constructed sushi we’d had at the restaurant out of the water.

Stick to the sashimi, Andy told us, and from then on we did. I would at home, too, except there you’re penalized for wanting just the fish, thanks, and nothing but the fish. In Japan, the sashimi is slightly cheaper, a nod to the cost and skill of the sushi chef, the opposite of at home where the cheaper rice lowers the cost of nigiri.

Andy and his chef got a kick out of just how many orders of Budi we placed (this is the king of yellowtail, and one bite will make you forget any hamachi you’ve ever eaten – buttery, rich and almost steak-like, it surpasses any other fish I’ve tried) and I think as a reward for our enthusiasm, Andy invited us to go with him to the Tsukiji market on Friday morning, fish shopping. We like any kind of behind the scenes tour, but this was seriously exciting – Tsukiji is the king of all fish markets, its own city within a city and the hallowed halls of multi thousand dollar tunas. Going with an insider was the best, and icing the cupcake was the fact that he wanted to go at 10am rather than the ungodly 6 called for by Lonely Planet.

How to describe Tsukiji? Pronouced “Skee-Gee,” it takes up a giant portion of the city, a sprawling warehouse of crates and trucks and people and quick little freight loaders that have the right of way. Oh, and fish. Fish like I’ve never, ever seen before. Andy told us that after twenty years, he’s still seeing fish turn up that he doesn’t recognize. The market operates by its own rules, on its own schedule. The fishing boats come in early morning – controlled by only four companies. The catch is sold at auction in the giant sheds that run along the back of the complex – the buyers are the stall holders within the market itself. These middlemen then resell the fish to the restaurant buyers until about 10 or 11 (we were the last of the bunch) and then finally to the supermarkets.

We walked through a maze of aisles and rows, so close to the dripping of melting ice and fish that we had to turn sideways to squeeze through. The floor was wet, the people were wet – and yet, there was no smell of fish in the air. Trays of pinkish red octopi, perfect curled flowers on ice. Whole stands selling nothing but shellfish, scallops still in their fluted white homes, mussels the side of my outstretched hand, spiral shells with funny yellow feelers peeking out the bottoms. One store sold only oysters, one only eel. Scattered here and there were shops that looked curiously empty, save for a lone lump of scarlet fish. Tuna sellers, Andy said.

I’ve never seen such a wide variety of shrimp – from tiny little things to prawns as long as my forearm. I asked about the difference and what it was used for, and Andy plucked one slightly wriggling thing from a barrel and wrenched off its feeler end, handing me the blue and green and turquoise tail, a feathered handle for a curl of pearlescent meat. “Sashimi,” he said, grinning. “Can you handle it?” Soft and slightly sticky and so sweet it tasted like sugar – yes, this I could handle. Talking about uni got us a similar response. I mentioned that I’d had it once when it was semi-sweet and Andy grimaced. “Sugar,” he said. “It should always be like sugar.” Again, this taste was like sugar, covering that off rot taste I’ve found in uni before and converting me from someone who thought sea urchin was foul to someone who would eat it again.

One of his vendors gave us hot canned coffee, another sweets. Everywhere we went we watched Andy inspect the fish, poke and prod at it. We learned the difference between farmed and wild, saw proof that a fresh fish has red gills and clear eyes, wished we could take all of it home. Andy bought four or five trays of an odd, milk white substance, looking like little globules of fat or partially melted ice cream. Shiroco. We had no idea, and he told Mike it was a good thing he hadn’t had it the night before, or he would have served it to him, a taste, he said, of your own medicine. Popular among the Japanese men and with a reputation for “putting lead in your pencil” we were looking at cod sperm sacs. Oddly, we did eat it in Kyoto – a ball of it came on our tempura plate. Not horrible, not exciting, but certainly one for the odd food lists.

Beyond the sheer size of the market and the fun of being there, I think what left the biggest impression on us both was the freshness. A tray of scallops were presented for Andy’s inspection. He flicked them, and they recoiled, twitching. Two pieces of octopus arm lay on a bed of ice. The vendor came over and knocked one with his knuckles and the arm reared up and flipped to the side. Keep in mind that it was in no way attached to the actual octopus! My favorite was the squid. Lying side by side in a Styrofoam tray smudged with their ink, the squid were a dull grayish white, speckled with darker dots. When Andy ran a finger down them, the dots moved and changed position, sparking to life in pricks of green and blue, looking for all the world like fiber optic toys. This was fresh, and the only drawback to it all was the sad knowledge that to be that close to such perfect seafood again, I’d need to fly back to Japan. I just don’t think Whole Foods is going to like it when I flick their scallops.

