Japan Day 2: Thursday May 27

We woke up gradually and went down to concierge to pick up breakfast, a little cardboard box each with plastic containers partitioned off inside: a few bits of cold fried chicken, cold scrambled eggs, and three of those Asian style sandwiches I came to hate in Hong Kong--tiny double triangles of crustless Wonderbread, one smeared with a teaspoon of egg salad, one with potato salad, and the third with a single slice of ham no bigger than your pinky finger. We struggled out of our hotel room, one person flattening themselves against the wall whenever the other wanted to pass, and took the subway to Yarakucho and the Muji store. We unlocked our neat little bikes, looking nervously after all the confident girls in school uniforms and businessmen flying by on their bikes, and after some wobbling starts and sudden stops we wove off into the crowd, helmetless. Old and young people leapt out of our way when they heard us coming and soon we were dinging our bells with confidence.



It was sunny, unlike what had been predicted. We circled first west and then north, hugging Chiyoda, the imperial park, past the trees and the palace--all you could see was a row of forbidding guards at the driveway, but nothing beyond that--to the infamous Yasukuni Shrine. We admired the architecture, samurai statue, and kamikaze pilot shrine:



then, reluctant to disturb the dozens of Japanese who obviously were there on spiritual journeys--ascend to the shrine, toss in a coin, bow, clap three times to summon the gods, pray, bow, descend--we rested by the koi pond for a few minutes before climbing back on the bikes and heading west.

At 1230, we rode right into a thunderstorm. Skidding to safety under an overpass, we joined two Japanese cyclists, both of whom parked their bikes and brought out newspapers as though they were settled in for a long wait. The rain was pounding overhead. We made a dash to the nearest restaurant, which was Chinese and nothing memorable, for lunch, emerging just as the rain had spattered itself out. Sun was shining through the clouds when we reached Shinjuku, a mad rush of loud noise and people and shopping. We parked our bikes under the Metropolitan Government Tower and took the elevator up for free to enjoy the view from the 45th floor, which is easy to describe--a lot of concrete buildings and in the distance, Fuji-san, only its bottom third visible, its top two-thirds fading into haze.


Inside the tower viewing platform was a vending machine selling mini-shinkansens, or bullet trains:



We continued on southward, taking a big circling loop—not entirely on purpose—arund Meiji Shrine. We inadvertently discovered a lovely rose garden, where we rested before continuing through lovely historical Aoyama Cemetery into Roppongi, the nightlife district, by day a mass of ugly concrete buildings and loud roaring overpasses. We couldn't find a coffee shop for rejuvenation, nor an acceptable Japanese phrase book in a foreigners' bookshop, and so we continued toward home. We stopped once more, at Hibiya Park, to see why crowds had gathered—it turned out to be a German beer festival, full of red-faced people clutching huge beers and bratwurst. We bought an exorbitantly priced packet of candied almonds and managed to return our bikes to Muji around 1830.



I was exhausted, but D wanted to do some shopping at Bic Camera. We swung by briefly and I was nearly overwhelmed by the shouting, the brightly flashing lights, the epilepsy-enducing dancing cartoon characters, the piercing falsetto of the theme song. Luckily for my sanity, the store didn't carry the camera D wanted, and we escaped to a smokey little alley under the subway station where we dined on yakitori--eggplant, pork, chicken, and shiitake mushroom--at a table shared with several drunken Japanese businessmen who kept chiming things that we didn't quite catch in to our conversation. One of them insisted on feeding D a bit of squid off his plate. We walked Ginza just for a few more minutes, and I bought sweet rolls to supplement breakfast in the morning, from the basement of a department store. Most of the shops were closed. We reached our hotel exhausted, only to realise we had no hotel booked for the next few days--but we were too tired; we went to bed.