There’s not much to say about the main drag of Roppongi. It’s situated in an area of Tokyo just outside the central part of the city and has been under constant heavy development for the past few years. In it you will find some of the most ostentatious buildings, hotels, and stores. Luis Vitton, Gucci, and the like line the streets. Further down in the club area it maintains all the glitz, but you will quickly discover that it’s pretty seedy. I couldn’t walk five minutes without some hustler trying to sell me his strip club. There isn’t much else.
However, it’s not all bad. There is one place on one of the small side-streets in a basement. I hope I can find it again because I happened in there randomly. It’s a young establishment but set up in a very traditional way — you will be required to take off your shoes before you enter and sit on mats on the floor around a traditional Japanese table. Food and drink are reasonably priced. The proprietor, Ken, is a very nice guy who dresses in a ninja costume sans mask.
Would I go back to Roppongi? Unless it’s to see Ken; no. It’s really not my thing. Your mileage of course, may vary.
Earthquakes are a fairly common occurrence in Japan. There was one on the North end of the main island last night that measured around 6.8 if I could understand the news alright. We felt it here in Tokyo, but it wasn’t that big. Definitely not something I am used to! I’ve never experienced an earthquake before. You see them on TV all the time and it looks like it “shakes,” but I’d describe it more as “wobbles.” Imagine the earth is like a sheet someone is whipping onto the bed; you feel the ripples. Hopefully I won’t have to experience a big one.
I slept pretty well last night. I had a little snack and after posting last night and updating everyone on Facebook, I laid in bed and watched some Japanese TV. It didn’t take long for me to conk out. I slept like a rock.
So the plan for today is to find the hotel I had failed to locate last night. I checked their website this morning and think I can find it this time. I apparently walked past the street it was on a couple times. It’s hard navigating Tokyo when it’s dark and you’re jet lagged beyond belief! Anyway, I hope they still have my reservation once I do find it. I will feel much better about this trip once I have a base of operations.
Then I plan on the following in no particular order:
Post first video
Do some shopping
Buy a day-pack
Buy some shades
Buy some sunscreen
Wander around the neighbourhood and get my bearings
This was supposed to be a video post.. but I can explain. I am stuck in a fancy pants hotel with no wireless in the suites. So I am stuck writing this on a terminal using a Japanese keyboard (which is quite frustrating). Hopefully I will fix this some time tomorrow, but know it was not my fault.
The hotel I was planning to stay at apparently does not exist (or I have the name wrong). Although the flight was long and the trains were a little disorienting at first, I managed to get to the area of Tokyo I thought I was supposed to be in (somewhere near Hiro-o station). However, I ended up wandering around jet lagged and anxious for about an hour before I found a police box. They promptly put me on a phone with someone who spoke English (”English okay!”). Even that guy could not tell me where the hotel was, so they pointed me in the direction of one nearby.
So I am safe for another day. Tomorrow I will have to find new hotel arrangements and hopefully get my video and photos up. I have some fun stuff already!
Two random facts before I go:
Japanese love to label EVERYTHING.
It doesn’t seem like it, but it’s actually rather expensive… it adds up. (Counter person: “blah blah en.” Me: nods.)
Update:
Now that I have Internet access, here’s the video of my trip to and arrival in Tokyo, in all my resplendent jet-lagged glory. I feel much better now! And I hope that my film making skills will improve as we go along…
In thirteen hours and twenty minutes I will be shoved onto a metal tube with wings and jet engines to launch myself across the Pacific on a thirteen hour trip. I’ve never traveled anywhere before. I’m still not really sure what is going to happen. Airports are monolithic botched attempts at automating the herding of humans and I will be very tired — I’m worried that I’ll end up like Tom Hanks in that movie I never saw. He got lost in the airport and basically lived there for a very long time. People forgot about him! What if I get lost and confused and they lose me?
Well, at least I’m packed and ready to go. Almost my entire wardrobe fits into one carry-on. I’ll also have all my gadgets with me (camcorder? check. camera? check. cell phone? check. laptop? check. Nintendo DS? check). I won’t be a bored forgotten airport guy. I can always blog about being lost in an airport.
This site is pretty much ready for my trip too. I created a Flickr account and set up a set for all my Japan photos which you can check out in the side bar. Comments are moderated for first-time posters, so if you comment doesn’t show up right away please be patient. Once you’ve been approved the first time, your subsequent posts will show up automatically (unless you start posting with more than a couple links or naughty words). Look forward to many video posts, travel recommendations, photos, and love. Tokyo style.
I honestly have ZERO experience in booking trips or accommodations. I’ve never traveled in my life and have never taken a vacation before. I’m totally new to this. So as a word of warning: take my advice with a grain of salt and be skeptical. It’s good for you.