If there was any doubt at all about the quality of the fish leaving Tsukiji, it was eliminated at lunch. Just a stone’s throw from the giant market shed is a tiny restaurant row. We squeezed into a little sushi place with barely enough room for a counter and 10 seats and three menu items: sushi plate 1, sushi plate 2 and sashimi plate. Heeding Andy’s advice we each ordered the sashimi and descended into sheer gustatory bliss. That was my perfect Japanese meal, and it has been duly entered into the annals as one of the top meals of my life. Thanks to a bit of dumb luck, and thanks to Andy, we took home a priceless souvenir of Tokyo. We will go back to reclaim our seats at his bar and let him feed us again!

Healthy Snacks and Tasty Treats?

Before coming here, I had bought into the widespread notion that Japanese food is extremely good for you. Rice, fish, soba noodles – no wonder the Japanese are so trim and fit! Their entire diet is tasty health food, they don’t even have to try. Um, think again. Yes, the soba noodles (served warm or cold) are good for you. Made of buckwheat flour, they have an understated, slightly nutty flavor and tend to be served more or less plain, in a simple broth with a soy based sauce. When I ordered soba with duck, I had three thin slices laid across the top of the noodles; Mike’s shrimp soba had a few scattered bits of crustacean. Sashimi and sushi also fall into the healthy category – but they aren’t cheap, and they aren’t for every day; our sashimi lunch at a hole in the wall counter was 6,000 Yen. Today I bought pseudo cheap sashimi at a Bento box stand in the train station – they listed the calories for each bento – 530, 480. Sushi? It’ll do as diet food.

The rest of it, though? I’ve never eaten so many things glistening in oil, fried to a crisp, dripping with fat. Japanese food, healthy? I’m not sure who perpetrated that untruth, but either they had a serious agenda, or they’d never actually eaten in Japan. All over Kyoto we saw stands for Tako balls. The cook starts with a large metal tray with a 6x6 pattern of golf ball sized half spheres, coated in oil. Into those he pours an egg-y batter that cooks up into something like custard, then drops in bits of chopped octopus and green onion. This cooks, open faced, for ten minutes or so until he flicks the sides over and turns the whole mess with long wire tongs. Suddenly a sheet of 36 gleaming fried globes appears, glistening with oil. The smallest order is six, drenched in a sweet sauce, mayonnaise and more onions, plus dried bonito flakes. We could barely finish an order between us – the locals were eating trays of 8 and 10 each, and the stands were always behind.

Everything comes fried. Tempura is the easy example, but fish, vegetables, noodles – even that staple of healthy dining, tofu, comes to the table crispy on the edges and coated with grease. In the markets there are stands selling tofu that’s been mixed with savory things: shrimp, pork, octopus, veggies – then shaped into rectangles, skewered and fried – then basted with oil over a grill until you buy it, where it will deform and slip grease down your wrist unless you eat it quickly enough.

Last night we ate at a yakitori place. Grilled meat on a stick, what could possibly go wrong in the health department there? When the pork, before grilling, looked like a thick cut cube of fatty bacon, we knew that this, like most of our Japanese meals, wasn’t going to be heart healthy. Bacon wrapped around cheese and grilled? Chicken soaked in mayo, then topped with more before serving? The deep and round sound of the fryer, sitting in the corner of the bar, drowned out the light sizzle of the charcoal grill, the sweet smells of which were similarly obliterated by the pervasive cigarette smoke. After restaurants here and in China, I feel like I’ve smoked a few packs. Maybe we should have stuck with ramen… or maybe not, as ramen is one of the fattiest dishes served. The surface of the soup is covered in lily pads of grease…

I was nervous about eating in China – I’ve had so much awful Chinese food at home, and I made the mistake of thinking it was representative. Thankfully, it wasn’t, and I liked everything I ate in the Middle Kingdom, from the dumplings and bitter tastes of the north to the heat of Sichuan and the sweet, layered flavors of Shanghai. I was expecting to like Japanese food far better, but in reality my reactions were mixed. The raw fish, of course, made me happy, as did the noodle dishes and the Izakaya (Japanese pub food, which encompasses a whole range of things). But the breakfasts…

Japanese cooking makes ample use of a fifth “taste” in addition to our salty, sweet, bitter and sour. I’ve forgotten the name of it, but I think of it as brown, and when it begins to overpower a dish, I lose some of my sense of culinary adventure and look for the rice. I think it ranges somewhere between the bitter, sour and salty, and it seems to be paired with pickled things. Breakfast at our ryokan was composed mainly of pickles. Pickles of what, I’m not sure, but the tray, beautifully arranged with probably twenty small bowls, could be reduced to three words: rice, tofu and pickles. Poor Mike looked miserable – while I actually liked the poached tofu in a sweet brown sauce, he moved on to the orange slices pretty quickly and then looked at me with an expression that clearly said “why didn’t you let me go to McDonalds?”

