I often tell people that, more than anything else, I love to travel. But actually, I hate traveling. I love being in places, and then wandering around.
The other parts of travel, it turns out, I'm stunningly bad at doing: planning ahead, organizing, economizing, packing, scheduling, etc. Mostly, when I travel, I just dispense with these things to the maximal extent possible. But, here in the world's most expensive city, that habit of mine has a pretty high price. Not that I'm complaining. I've fully accepted that my aversion to planning ahead when it comes to travel means I pay a little (or a lot) extra for things like accommodation. But actually finding a place proved more difficult that I expected. Is Tokyo full? Hmmm… sorry, that's a rhetorical question. Actually, I would say, Tokyo's pretty much full. Megalopolis of megalopolises. The metamegalopolis.
I spent a major portion of yesterday simply wandering around. As I do whenever I'm in a new city with a subway system, I deliberately went into the subway without studying the map, got what seemed like a useful ticket (a one-day pass) for 710 yen, and walked to the first platform and got on the first train. And after about 20 minutes, I saw fields. Fields? What kind of megalopolis is this, anyway?
Obviously, I'd gone off in a centrifugal direction. So I got off and found that my little ticket made the ticket gate complain beepingly. You see, I'd managed to get on a JR train that exited the "Tokyo Metro" system. Somehow, the regional rail and the subway here don't exist in their seperate, delimited universes, the way that such things do in other major cities I've been to. So you can ride a subway train that indetectably transmogrifies itself into a regional rail route once it crosses the outside edge of the metro system. Hmph.
I paid the friendly and utterly English-free station guard the make-up fee for the incorrect ticket, and walked around my randomly discovered neighborhood. Then I bought a SUICA pass (which appears to work like Seoul T-Money — my fingers are crossed that will continue to do so) and went back to Ikebukuro where I started. After I'd figured out that first lesson in Tokyo subway navigation, things went smoothly. And what better way to learn subway navigation than through trial and error? That's why I do things that way, I suppose… aside from the fact that for me, personally, it also happens to be fun.
I went and saw the Diet building and government area (there were tons of riot police about, which made it feel just like Seoul's government area — perhaps because of the recent elections?), then I spent a long time walking around Ueno and later Shinjuku. Just exploring, as is my wont.
Today will be museums day (at least, that's the plan… as I said, plans don't work well for me when I travel).
Tokyo seems more "western" in some ways, than Seoul. More multicultural, though still nothing like Western cities. But also… there's a tiredness about the people here. Where Seoulites seem frantic and hectic and even chaotic, Tokyoites seem more just "heads down" pushing ahead. Not moving slower, but there's a kind of ennervation in the air. The subway trains are eerily quiet (there's a cell-phone use ban, apparently, among other rules), unlike the raucous way that crowded subway cars in Seoul can sometimes seem. Then again, it's easy to forget that Japan has basically been in something close to economic recession for 20 years. 20 years! In that period of time, Seoul has probably doubled its GDP. That kind of contrast is bound to affect the psychology of the inhabitants.
When I walk around, I often rely on the sun to keep my orientation and find my way back to somewhere familiar. I think I must be odd, in this respect, at least among postmodern urbanophiles. And it can really mess me up, when the sun goes down or hides in overcast skies. Last night, I became very disoriented trying to find my hotel after taking the wrong exit out of the subway station (the station in question has almost 70 numbered and lettered exits!). I wandered into a nieghborhood of pachinko parlors and love hotels, and was accosted (politely) by hustlers, one Japanese and later a Nigerian (I think).
Finally, I found a Starbucks, and thinking it was one I'd walked past before, because it was next to a Mizuho bank, I headed confidently in what I thought was the right direction. Alas, it was not the right direction. I didn't get back to my hotel for another 20 minutes, because I had to double back, go back into the subway station at yet a different enterance, navigate underground for several blocks, and then go out by a more familiar entrance. Beware trying to use a Starbucks as a landmark. That's the stupidest thing I've ever had to re-learn the hard way…