Booking a Flight
To book my flight, I did what any privileged person would do: I searched online. I spent a lot of time on this to try and get the best rate; shuffling my departure and arrival dates around and checking with several sites. My totally unprofessional analysis says that Orbitz has the best rates and service.
Orbitz seems pretty good. I like the design of their site and their grid view is really handy. They also have a price guarantee that claims to give you a cash discount in the event that you or someone else books your same trip for a lower price. They also have a collection of other neat and useful tools on their site.
Booking Accomodations
Admittedly I am very poor at organization. Until there is a need for a system, I avoid complicating my life with them. It’s my natural tendency to try and make things as simple for myself as possible. This tends to make my life appear very cluttered to the outsiders.
Therefore, I didn’t bother booking an itinerary for this trip. I have a vague idea of things I’d like to do: climb Fuji-san, see the shrine for aka roshi (and possibly a few others), attend the Fuji Rock Festival, and mostly to wander. I like wandering and finding things. It fits with the whole “disorganized,” thing.
So I basically booked a single room at Azabu Court for the whole trip. It has broadband in all the rooms and is conveniently located between Shibuya to the North, Ebisu to the West, and Roppongi Hills to the Northeast. The rates they listed on their page seemed rather good too. It will act as a sort of home-base for my operations.
So, once I get there and settle in I will totally provide a review of my flight and accommodations. One thing that has been bothering me as a first-time traveler is the lack of first-hand reviews. You mostly just see one or two sentence reviews and a few stars on the travel sites and other blogs don’t really mention much. Hopefully they will help you out when choosing how to get to Japan and where to stay.
Learning how to write Japanese is not for the faint of heart, but can be very rewarding. Learning a new language not only immerses you in new cultural experiences, but it can help you to improve your thinking and memory skills as well. By forcing yourself to really examine the nature of language and the sounds you use to describe things you’re actually making new connections in your brain. If you can stick through the hard parts you’ll not only make new friends, you can become smarter.
Learning how to read Japanese characters is the first step. The first thing you should read up on are the “hiragana.” Japanese uses a fixed set of syllables instead of an alphabet to make their words which actually sounds more complicated than it is. To represent these syllables, the Japanese use a system of “syllaberies;” of which there are three: hiragana, katakana, and kanji. It is recommended to start learning hiragana first along side katakana before moving on to kanji.
A hiragana chart
One advantage Japanese has by using a limited set of phonetic syllables is that it makes the language very simple to understand. All words in the entire language are formed by the same sounds. This means there are no tricky pronunciation rules as there are in English (characters in Japanese do not modify the sound of other characters). The trick is to memorize the sounds just like you did when you started learning your ABC’s. Once committed to memory, the Japanese language starts to seem a lot easier than it first appears to be.
There are many free programs to help train your knowledge of hiragana, katakana, and kanji. One such program I’ve been using is called KanaTest. It comes with a built-in hiragana and katakana chart and can remember your test statistics so you can track your progress. Best of all, it’s free (but I’m sure the developer wouldn’t mind a small donation). There are even dictionary programs like Gjiten (for Linux GNOME users) and MayJay (for everyone). Be sure to check them out as they certainly help with studying.
Below is an amazon link to a book I highly recommend. I’m using it myself and I find it indispensable. It will teach you the syllabries, how to write the characters (stroke order is important!), about 160 kanji, grammar, and even onomatopoeia! Plus, it uses Japanese manga to provide examples of more advanced colloquial speech not typically found in stuffy training books geared towards business people. Also, it is an affiliate link so if you decide to purchase the book it will help me out a little towards paying for this site.
Remember to let me know what you think about posts like this and such so I can write better posts in the future! Take it easy and all the best…
I’ve been stuck in Ontario, Canada for my whole life. I’ve never been traveling and have always been terribly envious of those who have. Instead of school and spending summers back packing around Europe, I’ve spent my early twenties starting a business, failing to maintain a successful business, and building a career. So I suppose I am partly to blame. However, the time has finally come to change that.
This blog is going to detail my adventure. In just a little more than two weeks, I will be joining the globe-trotters out there and experiencing something completely new. I fully intend to post the bazillions of photos I will take as well as video posts of the really interesting bits. I’m hoping that by detailing my trip, others who are interested in traveling to Japan for the first time will have a first-hand account of what it’s like.
In the meantime, you may see things changing fairly rapidly on this site as I try and sort things out to the way I like them. If you have any suggestions of course, please leave a comment or email me: jim at this lovely domain dot com. I may also take a while to get back to people at first as I sort out issues (or simply because I’m busy learning how to speak Japanese).