And then there are the desserts. They look magnificent. Imagine the nicest French pastry shop you’ve ever seen, then pare things down to that elemental Japanese simplicity and add a few maple leaves and gold bits as garnish. They are as dear as they look, too, and a few treats can easily relieve you of most of your pocket money. Most of the treats are foreign looking – powdered, rolled, gellied  - these are not chocolate coins and éclairs. We’ve collected quite a few from different shops; anywhere that will sell us one or two pieces actually, since most are packaged for gift giving in large boxes that start at 1000 Yen and go up from there. We’re wary of buying in bulk, for one simple reason: the azuki bean.

Yes, a humble bean has us nervous. Why? Because almost all sweets here are based on it, and it is a tricky customer. Standing at a stall yesterday in the market, we were given descriptions of an entire store’s selection of sweets. Filled with red azuki paste. Topped with azuki. Flavored with azuki. Oh, this one is different – white bean paste. Yes, very special. It isn’t that azuki is bad, really – if you’ve ever had sweet dim sum, or a dessert at Chinese New Year, you’ve had azuki – but it doesn’t transmute. It is mildly sweet, mildly bean-ish and a little grainy on the tongue – always. So the wide variety of candies and treats, while they all look different, all taste more or less the same. The only difference lies in whether or not the amount of sugar will make you cringe, shudder or just cut to the chase and make your teeth fuzzy. Never let it be said that Japanese candy isn’t sweet!

We’ve found a few things we really liked: a blueberry flavored mochi ball with enough blueberry that only the grainy-ness of the azuki was left, some beautiful macaroon type cookies in subtle pastels but intense flavors, a hard candy flavored like sakura (cherry blossom) – no azuki in those last two. Mike’s not too excited about the mochi, either – it always comes dusted with rice flour to keep it from sticking and he thinks it has all the charm of a powdered rubber glove. Part of the problem is that presentation is everything here, and all the food (even the plastic) looks tasty. Some places the food looks terrible but tastes great – in Japan, nothing will ever, ever look terrible – but the taste may be, to put it kindly, for the more specialized palate than ours. Buyer beware.

This One’s for Dana

Fly half way around the world, and how would you spend your first full day in a new place? Museums? Shopping? Sleeping? (That last was pretty appealing…) No, we went to Disneyland - Tokyo Disneyland and DisneySea, to be more exact. Now before the non-Disney lovers of the bunch completely tune me out, these were both beautiful parks. If Disney does everything perfectly, Disney + Japan takes it to a new level completely. And people watching was almost as much fun as the parks themselves…

We made good use of the After 6 pass for Disneyland, spending our daylight hours at DisneySea and only wandering over to the facsimile of the original in the evening. I suppose that it wasn’t so necessary, really (it was a lot more like Disneyland than any of the other Disney parks) but at half price… DisneySea was celebrating its 5 year anniversary, so the park was decorated for that as well as for Christmas, complete with brass band playing carols, bunting of ornaments and overly bedecked trees. For a five year old park (just a smidge older than California Adventure) it was amazingly developed, and a clear sign of just what the Disney company can produce when money is actually applied to what the Imagineers design.

The theme is (duh) the oceans or waterways of the world, and rather than the hub and spoke design of Disneyland with a castle at the heart, DisneySea’s lands lead into each other, but don’t all relate back, directly, to the center. The entrance plaza leads into Italy – the most expensive hotel of the entire Disney Resort Complex is here, and it looks like a giant villa, stretching in an arc around the central water feature, the Mediterranean Seas (note the plural) or something similar. Walk through the arcade filled with shops and you’re deposited in front of a shining body of water with an Arabian castle on the far shore and a giant volcano rising up behind it. To one side is the “Ponte Vecchio,” gondolas plying the water beneath it which eventually leads to the liner Colombia, docked and ready for sail in the Old New York quarter. To the other, a steamship dock sits just down the hill from an old Roman aqueduct. The large open space where you’re standing is an Italian piazza, broadened and filled with characters and excited Japanese in outrageous clothes and ornate Mickey hats. I saw a woman in a kimono go past and had to look hard to make sure she wasn’t wearing a nametag. (She wasn’t).

