To Tokyo

Day 20 – Wednesday, 17 April 2024

A short walk by the shore of Yamanakako, eastwards from our temporary dwelling on the north side of the lake. Across the water, a sizeable tourist-carrying boat shaped like a Swan put this old Hobbitomane immediately in mind of Alqualondë. The direction was chosen partly because we had, the night before, driven in from the west, so it was the road not yet trodden, but also because Maps suggested that a café might be open about two kilometres into the journey. It wasn’t, of course, as it was way too early for any Japanese barista to be out of bed.

Then back into Fujiyoshida to return the car, hoping that the minor scratches that I had noticed the previous day had been there since before we picked it up. Orix seemed not to care, so presumably they were. Then the train and my first look at Tokyo, or at least Greater Tokyo, kilometre after kilometre of suburbia, Japanese style, more densely packed than I am used to but by no means shouting megalopolis, at least at first. But it kept coming and coming, punctuated by more high rise apartment blocks. Musing again on history, I kept half an eye out for any structure that might be older than the nineteen forties, or even than me. I expected none and was not surprised.

We disembarked at the nearest large station to our new home – an apartment, this time – Shinjuku, stuck our luggage in some lockers and walked off in what felt like a useful direction, hit a dead end and backtracked round what I later worked out was the south end of the north half of the station to its western side. There, we found something to eat in a restaurant that must draw half its customers from among slightly lost tourists new, like us, to Shinjuku. The clientele were mostly white and the television screens showed, alongside a local medical drama involving heroic and photogenic paramedics, a thriller involving gallant, grizzled Francophone soldiers rescuing civilians from an unidentified Middle Eastern country. Paramedics in khaki. The menu was the kind of Japanese food familiar to every urban Westerner. The most Japanese thing about the place was the existence of a smoking section. Sebastian objected, wanting to preserve his virgin lungs. Apparently the school lessons telling him that one whiff of a cigarette will be instantly lethal are working.

We walked the couple of kilometres to the apartment along the north side of Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden but didn’t go in. Gates and (empty) queue markers suggested that a fee would be payable and it wasn’t time for a stroll among the trees. Our apartment was modern and clean, with two queen size beds stacked one above the other. The boys, sick of co-sleeping, started working out who was going to sleep in the living room on the spare mattress. I discovered the flat’s major flaw when I walked into the light fitting dangling, madly, at exactly my eye height. For the remainder of my time in Tokyo, I bore a small cut right between my eyebrows.

The day had been quite long by this time, but we were, after all, in Tokyo for the first time in our lives (or, in Anna’s case, for the first time in more than thirty years), so there was sod all chance of us dialling a pizza and watching an evening of Japanese television, which turns out to be exactly what I expected, and more on that later. Back to the railway station it was and down to Shibuya, a short ride, and out onto Shibuya Scramble Crossing, named after the woman who invented the famous egg recipe. Dinner was five floors up, ordering things barely understood from a tablet, but all delicious. A brief walk to the Pokémon Centre, naturally, in the Parco shopping centre, where things that will later need to be bought were identified by Anna (boots) and Seb (unending lists of merch), before heading home to bed.