Japan – Day 2, Surprisingly nice in Winter
Bedroom, Breakfast room, Dinner Room, Lounge room all in one
Waking up several times through the night due to a lack of familiarity with sleeping on a futon was a little bit of a nuisance but the room in Sekitei was lovely although, I could not see outside or let any fresh air in.. Sleeping on a futon was however novel, it’s like when you’re sleeping over at a friend’s house as a kid and you sleep on the floor. All those memories of fun times come straight to mind, and shifting the room around to allow you to have a sleeping area is something quite different akin to camping. Well, we liked it, maybe you won’t, but either way the rooms are fitting with paper windows and a paper sliding door to hide your shoes. Our only troubles that we experienced were that the hot water controller can get a little too talkative for my liking and you end up in a vicious circle when you press a button and it communicates with you loudly, pressing another button in response just generate more chatter. Had it not have been for my wife I may have ended up in a vicious circle where I could never stop pressing the buttons on the controller……
A word of caution however. In my travels I (Tim) normally find that places which aren’t Brisbane in Australia seem to not cause me allergies. Through my years I seem to have developed a hay fever allergy to Brisbane and when I step out of the home town everything seems to calm down. This was not the case with Japan or at least the hotel we stayed in. I suspect that the cause of my hay fever in the morning was due to the thatched flooring. I find straw and hay bales can give me trouble and sleeping on a nicely thatched hay bail for a floor is no exception. So if you do have a susceptibility to allergies from hay or straws and you do intend to sleep in a Ryokan or a more traditional hotel make sure you come armed with some antihistamines.
Trimming the trees in the city to make them beautiful. We were impressed!
Departing from the hotel in the morning was a breeze and the new lady at the reception was helpful and had very good English. We couldn’t really pick much to fault with this hotel, obviously set your expectations correctly (small room, making your own bed etc.) and you’ll have a good evening. I can’t hold my allergies against them, that’s my problem and it’s just something I thought I’d put forward for others to consider. Our backpacks aren’t terribly light and lugging them around while we walked through Shinjuku would not have been a good plan. Instead we chose to put them in lockers at the train station. The large size lockers cost 600 Yen and hold two backpacks at a pinch. If you’re using the lockers behind the gates like we did, don’t forget to get your passports for Jr pass exchange before you lock up. We were concerned that there wouldn’t be any spare large lockers available outside the gates but that wasn’t the case. There’s no real trick to using them, put the correct amount of money in follow the extremely loud prompts from the machine (if it’s automated), keep your sheet of paper with your pin on it and retrieve your stuff when you need too. The coin operated lockers give you a key to keep and when you unlock it the key is then locked so you can’t accidentally take it.
Our next stop was to exchange the JR rail passes. We had chosen not to exchange at Narita airport for two reasons, firstly it is extremely busy, there was a cue about 100m long and much stamping happening, and we were in Japan for 15 days so we needed to either miss one day at the end or the beginning of our journey. Given that it was late and we’d have to wait several hours (it was already 7pm and the JR exchange closes at 8pm) we chose the buy tickets on the JR n’ex and skip the lines, this was a modest ~3000Yen / ~40AUD and we figured we’d exchange in the morning. However our experience in Shinjuku was slow even though while popular it’s not the main international airport. Therefore if doing an exchange outside of Narita still budget an hour or else you’ll be disappointed. The lots of stamping and talking still happens where ever you go (even though the attendants are amazingly fast at pressing buttons and checking each letter in your passport) so it takes quite some time for each person to get through.
We then set out to find ourselves some breakfast and then head for the holy five story camera store. Again, locating a breakfast was not as straight forward as hoped. It seems that the Japanese style breakfast isn’t immediately easy to come by, actually we have no idea what a Japanese style breakfast is, sometimes it doesn’t help not actually doing your homework. So what we did notice is that some places are open and have people in them, and others don’t. This lead us to another machine operated restaurant called Ringerhut, this may sound like Pizzahut, Wikipedia indicates that the naming origins are from the Ringer family of Nagasaki and hut possibly from Pizzahut, so you might be close but the place is anything but Pizzahut. Think of a button operated machine to select your meal, take a seat anywhere at any free stool along any bench, give the waiter/ waitress your ticket from the robot, receive a glass of green tea/ water/ cold not tasty stuff that might be tea and wait a few minutes for your meal to be handed to you on a tray. For us looking for anything that looked breakfast like, we ended up settling on dumplings, miso and rice from the robot in the front of the place, service was quick and the food was tasty. Yes you’re probably right in thinking that’s not terribly Japanese but we had settled on hungry and the simplest path to satisfaction. The net result was tasty and satisfied, can’t complain with that!
