Japan: Tokyo Part 1

Tokyo is an incredible city. It's huge. And it's so clean. Everyone raved about how safe it felt and how polite everyone was.

While in Tokyo we stayed at the Sunshine City Prince Hotel in Ikebukuro. It's 60 stories and is one of the tallest buildings in Tokyo. It had a shopping center, an aquarium, and is impossible to navigate. Reid and I walked back once and found the hotel okay but it took us fifteen minutes to figure out how to get in to the hotel. The hotel had free wifi and free breakfast and there's really not much more you could want from a hotel. And showers!

The view from the hotel room. We were on the 24th floor.

You could see Sky Tree from our hotel!

Our meetings on Thursday were with Tokyo Metro and Japanese Railway. We learned about what the respective companies do. We also got to learn about how they coordinate hundreds of trains every day moving millions of passengers at extremely precise times. It was very impressive.

We only had a short break for lunch between meetings so we went to a convenience store in the train station to grab food. It was my only meal the whole trip that did not have multiple courses. Toru was extraordinarily patient as I made him translate what felt like every item in the store. I ended up getting a triangle shaped rice chunk wrapped in seaweed and stuffed with chicken.

 Helpless Foreigners Attempt to Buy Food

Our last meeting for the day, and one of my favorites, was Tokyo Metropolitan Government.

Tokyo Metropolitan Government

We learned in this meeting about diesel regulations in Tokyo and how it contributed to a reduction in air pollution.

After the meeting, we got to go to the top of the building, which had stunning views of Tokyo.

Taro and Mahito insisted that we join them for a photobooth. It's called purkikura and I didn't realize what a huge deal it was in Japan. You take photobooth pictures with your friends, the machine airbrushes you, and then you can decorate the photos. They're everywhere and they're a full experience.

Thursday night we were reunited with the Education Team at a Shabu Shabu restaurant in Tokyo (hot pot). I see my classmates every day. We have class together every day and we usually do social things together on the weekends. We had only been separated for five days, but we were all still so excited to see each other. There was a lot of shrieking and excited catching up.

For hot pot you get a pot of boiling sauce and you get raw meat and vegetables that you dip in the pot to cook and then eat.

 

 We ran out of cups for sake, but fear not! My resourceful friends just drank the sake from bowls.

By the time we got back to the hotel, the Reconstruction Team had arrived, so we were all finally reunited!

Friday morning we all had hotel breakfast and then went running to make our appointment at the Diet.

Literally running.

The Japanese National Diet building is their equivalent of the Capitol. Their House of Representatives and House of Councillors meet here. We got a tour of the Diet building.

Organizing fifty people is very difficult it turns out.


Waiting for our tour

The Debate Chambers

Luskin Ladies

Diet selfies

The whole group! 

After the Diet, we split up again to go to our respective ministries. We went to the Department of Transportation. We learned about urban planning in Japan and efforts to expand public transportation, with a short break for lunch at the cafeteria in the ministry. Some of the urban planning students in my group gave a presentation to the Japanese ministry as well, discussing public transportation in Los Angeles. I asked one of the urban planners later what the daily ridership was in Tokyo. He told me he guessed it was around 93% of the population. The Japanese employees were visibly shocked and kept asking for a retranslation of the statistic that only 7% of the population rides public transportation each day in Los Angeles.  We also learned a lot about Japan's decreasing populations and the impact that is having on a lot of areas. I had not realized it was such an extensive problem.

Asking the hard hitting questions about depopulation implications

While all of the meetings were incredibly interesting and I learned a lot, I discovered that generally in Japan restaurants, hotels, and meeting rooms are heated excessively. The uncomfortably warm rooms coupled with a chronic lack of sleep and jet lag sometimes meant we were not an incredibly lively bunch in meetings. 

After our meetings, we were given free time until we had to reconvene. After being inside all day, some of us decided to go for a walk to Hibiya Park. We all walked there together, but once we all got our bearings, we all split off individually for our own walk through the park to appreciate the fresh air and green space.

 We all reconvened and redivided into dinner groups. My group went out for Okonomiyaki, which is a Japanese pancake.

You cook all of the food yourself on the grill at your table. We had a lot of appetizers. My favorite was the cheese filled mochi. Eri did most of the cooking.

One of the appetizers was octopus! I ate one bite.



The okonomiyaki was mixed noodles, meat, broth, veggies, stuff I'm not entirely certain about. You mash it all together and squish it into a circle on the grill. My big responsibility was to flip the pancake.


