Part I: 到着 (touchaku: ARRIVAL)
Friday, October 10, 2008 8:02pm
After much planning, the moment had finally arrived: we were taking our scheduled Shinkansen train from Kyoto to Tokyo at 8:02pm, and arriving around 10:30pm. Excited beyond measure, we hopped the local train and made all the necessary transfers to get from Keihan's domain to Japan Railway's massive Pan-Nipponese realm. Keihan had the nicer service, but JR had the Shinkansen, so we had little say in who we got to choose to take us to Japan's capital at blazing speed.
This part of the trip was met with little difficulty. Our Nozomi train left on time and arrived as such, too. The flight was smooth (albeit slightly motion sickness-inducing), and, as indicated by my subconcious desire to use the word "flight," was very similar in feel to air travel in terms of accomodation.
Once we got in at 10:23pm, as our ticket promised, we ran into our first issue: we were staying with a bunch of other friends who had already checked in at Narita Airport's rest house, which was well over an hour away from were we had arrived, JR's Tokyo station... and during the day, getting there would be no problem. However, unbeknownst to us, the last direct train left for Narita Kokusai Kuukou at around 9:00pm.
Damn.
We had to improvise the way home, which we did the best we could. We found a commuter homeliner train bound for Chiba, and after paying the 500 yen fee to board, we got ourselves on the way to about the halfway point between Tokyo Station and Narita Airport station.
Once in Chiba, we hopped the train bound for Narita, two stops away from the airport, whose distance is a considerable distance by any non-wheeled means. So we knew we were condemned to take a taxi, but we wanted to get ourselves as close as possible, so we quickly jumped on a ticket machine and got from Chiba to Narita.
Only problem was we got the wrong ticket. We got a limited express ticket for a local train (this 特急／普通 dichotomy doesn't really exist with Keihan; you get a ticket, you can hop a lim. exp. or local)... but after a minute or so of insecurity before the JR Narita station attendant, we were (slightly reluctantly) let through.
Taxi time.
Japanese taxis are comfortable, direct, and insanely expensive after the 2km mark. They give you a flat rate for traveling within those 2km, but thereafter, you get docked a little more money for traveling 200m or so, which builds itself up after a while. Thankfully, we were a group of three, so our total 3000 yen travel bill was much more easy to digest.
The taxi travel itself would have been more sane if customs hadn't tried to bust us.
We pulled up to an entrance of Narita Airport, which is a gateway between the worlds of Japan and securityland. When the customs officials walked up and saw that we were foreign, they asked for some form of ID (which we had), why we were entering the airport, whose name the hotel rooms were under, and so on and so forth. This was conducted between me and a customs guy in 70% Japanese, 25% English, and 5% "huh?".
I would NOT decry the experience as racism, however; it's pretty logical not to let anyone into an airport if they don't have a decent reason to. It's just that the whole dealing with customs was a stress factor that compounded with the whole rushed experience. Besides, we were let in.
So, after we were waved off, and our amazing driver bid the officals farewell with a contemptuous-sounding "BYEBYE~", we went laughing off into the bright lights of Narita International Airport.
Part II: ゲームの大会 (geemu no taikai: THE BIG GAME SHOW)
Saturday, October 11, 2008 6:00am
Our main reason for going to Tokyo was the Tokyo Game Show, a once per annum event showcasing the up-and-coming events in the Japanese gaming world. A decent fraction of these games are released or developed worldwide as well, so it becomes an excellent chance for not just native Japanese gamers to get a taste of what's to come, but it gives foreigners an excuse to hop to Japan and get with the program.
This event took place at the Makuhari Messe, a huge convention center not terribly far away from the Chiba nexus (getting Gibsonian enough for you yet?). Thankfully, this was easily accessible by JR trains, so transportation issues were not a factor.
What was a factor was the sheer number of people going to this event. In order to keep a mob of tens of thousands of hungry gamers in check, TGS and Messe staff made the huge line go around the entire convention center, eventually fencing us into smaller lines that were let in one at a time. Our line got in at about 10:30 to 11:00am. The exact time escapes me at the moment, unfortunately.