If you walk towards the aqueduct, you’ll pass little shopping alleys that look like they’ve been transplanted from Tuscan hill towns, pass the gardens and aforementioned aqueduct and then curve into the volcano which has been smoking and belching flames the entire time. Incidentally, being in Disney Italy after spending so much time there recently was a real double take experience, but it did give us good reference to notice just what a good job they’d done. Inside the crater is another lake and equipment belonging to Jules Verne. Two rides live here, one a pseudo roller coaster that takes you to the center of the earth (on a track, Disney fans, that is suspiciously like the defunct Rocket Rods) and the other a dark ride under the ocean that mixes the effects of the submarines with a lot better technology. Pass through this retro-futuristic world of exploration and end up in the real futuristic exploration of Port Discovery. Here you can “control a storm” and ride the Aquatopia, some bizarre (but fun) cross between bumper cars, autopia and boats, controlled by lights and bar codes under the ride cars and worth three repeat rides for us. If you look out to the actual sea from here, you’ll see that Disney must have an amazing insurance policy in this land of typhoons: all the water in the park is seawater and opens to Tokyo Bay via giant and very futuristic sea doors.

If you turn back towards the park entrance here you’ll walk through a wooded area and come to a lighthouse. Look left and you’re in the picture perfect Cape Cod village. It isn’t my side of the country, but it was interesting to see the perfection + Japanese image of coastal America all built out with Olde Tyme Stores and ice cream parlors and, oddest of all, Santa. More odd than Santa, though, was the long line of Japanese adults lined up to have their photo taken on his lap, fingers up in that perpetual Japanese photo peace sign. Santa was a white guy, and he waved at us longingly as we passed by – I swear his expression was code for “get me out of here!” Follow the line and the path and you’ll eventually loop back into old New York where the Tower of Terror, NYC themed, lines up the thrill seekers and the shops of Manhattan suck in everyone else.

Turn the other way, instead, and you’ll end up in Rio Perdido, Indiana Jones adventure area complete with a ride very similar to ours and a wimpy little roller coaster, plus lots of Mexico/South-central America theming and restaurants. This was funny to us, since Mexico doesn’t seem very exotic when you live next to it, but someone must have decided that it would work better for the Japanese than South East Asia as an undiscovered country. The roller coaster, incidentally, has a loop, and all the signs make much of this, warning guests what will happen. We had to use lockers for our small camera bag and they were very worried about my Mickey Ear barrettes.

In the farthest corner of the park was an Arabian themed zone with a Sinbad’s Voyages ride that we assume was Pirates-compatible (it was under refurb), a two story carousel, theatres, shopping, eating. On a map it didn’t look like much, but the theming of the land was perfect and the costumes of the cast members exceedingly detailed. I would have wandered around and looked at things here for a long time, but we had to see what was in Ariel’s Grotto. Entered underneath a shell castle that really did look like animation brought to life, the entire area was inside, a move we thought was smart given Tokyo’s weather. Little kid friendly, it was A Bug’s Life land from California Adventure but with a Little Mermaid skin rather than a bug one. The lighting effects on the ceiling did a great job with the underwater feeling and I thought it was one of the more clever bits of the park.

We saw very few kids, actually. It was a weekday and most guests were in the late teen to mid 30’s bracket. Lots of couples, often dressed in matching Disney gear and many wearing fuzzy hats and ears. I saw a few women dressed as Minnie and more high heels than I care to remember; my feet hurt in sensible shoes by the end of the day. Attendance was light, making it possible for us to see the entire park and not stand in horrendous lines for our flavored popcorn – each area of the park sold a different flavor: caramel in Cape Cod, coconut in Mexico, sea salt in Ariel’s grotto, cappuccino in Italy. We also found chocolate, strawberry and black pepper. In addition to the popcorn, the restaurants were heavily themed and we took photos of all the menus we could find – the translations (and the Japanese interpretations of Mexican food) were invariably funny.

Disneyland itself was a cross between “our” Disneyland and Florida’s Magic Kingdom. A little more space, a slightly different layout, a new twist at the end of Big Thunder, but mostly quite familiar. Main Street was enclosed, and the shopping was one of the oddest things about the park: no clothing, no postcards, close to nothing with a park theme or logo. What they had, in spades, was plastic crap, cell phone charms, stuffed characters and specialty food in commemorative tins. Everything was character based, and Chip n Dale and Marie from the Aristocats were more popular than the princesses, who hardly made an appearance. Mike discovered that the teacups here still spin the way they used to in Anaheim and I paid the price for that discovery; I couldn’t stand up straight ten minutes later.

