Homer Simpson in Tokyo

[This entry is by Scott...] It’s early Sunday morning and the trains are running across the street from our hotel. A lot of them, and I like them. We’re halfway between a very big station, Shinagawa, where we’ll eventually catch a bullet train—one just went by now, slowly—and a medium-size one, Shimbashi, where we’re off in a few minutes to catch a train to Kamakura to visit Koji and Nobuko and perhaps their children and grandchild. There’s supposedly some kind of festival today in Kamakura, and Koji said the train down there would be crowded. Tor and I have spent a fair amount of time watching Japanese tv, hoping for some game show action. I’ve even asked him, half seriously, if he thinks we should try to get on one, but he’s not game for it. When the Simpsons went to Japan, Homer lost all their money and they went on a show to make money. In the “lightning round” Homer was tied to the Tokyo Tower in a thunderstorm. Life might have copied art, because when we got to our hotel room yesterday I couldn’t find the “wallet” that I was using to keep all our cash, passports, credit cards, etc. I turned the room upside down, frantic, then called down the front desk—where I’d left it and they had it.

I’ve tried a few forays in Japanese. I can very proudly ask where something is, and eagerly tried it out last night—and it worked! But then in Yakitori alley, where we shared a tiny table with a young Japanese couple, I failed miserably trying to tell them I studied some Japanese at a school in Japantown in San Francisco. One of the things I find interesting about Japanese is the “counters.” That is, depending upon the nature and shape of the thing you’re counting, the suffix varies. For example, people are “nin.” Ichi-nin, ni-nin, etc. But there is another suffix for long objects such as bottles. And another for flat things. And two or three others, I think. Curious.

An odd place Tokyo, at least in the mind. Destroyed twice last century—in the 1923 earthquake, and then in the war. I have a vague image, from wood block prints and maps, what the city was like in the shogun era, especially early. It was essentially a big collection of gated compounds. The shogun required all the feudal lords from around the country to maintain a residence here—and eventually their wives and children, as hostages of a sort—and to visit every other year. So they all had their walled-in compounds, complete with gardens, etc. , where they stayed on their visits. And there were a lot of waterways, almost Venice-like is my image of it. It was probably beautiful, which is not how I would describe it now, although our airport bus went down a couple of cherry-blossomed streets on the way to our hotel.