And so the hungry herd was fed its information. Our entire group stayed until closing time at 5pm, and Tiff and I were off essentially doing our own thing that entire time. We spent most of the time checking out little snippets of games, but didn't actually get to try a huge amount of game demos for the impossibly huge wait times (upwards of 1 to 2 hours to play a small snippet of an incomplete game).
Still, the experience was unreal, even if we didn't get to go willynilly because we didn't want to waste our time on a line for those cursed game snippets. Unfortunately, though, the games that both Tiff and I wanted to see at TGS were mostly no shows. Even then, we got our fill of gaming updates in that 6 to 7 hours of wandering amidst incredibly dense clouds of info and crowds of info gatherers.
After the event had ended, our larger group of travellers regathered and split off again (most wanted to go to the anime haven of Akihabara (秋葉原 - the field of autumn leaves, an ironically beautiful name, no?), while Tiff and I wanted to stop by the classier Shibuya (渋谷) and Harajuku (原宿) areas). However, after both shards of this broken group got food at the same time at different places, we actually ended up gathering at the train back home for Narita Airport at the same time, without going to where we wanted to go. The Akihabara group was too tired, and Tiff and I realized that the last train for the airport was coming up way too soon to do any exploring.
What a lucky coincidence, eh?
So, we got back to the airport without any difficulties (the customs barrier between the trains and the airport is much friendlier), and tried our best to get a decent night's sleep for the next day, which we had originally planned out as starting off from TGS, with Tiff and I later branching off to do our own thing in Tokyo.
This changed, though.
Part III: 東京… また会いましょう (toukyou... mata aimashou: TOKYO... LET'S MEET AGAIN)
Sunday, October 12, 2008 5:30am
On the way back to the Messe the next day, Tiff and I decided that there wasn't nearly enough at TGS to keep us coming back for more... especially with the insane crowds. So, we bid farewell to our train-faring compatriots at Chiba station, and continued on the train for JR Tokyo Station.
Since we had checked out of the hotel earlier, we had our luggage on us, which we quickly stuffed in a 600 yen coin locker near the stairs for the platform. The country of convenience.
From there, we hopped on the JR Yamanote line (the lime-green designated circular route that pierces the heart of Tokyo's many central wards), which took us on a 30 minute ride to Shibuya. Like the Shinkansen and Homeliner, the Yamanote line was adequately bilingual in its announcements, a huge hint to just how many tourists and other forms of foreigner are wandering helplessly through the so-called Metropolis of Tokyo (東京都）.
(And when you actually get to see just how many foreigners are around, it feels nothing less than strange, even being a foreigner yourself.)
So, we got off at Shibuya, the Times Square of Tokyo, and like Times Square, it was a fleeting interest, perpetuated by shiny lights and the sheer number of how many damn people were clogging up the crosswalks and the 109's. We even accidentally put ourselves on the shady backstreets and didn't get much out of it, aside from the fact that someone put a love hotel right next to a perfectly good Shinto shrine.
Thus, we dashed right out of Shibuya and took the Yamanote a couple of stops up to Harajuku, a more laid-back sector of Tokyo, with the jam-packed Takeshita Road lined with small clothes shops and other such establishments with articles for sale cheaper and more interesting than those in that ward two stops down.
Despite some places being just as built up as Shibuya, everything just seemed to have a more... pleasant feel in Harajuku, from the lesser treaded backstreets, to the Harajuku Girl-filled forestreets.
There, we had some Lotteria (a good burger shack that seems to have its closest Kansai base in Kyoto... please correct me if I'm wrong; I thought it was delicious), and later stopped by this really cool music-oriented coffee shop called Jet Robot. Then, after a little bit of shopping, thereby picking up some ridiculous T-shirts, and a lot more wandering (cursing our legs for only being able to travel so far), we made our way back to JR Tokyo Station.
We had a lot of time until our night bus came, so we just sat out in front of this mall directly in front of the station, admired the cool Tokyo night, and so found a simple way to enjoy our last day (but not last time) in the Tokyo Metropolis before grabbing some bento boxes from the AMPM in the mall, searching frantically for our night bus, and hopping on that Catatonia Express that would leave us behind in a daze at JR Kyoto Station.