I won’t pretend that there weren’t better uses of our time, but we thoroughly enjoyed DisneySea – the park was beautiful and it was a good way to unwind from China without hiding in our hotel room. Interacting with the locals at a theme park is an interesting way to see their relaxed sides, and I think we only saw three other white couples all day, so it was a Japanese atmosphere. More formal than any other culture we’ve visited, the Japanese, oddly, are also better than we are at acting like kids, and we enjoyed seeing that in their Happiest Place on Earth.

T is for Tokyo

I saw a brochure here that called Tokyo the 'big mandarin' and while I don't know about oranges, Tokyo certainly is big. Bigger than big, maybe. The view from our hotel room was of a city without limits, lights that stretched into infinity, out and up and away. Closest to us was a giant curved monolith of corporate culture, at capacity with cube upon cube, monitor upon monitor - and filled with salarymen in suits even at 23:00. Each triangular corner was an office, furnished identically, and the lights never went off. Every night I sat on the window seat, furnished with cushions at just the right elbow level for leaning, and gazed out into the sea of lights, watching the motion and wondering what sustained it all.

And about that hotel room. If Tokyo is one of the most expensive cities in the world (it doesn't look it on the surface, but oh, it is) this was a room to match, our own little pleasure dome, modern style. We cashed in Hilton points for a refuge from the madness at the Conrad, the part of the Hilton chain that puts the 'up' in upscale. The lobby was on the 28th floor, overlooking Tokyo Bay from a swanky but very low key lounge - our room, on the 34th, felt like a left over set from Lost In Translation, but maybe with a little more style. The wall between the bedroom and bathroom was glass ・but never fear for privacy: the toilet and shower were in frosted cubicles, and push button shades hid the entire room. We had push button drapes on the giant picture window, too, and that should pretty much sum up the experience of the Conrad. Lying in the bed in the dark and watching Tokyo was an exotic luxury, an expensive and rare treat.

T is also for Toto, as in Toto Toilets. I'd heard of the infamous Japanese toilet, of course, the one that does everything (and then some), but I didn't know how they really could be all that, and it goes without saying that I'd never seen, let alone used one. That private frosted box in the Conrad, though, taught me that I want a Toto of my own. I'm not going for details here, but I will say that it really does everything they say it does. Bob, you were right. Could we get a discount, perhaps, for two?

Tokyo is contrasts - we ate a very traditional soba lunch in a tatami room in a neighborhood restaurant housed in an old wooden house, then walked three blocks to Akihabara, the area of Tokyo known for selling every possible kind of electronics (and then some). Just down the street from a temple filled with incense and clapping is a giant Pachinko parlor that contains more noise and flashing lights than I thought was legal to have in one space. The women here wear the highest heels I've ever seen, but almost none of them can walk in them, thus ruining the glamour at the very last second of review. The salary men, dark and rumpled in nice suits that see too many hours at the office, look grim and overworked, no match for the butterflies of the opposite sex. All of them, to the man, carry cell phones bedecked with shiny, glossy, cutesy charms.

The trains that run on the subway are usually busy, sometimes packed to the brim (I witnessed the floods of people moving as one dark mass up the stairs and onto the train platforms, but never actually saw the uniformed guards pushing people in to get the doors shut) but as close as you are to body next to you, eye contact is never made. Most people read, and the privacy level is such that all books have covers; even the title of your novel is no one else's business. The cabs, though, are huge, with enough space in back for shopping bags galore. The seat backs and head rests are covered with a white cotton eyelet that is always spotless and the drivers are wearing white gloves as often as not.

Everywhere you look in Tokyo, you see money, real or not. The clothing is expensive, the cars are expensive, the food is expensive. If the people pushing past you in Shibuya aren't 'making it' you'd never know from they way they look and the way they carry themselves, and I don't think I saw one homeless person while we were there. Shopping is the game, and everyone plays. Whatever poverty or misfortune exists in Japan isn't on display in the Big Mandarin, that's for sure. The newest of new, the biggest of brands - the women here carry their glossy shopping bags as proof of where they belong.

I feel as though I should be building up to a climactic unburdening of why I didn't like Tokyo, not one bit ・but I'm not. The fact is, I really liked Tokyo. It got under my skin almost immediately, a little bit against my inclinations. It is not a pretty city, and it isn't easy to navigate once you leave the subway womb (with twenty some lines, it looks like a nightmare but actually works like a dream) and it made me feel dowdy and unkempt in my travel clothes and shoes -but I liked it. I could return again and again and I think that each time I would learn something new, uncover some other alternate reality that exists only here. Underneath the order and efficiency and money and uber-politeness is a playful spirit - what other city is stocked to the brim with vending machines dispensing so much more than hot and cold drinks? Standing in any of the public spaces (or even spying on them) it is hard not to turn circles in awe, mouth hanging open from the sheer audacity of it all.