In Pursuit of Adventure: 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.