Tokyo! (東京!)

I'm still not quite savvy enough to put pics where I want them, but here are a few to get you going. From the top- the view from my hotel room window (20th floor), Takashimaya: Tokyo's times square (sorry the image is a bit out of focus), and the arriving JETs all lined up at Narita.

We arrived at Narita International airport early, at around 3:30 p.m. local time. Clearing customs/security actually proved to be remarkably painless, and we were then herded onto buses that took us to the four-star Keio Plaza Hotel, where the orientation is.
Observations about Tokyo:

1. It is big. Huge. Jigundimous. It dwarfs any notion of large city I had heretofore held- the bus took 2 or 3 hours to get us to the hotel from the airport- driving through Tokyo metro area the whole way (I'm not sure how long the ride was- the 12 hour flight, sugary drinks served thereon, and feverish excitement had pretty much made me delirious at that point).

2. It is humid. Stepping out of Narita is like having a big, warm, wet sheepskin blanket draped over you.

3. It is intense. The parts that we saw during the bus ride were fairly unremarkable- squarish concrete buildings with company names on the sides, harbors, and such. Once we had a chance to explore outside the hotel, however, we ran into an intense labyrinth of lurid neon signs and turbulent crowds. Imagine standing there in your sheepskin, and then being beaten by a 7-foot transvestite with a fluorescent shovel.

It probably didn't help that we had accidentally wondered into Kabuki-cho (歌舞伎町), a district notorious for its Yakuza, bars, and porn stores (we did see at least two of those, and I imagine some Yakuza as well, although I wouldn't have known how to identify them). What looked like a normal busy shopping district quickly became more freaky the farther we wondered into it, and we had to fend off the advances of a man in African dress (don't ask me which country- but definitely from Africa), who spoke perfect English and VERY much wanted us to go check out his club, whatever was inside. I don't know what kind of club it was, but a lot of the other establishments on the same street had beckoning girls in miniskirts standing outside their storefronts, and after exhausting excuses (I don't have any money, for one), we had to flat out tell him that we were not interested, and flee for a street that would take us back to the more sane parts of Shinjuku where our hotel is located.

The orientation started today, and was 8 solid hours of information absorbtion. Fortunately, I won't have to since much of it is printed in the roughly FIVE KILOGRAMS of printed material given to us by various JET-associated organizations. I am completely exhausted, and will remember half of what I was told if I am lucky. Everything was covered from activities to do with elementary school kids to the stages of culture shock (it was strange to watch a keynote speaker stand on stage and dissect my future psychology- with any luck my culture shock won't be very bad). Following this was a traditional banquet kicked off with a traditional toast (kampai!) with Sapporo and octopus a-plenty.

The night after the orientation (tonight) was spent with my future Niigata co-JETS, who seem like a good group. We visited Takashimaya, otherwise known as the Times Square of Tokyo (much more safe and impressive than Kabuki-cho), which had insane crowds and a bronze statue of a loyal dog (whose name escapes me) who was fabled to have waited each day for his master's return from the train, even after his master had died. The sensory experience was completely overwhelming- and we got a lot of odd looks from passing Japanese (I guess that even here in Tokyo foreigners are still something of a novelty). After that we went into a Karaoke establishment for drinks and bad singing.


Karaoke places in Japan are quite different from what we know in the U.S.: back home they are mostly a bunch of equipment set up on a bar stage, which serve as a friday night attraction at (name of watering hole here). In Japan, they are multi-story buildings with private rooms where your party can drink and create dissonance without interruption from anyone you don't know. Up on the sixth floor we had some gin and tonic and sang songs for an hour, concluding with "You've Lost That Loving Feeling."

Overall I am thrilled to be here, although I will probably be able to make a more level assessment after the neon-funhouse-madness of the Tokyo orientation. I also need to sleep, so this is where this post concludes. Stay tuned for what's next!

oyasuminasai!