Since the boys are going to two different schools, they tend to have different vacation schedules, but luckily this year, they have Spring Break during the same week, 4/1-4/7.
My work as a physicist brings me to international conferences at least once every two years. I could possibly go to more, but I don’t like to travel much. However, my international travel has given me a somewhat cosmopolitan perspective that I can provide my own boys and which I didn’t experience during my own childhood.
In 2013, we visited Italy as a family, when the boys were attending the same school. It’s one of my favorite countries. Not only did I propose to Hsuan in Venice right after the 1995 ICRC, but I simply love the country, the food, the atmosphere. As I pointed out to the boys, it’s the location of two of the great periods in human history — the Roman Republic and Empire, and the Italian Renaissance.
I decided a few months ago that we’d visit Japan during their joint Spring Break. Back when Hsuan worked in Japan, I visited while still a student, and I noticed how safe I felt walking the streets anywhere and at any time. When so much of Europe is dangerous due to attacks by terrorists, I decided that Japan would be the place to go. Plus, like Italy, there’s great food and great history to enjoy.
I decided we’d visit Tokyo to get a taste of modern Japan, and we’d visit Kyoto to stay in a ryokan and try to get some more traditional Japan.
On April 1, after the boys had served at Easter Vigil Mass the night before, we flew from LAX to Tokyo Narita International Airport, landing late in the afternoon on April 2, local time. I rented a mobile hotspot for the week, picking it up in the terminal. It turned out to be one of the best things I did at the start of the vacation. Although WiFi is widely available in various hotels and other buildings, the mobile hotspot was something we could carry and have with us all the time. Coverage was very good throughout the vacation.
(On the flight over, I watched a woman/girl across the aisle take 40 minutes to apply her makeup. I went to the lavatory about halfway through and was appalled to find her still brushing her face and applying whatever when I got back. Ick.)
We then boarded the Narita Express to Shinjuku Station, where we picked up a taxi to our hotel, the RIHGA Royal Hotel Tokyo. It’s a nice hotel in a quiet neighborhood, right next to Waseda University but with easy subway access at nearby Waseda Station just a few blocks away. It’s also a business hotel, rather than a tourist hotel or resort, but service was extremely friendly, polite and efficient. The staff all spoke English well; I had brushed up on my basic Japanese prior to this vacation and found I didn’t need much beyond arigato gozaimasu. We later learned they say okini in Kyoto, rather than arigato. For the taxi ride to the hotel, I had written down the hotel address in Japanese as well as English, for the taxi driver.
That evening, after checking in, we wandered around the neighborhood at night, looking for dinner and eventually settling on a tiny sushi bar right around the corner from the hotel. When we walked in, a little old lady was sitting at the bar, watching television, but she got up and started preparing stuff in the kitchen. Her husband, the sushi chef, walked in the front door, went behind the bar, and started preparing a sushi assortment dinner for each of us. The final cost was about $40 (US), for the four of us, which was astonishing. I think the same would have cost $50-60 in Pasadena. We started questioning our assumptions about the expense of this trip, apart from the plane flight and hotel charges.
We also found a 7-11 down the street from our hotel, which turned out to be useful later.
April 3 was our first full day in Tokyo, and we got some very useful directions and maps of the subway system from the extremely friendly and helpful hotel staff, who helped us figure out navigation, initially. Later, I used Apple Maps — rather than Google Maps — to help us navigate the subway and train system. We immediately ran into a problem when we bought Tokyo Metro all day passes, forgetting that the JR Line subways and trains are separate (a competitor), so we had to buy all day JR Line passes as well. The next day we bought combined passes.
Our first stop was the Meiji Jingu Shrine, dedicated to the Emperor Meiji and his Empress. Emperor Meiji was the beneficiary of the Meiji Restoration, which returned authority from the Shoguns to the Emperor, and he was the Emperor who set about modernizing Japan. Basically, he’s the Emperor portrayed in The Last Samurai. Since the Emperor died in 1912, this isn’t an ancient shrine. Regardless, it’s very beautiful and well laid-out. It contains a garden that was enjoyed by the Emperor and Empress, with a small pond for fishing.
After spending the morning wandering around Meiji Jingu — disappointed to find the museum at one end closed — we took the subway to Otemachi Station, near the Imperial East Gardens, and we walked to Tokyo Station for lunch. Unfortunately, that’s right in the middle of the business center of Tokyo, and it was lunchtime for all the salary men and women. We snagged some ramen at a little ramen shop. You tap your order into a machine at the entrance, put in some money, and get a ticket with your order, and then, when a table is available, you hand the tickets from the machine to a waitress. Unfortunately, we needed some help with the machine, and while the boys and I got some nice, tasty ramen (mine and J’s included chicken karaage), Hsuan chose a spicy bowl that was spicier than she expected.
The place was packed to the gills, with a line at the entrance. All of the restaurants in this underground shopping mall seemed that way, full of business people, until we found some side “streets” in the mall with more wide-open, sit-down restaurants. Apparently, we chose the area with the smaller, faster restaurants frequented by lunchtime business people, rather than the slower, more out of the way restaurants that might have been easier for us, as tourists who didn’t need to get back to work immediately.
After lunch, we visited the East Gardens of the Imperal Palace, nearby. The gardens are two large gardens — they’d be called large parks anyplace else — adjacent to the Imperial Palace. The Palace isn’t grenerally open to the public, but the East Gardens are. It was another beautiful, peaceful garden, so huge that even the large numbers of people wandered freely about. Interestingly, there were defensive structures around the garden. I later learned that Edo Castle, upon which the Imperial Palace is now built, was formerly the residence of the Shogun (including Tokegawa Ieyasu). We learned in Kyoto that shoguns had to worry about assassination and attacks, but the Emperor — being divine — never had to worry about being assassinated. Thus, except for castles taken over by the Emperor from Shoguns in later years, Emperors’ palaces didn’t have moats and defensive structures, while Shogun castles did.
