Japan and Me

Tokyo and Nagano but not Tokyo and Nagano

The featured cities in this section about Japan are Tokyo and Nagano but it’s one that will not really be about either. Here’s a little background on how I came to Japan between the 1964, 1998, and 2020 Games. It was the spring of 1982 and having spent two years working at my father’s accounting firm while taking the necessary prerequisites to sit for the CPA exam, I had only three tasks in front of me. The first was continuing to work for my father. The second was studying for the CPA exam which at the time was administered only in May and November. The third was planning a three week trip to Japan as a reward for my diligence.

The key fact in the above paragraph is that it was 1982 meaning that nearly 40 years have passed since then. One essential difference between that trip and the trip to London described in the previous post is that other than a day trip to Stratford-Upon-Avon, the entirety of that trip was spent in the British capital while our time in Tokyo occupied a mere three days of the trip to Japan and Nagano only a single night. Nearly all of my most vivid memories all happened elsewhere in Japan. And yet, oddly enough, it was an image like this

(From Flickr BY Dick Thomas Johnson-CC-BY-2.0)

that triggered my thoughts about writing this series. The Olympic Rings in front of the Rainbow Bridge served as a frequent backdrop for NBC’s Olympic coverage and each time I saw it I kept thinking, “I don’t remember that bridge,” with good reason as it turns out. Construction on the bridge began in 1987 which was years after my visit.

One thing I can say about Tokyo is that it made one indelible impression and left one indelible impression on me. The former is an expression of the naivete of my inexperience while the latter left a sense quite similar to my feelings about New Orleans though perhaps for different reasons and may also be an expression of my naivete.

In my late twenties, Japan was by far the most exotic place I’d ever been and Tokyo was no less so. My experience of large cities would have included places along the east coast of the U.S. such as New York, Boston, Phiadelphia, and my hometown of Baltimore together with Chicago and the three previous host cities in this section. One element all these places had in common was substantial diversity and heterogeneity in their populations. This was not the case in Tokyo.

I shudder to write it now but standing at a busy intersection such as the famous Shibuya Crossing

and looking at the crowds around me and facing me I thought to myself, “Everyone looks alike.” Then I thought that from a distance, as a short man with dark hair and glasses at least partially obscuring my occidental eyes, I might not have stood out too much.

As for the impression I left with, I’m fairly certain the language barrier played a part. Nevertheless, I have a strong memory of feeling that nighttime Tokyo was much more adventurous than daytime Tokyo and things happened in places that were meant to be hidden and hard to find even for those in the know but especially from gaijin (foreigners).

About Nagano I remember even less.

I remember the names of some of the sights we saw – the Meiji Shrine, the gardens of the Imperial Palace, and the Sensō-ji Buddhist Temple but my memories of these places are no stronger than the memories of the shows I saw in London.

The Hakone incidents

My traveling companion (whom I will refer to as P in respect of her privacy) and I had spent a day or two in Tokyo before we embarked on a day trip to the town of Nikko some 150 kilometers north of the Japanese capital. Nikko is famous for both its natural beauty and for the Rinnoji Temple founded by a Buddhist monk in the eighth century and the Toshugu shrine built to honor Tokugawa Iyeasu who founded the Tokugawa Shogunate that ruled Japan from 1603-1868. (You can read or watch a fictionalized account of his rise in James Clavell’s Shogun.)

Before we arrived there I learned two object lessons. One was that if a train schedule says a train’s departure time is, say, 08:17, if you’re on the platform at 08:18, you’ve missed it because that’s exactly what happened to us. While we sped off in something of a panic to find another train or see how to change our tickets, one of us left something by the track. This led to the second lesson because I assumed, of course, that it would be long gone. When I raced back in an even greater panic, the truth was not at all coherent with my assumption. Instead, I found someone standing by whatever it was (I don’t recall what) who graciously returned it to me without a second thought. This lesson would play an important part in the first Hakone incident. But before I move on to that, you might want to watch this video about the Nikko temple and shrine.

Hakone incident one – Left on the bus

On the fourth day of the trip we left Tokyo and wouldn’t return until the day before our scheduled departure for home. Our first stop would be the city of Hakone in the Fuji-Hakone-Izu National Park. This destination had a twofold purpose. One was to stay in an onsen ryokan. A ryokan is a traditional Japanese inn with tatami mats over the floor and meals served in the room, public areas where visitors are encouraged to wear a yukata (a loose fitting Japanese robe), and a communal bath. The baths in an onsen ryokan are fed by thermal hot springs. This photo from onthegotours.com is a fairly typical room in a ryokan.

We traveled to our ryokan by a combination of train and public bus. This time, we arrived at the train station early and made the connection to our bus with little difficulty. Fortunately for P, although I wasn’t a particularly experienced traveler at that time, I was both an observant and a bit obsessive one. You see, as we were walking up the inn’s driveway, P stopped in her tracks, let out a loud gasp, and cried out that she had left her soft blue bag on the bus. This was a critical oversight because that bag contained not only her camera but, as I recall, her cash, and her passport were also among the items in that particular tote.

I remember saying what I could to reassure her and told her we would try to address the situation at our check-in. When we got there, we learned that unlike the hotels in Tokyo, no one on the staff here spoke enough English to have any meaningful conversation and, although I had learned a few phrases in Japanese, they would be of no help either. We were going to have to resort to the international pantomime dance.

I mentioned above that I was observant and a bit obsessive and what I had observed and committed to memory was the name of the bus route we’d taken from the train station. Through my gestures I was able to communicate that we had lost a piece of luggage and I was able to tell the desk staff the name of the bus. Through his gestures, he communicated to me that he would call the bus company and they would set the bag aside until he could pick it up which would be several hours because he couldn’t leave his post at the inn.

Shortly before dinner, someone knocked on our door and it was the young man from the desk. He handed P her bag and, though I knew that tipping was neither expected nor even appropriate, he had traveled I knew not how far on his own time and still would accept no gratuity for this above and beyond service. P took inventory and nothing was missing not even, as far as she could tell, a single yen.

The second reason for our visit to Hakone was to take in some of the iconic views of Mount Fuji such as this one

(from viatour.com)

from Lake Ashinoko also called Lake Ashi. Unfortunately, the day we were on the lake, the view looked more like this:

and we never saw that most iconic of Japanese images.

What we did experience was Hakone incident number three but since I’m aiming to keep these posts relatively short, I will defer incidents two and three for the next entry.