The best fun on the Shinkansen is had playing with a USB dock for a lens…
We then went off in search of a USB dock for the SIGMA 18-35mm lens which I had bought during the year, which is excellent except that it refuses to focus on anything. The USB dock is for re-calibrating the lens and correcting for front or back focusing, which until this year we had no knowledge of. Anyhow it took a little wandering to track Yodabashi’s camera section down as Yodabashi is a massive multi-level store full of electronics and some cameras, but the camera Mecca is actually next door here (google street view link). As everyone says, if you like cameras you’ll like this place, we had to leave as if we spent more time there impulse buys would begin to happen. The only sad thing however was now that we’d bought some handy tools we wouldn’t be able to play with them until later.
As we then had a few hours to spend around Shinjuku before heading for Hiroshima we went wandering through the business district in search of the Sompo Japan Nipponkoa Museum. This wasn’t entirely well signed but the museum was on the 42 floor of the Sompo Japan Nipponkoa Insurance building. Entry was 500 Yen and to our surprised the museum has an absolutely fantastic view of Shinjuku. As we entered the building we noticed a Sunflowers by Van Gogh, we had no idea that this version of the painting resided in Tokyo. The Seiji Togo exhibition was excellent and the surprise bonus of the Van Gogh and the view of Shinjuku mad that couple hours extremely worthwhile.
We then attempted to make our way to the Pentax square which according to our 2007 lonely planet guide was a good place to see some old Pentax camera gear turned out to not be there, or at least we couldn’t find it and after traipsing around for an hour in an attempt to locate it we decided to give the opportunity away. One thing we did notice in that time hunting around was that Tokyo’s business area is very clean and while a little stark beautiful in it’s own way, possibly the strangest thing is how quite the area is, aside from a little traffic noise. The attention to detail that the Japanese council goes to ensuring that their area is beautiful is quite extreme, we took a few photos of the tree beautification team in action tidying up the Autumn foliage on the Ginko trees.
That left us fairly time poor at that point and we headed for Shinjuku station then Tokyo station, then the lovely Shinkansen. The Shinkansen are fantastic trains, if only all countries of the world had a service like this, and not only a service like it but a rail pass specially for visitors. As we’d reserved our tickets all we had to do was head for the correct carriage and sit down and start playing with camera lenses, well at least one of us.
Fast forward an hour into your journey and so long as you reserve seats on the right hand side of the Shinkansen you’ll get to see mount Fuji. Fast forward 157 minutes you’ll be at Shin-Osaka eating some sushi wrapped in persimmon leaves, fast forward 2 minutes you’ll have people looking at your strangely as you’re eating the sushi (Kakinoha) with the persimmon leaves instead of unwrapping them (no one told us….) 90 minutes later you’ll be in Hiroshima.
Mt Fuji not at its best but apparently that’s what it’s like most of the time.
We then donned the backpacks and went for the short ~maybe 1 km at best walk to K’s House hostel. Yes we like hostels, they’re cheap, fun and normally tidy if you book the private doubles like we do.
Dinner was at a small yakatori place nearby, when we refer to small in Australia you’d be talking maybe a 20 or 30 person restaurant. In Japan you might be talking 7 people (in an L-shaped table around a few grills) plus your chef who stands in front of you preparing ingredients and dishing out the cooked yakatori as soon as it’s off the grill. We thought that this was just great. Luckily/ strangely (maybe it’s normal) we seem for the last few places to end up in restaurants which have no foreigners, this is re-assuring as often when you travel it’s fairly clear that only foreigners go to where you’re currently eating. This might be something unique to Japan that the locals actually go to the same places that hostels/ hotels/ accommodation suggest to the foreigners. After a handful of beers, highballs and yakatori we headed back to the hostel for a cup of tea and then bed, this turned into a handful more beers, discussion about refugees and a long night….
What a day
