Japan: Day One

Got in on the plane. The plane ride was actually about as good as a 12 hour plane ride could possibly be. I actually wrote some stuff in my notebook during the flight, kinda observational stuff mostly about the other passengers and what I was reading. Might type it out later, depends on how well I can still read it.

Took the train from the airport to our hotel. The train wizzed by all sorts of scenes that, when I saw them in scenes with train rides in anime, I knew to be good sorts of train scenery cliche: lonely semirural stations, old urban architeture, sudden rice fields, bamboo shoots, an old man on a park bench talking to an even older man standing idly by, those hillsides where they have like, cobblestone or something, etc, etc. I got a few pictures which I'll reproduce here, making this more of a traditional blog and less like rambling. The interior of the train was even more stereotypical, and I was amazed at how quickly I could catalogue a sleeping businessman sleeping next to a sleeping student, uniformed high school kids of both genders talking in a tight circle, a guy next to me reading Astro Boy - no, wait, Atom - illustrated light novels, another kid further down reading some mecha manga I couldn't identify - everything seemed perfectly in place, almost surreally so, as if I was half expecting the lot just to be actors.

Anyways after that we got to the subway, which I have no pictures of. It was even more what it should be than the train. It had all the bustle of a western subway, with the same sort of reek of daily life. I call it a reek in no insulting terms, it's just that "odor"or some other more neutral sounding word doesn't describe the confrontational way that something smells when it reeks: omnipresent but not quite omnisecient: the smell of a multitude of normal things that is unescapable but not powerful enough to be overwhelming. Again I mean this not to be an insult, especially not about the literal smell, which, as I was taking great care to notice ambient smells, seemed about the same as a Toronto subway with a bit of a twist. This was the same about the abstract smell of lifestyle, there was the unmistakable of idea of people returning from something they did every day, perhaps especially on a Friday, but a noticible, and definitely known, knowledge that what they were coming back from doing and planning on doing would likely never be encountered on the Toronto subway.

I think I've probably said enough about this obvious observation that hey things are largely the same but also different in ways you expect but don't quite know. Really it stems from reading so much of The Pale King and wanting to talk about the ideas of commuting, of daily routines, attitude towards careers, etc. BUT THAT IS A SUBJECT FOR ANOTHER TIME NOT SPEEDY JAPAN UPDATES ALMOST ENTIRELY FOR MY OWN BENEFIT.

So yeah subway was mad crowded with cool ads. Hotel room is nice. Then we went and wandered around and it was nice. Had a good meal.

Pictures:

Actually nope nevermind this hotel internet is surprisingly slow and uncooperative re: uploading anything so I'll worry about uploading pictures later.

Anyways yeah woo