Okonomiyaki!

Friday night after our Okonomiyaki dinner we met up with everyone in Shinjuku.

We went out to a gay bar called 'Dragon Men' and then to a club and danced the night away.

Japan: Nagoya

The train from Toyama to Nagoya took almost four hours. It wound through the mountains. The Japanese organizers thought ahead and had gotten wifi routers that they carried around with them, so we were able to scroll through various social media to pass the time. We talked to each other and we admired the view from the train of the Japanese countryside. I even saw a Japanese Serow from the window of the train! No one understood what I was describing so I spent a long time on wikipedia until I figured out what it was (a goat-antelope in case you were wondering). 

Watching skiing fail videos.

And we slept a lot.

We checked into our hotel, Nagoyakatei Miyoshi, which played an Enya album on repeat in the lobby. 

This hotel room was even smaller than the previous one. We got to know each other really well. No showers again, so we showered at the hot springs again.

We then headed back out to our dinner.

 Reid making friends with our dinner.

The appetizer was shredded radish with baby sardines.

The main course was eel and it ended up being my favorite thing that I ate on the trip! I found it very delicious. You ate it in three steps. The first was by itself. The second was with wasabi and seaweed. The third was with soup. Step two was my favorite. 

The hotel provided Yukatas again. We dressed up and went to breakfast after not enough sleep. 

 I greatly improved my chopstick dexterity on this trip. 

We had the most formal meetings out of all of the three trips. For a few days we could wear just business casual. For a few meetings we needed to dress up especially nice. We were given a strict dress code, so we all ended up matching pretty well.

We took the subway to the end of the line to the SCMaglev and Railway Park. It was a train museum run by JR (Japanese Railway). We had a presentation and then a guided tour of the museum before we were let to explore.

 We got to ride in a Maglev simulator. Maglevs (Magnetic Levitation) are high speed rails that can go up to 500km/hr (310 mph). The simulator showed you what going 500km/hr felt like. At that speed you could get from Los Angeles to San Francisco in an hour and fifteen minutes. They run by electromagnetic fields (or something, not my area of expertise) and they levitate. Once they get going the wheels retract. 

The diorama room was a huge hit. It was an incredibly intricate and detailed kinetic diorama of a city that showed train activity over the course of 24 hours. There were even tiny light fireworks over the city at the end. 

There was even a mini rock concert. The band had tiny instruments and moved. Whoever designed this diorama had a sense of humor. There was even a tiny fan being given medical attention on a stretcher. 

Maglev!

 Walking around a history of rolling stock

We then went back to the Nagoya city center to meet with an engineer from Toyota who told us about an engine he designed and the difficulties of not having a universal set of emissions standards. We then shopped around for our new cars for when we all start our very lucrative civil servant careers.

We got generous bowls of udon topped with a raw egg for lunch. We all tried to slurp the noodles gracefully. We all needed to wear our white shirts the next day and we couldn't spill.

Our poor organizers overemphasized the necessity of punctuality, yet we were always still running behind. I think it is hard to organize 16 lost young adults. We got our work out for the day as we all went sprinting through the Nagoya train station with our luggage and coats dragging behind us to make our train to Tokyo. We made it with a solid 30 seconds to spare and we not so politely shoved our way on the train to make sure we all got on.

We rode on the Tokaido Shinkansen which is the oldest high speed rail in Japan. It opened in 1964.

We rode a lot of trains.

The Japanese organizers thought ahead and reserved us all seats on the left side of the train so that we could see Mt. Fuji from the train as we passed. It is a very impressive volcano. It appears out of nowhere and it huge and towering and we could see it for awhile! The mountain seemed to stand perfectly still while the cities rushed by past it.

We arrived back in Tokyo an hour and forty minutes later. 

Transpo Team takes on Tokyo

The first thing we did when we got back to Tokyo was go out to dinner. We went to a Ninja Restaurant. I asked Mahito how he picked that place and he said he had googled "Restaurants for tourists in Tokyo". We were guided through a maze of dark rooms by ninja dressed waiters and waitresses until we got to our own private room. We were served several courses of food with the word ninja in front of it. We had ninja water, ninja sashimi, and a variety of other ninja goods. At the end of the dinner the ninja waiters did magic tricks for us with cards and I got to keep a card as a souvenir. 

Exhausted, sleep deprived, and full of ninja food, we finally made it back to our hotel in Tokyo.