It was getting late in the afternoon. I had originally planned that we would visit the Senso-ji Temple in Asakusa and the Samurai Museum in Shinjuku, but since we also wanted dinner, since we were getting tired, and since we the museum closed at 9:30 PM, we decided to put off both for the next day and visit Akihabara instead.
Akihabara is world-renowned as the place to go for all kinds of electronics and other gadgets, not to mention cosplay and such. What we found on the streets outside of Akihabara station was a violent, bewildering sensory assault of a bazillion electronics stores, bright flashing lights and signs, storefronts packed with cameras and God knows what else, maid cafes, and crowds of people walking everywhere. There was a group of buildings and alleys across the street from the station called Electric Town, and it seemed to be the place to go. However, when we crossed the street to see it, it was even more densely packed with stores and people.
I’ve seen streets in New York City crammed with “camera and electronics” stores, but Akihabara sneers at such pathetic, amateur displays. I didn’t take pictures on the streets in Akihabara because I was afraid my camera would explode.
W was getting confused with the sensory overload. I checked TripAdvisor and various websites, looking for “things to do in Akihabara”. TripAdvisor said there was a Sony Plaza in the area, but I couldn’t locate it. Hsuan suggested visiting a maid cafe, but I didn’t think it would be either age-appropriate for J or any less jarring for W. Instead, I found out that there was a single, big, electronics superstore nearby called Yodobashi Akiba, so I decided we’d walk there. Surely there would be some sense of order there.
However, while it was far less crowded and confusing than the streets, it was still 9 floors jammed with electronics, toys, computers, cell phones, appliances, etc. Think Best Buy on mega-steroids, the kind that give you brain and testicular cancer so much your balls swell to watermelon-size and your brains pop out your ears and nose.
Throughout the whole experience, W and J started taking refuge in their iPhones.
We finally decided to return to the hotel by subway and train, where we all pretty much fell asleep, exhausted from the day’s walking. I wound up getting food from the 7-11, but the boys immediately went to sleep.
There’s always money in the banana stand.
On April 4, our third day of vacation, we took the subways to Senso-ji Temple. It’s actually a temple complex that’s a mix of Buddhist temples and Shinto Shrines, including Asakusa Shrine, plus a bunch of vendor stalls selling food and souvenirs. J decided he really likes the street food, which was cheap and tasty.
Photos were forbidden inside the main temple, but people were taking photos of the religious service going on in there anyway. I didn’t take photos there, though. Hsuan and the boys both spent about 100 yen apiece to get their fortunes — shake some some sticks out of a shaker can, read the number, then take a fortune slip out of a drawer with that number. W got a very good fortune (i.e. successful this or that, lucky this or that, good time to build a house, boyfriend or girlfriend coming soon), Hsuan got a lame fortune (i.e. maybe good, maybe not, could be successful, or not, maybe a good time to build a house, or not,… blah blah blah), and J got a bad fortune (not successful, bad time to build a house, long wait for boyfriend or girlfriend, blah blah blah), which ticked him off.
Despite the abundance of street food, I was hungry for some Japanese barbecue, and I decided we’d try to have lunch at the Asakusa Char-Grill restaurant nearby, but unfortunately we arrived and found it didn’t open until 2 PM. However, around the block we had seen a line standing outside of a restaurant, so assuming the line meant it was good, we got in line in time for opening and then had to wait, as all the people just in front of us filled up the tables. Still, we were told an hour’s wait, and it wound up being only 40-45 minutes.
We were very lucky that the barbecue restaurant was closed, because we had gotten into the Asakusa Imahan Kokusai Dori Honten restaurant. The Asakusa Imahan is a company that produces its own, exclusively labeled Imahan Wagyu Beef, and the restaurant we were eating at is the company’s head restaurant. We all had sukiyaki — Hsuan and the boys had their lunch beef sukiyaki sets, while I splurged on the Kobe Beef sukiyaki course. I traded some beef with W and J, so they could try it out. Their beef was just as tasty as the Kobe, which, however, was noticeably more tender. (The lunch sukiyaki beef was very tender, too, just not as fall-apart tender as the Kobe beef.)
All tables were served by elegant ladies in kimonos. Ours waitress started the cooking for us, but we took over once we got the vegetables going. J later said this was his favorite experience during the vacation.
We returned briefly to the Senso-ji temple complex for a little more street food, then we took the subway to Ginza for a little window shopping and to visit the Sony Store there. We also stopped by the Apple Store in Ginza; Hsuan’s iPhone X stopped charging the night before we left home, but it was unclear what a Japanese Apple Store could do for her, practically.
Then, before returning to the hotel, we went to Tokyo Tower, got tickets, and went to the main observation deck to view Tokyo in its nighttime glory.
I knew by now we had to give up on the Samurai Museum in Shinjuku. At best, we’d have an hour there, hardly worth the admission fee. Back in the hotel room, I searched TripAdvisor for similar Samurai attractions we might visit in Kyoto, and I found the Kyoto Samurai Experience and the Samurai Kembu Theater. I wanted the first, but when I went to book online, I found that the were booked solid until April 14. I e-mailed them, just in case they had a cancellation for April 7, when we could visit, and then I decided to keep an eye on the second one, which still had availability for the 7th.
Hsuan and W had a late dinner at a teppanyaki restaurant nearby, discovering they had problems with the language. J and I fell asleep in the room, so Hsuan brought back more food from 7-11 afterward.