These bugs, perhaps some kind of crustacean, were COVERING the shoreline of Enoshima Island on my July trip to Japan. I was hiking and climbing all over, and could not escape them anywhere near the water. These here are about the size of pill bugs, but many were large, up to two-inches. Almost gave me nightmares. Thought I'd share.
This uniform belonged to a Japanese "mobilized youth," one of the many children in Hiroshima working on the war effort when we dropped the atom bomb. Actually, *this* uniform belonged to *many* children. It was stitched together from scraps of what was left.
During the peak of my trail running craze in 2008, I attempted a 30k in the mountains outside of Tokyo. Running in the Tokao region is a real treat, with well-defined trails that go on and on and on, ample rest stops, and breathtaking views.
The trail is accessible by train and short job if you know where to go, and the fantastic public transit means you could do four hours, hit a hot springs bath and be back in town without ever covering the same ground twice.
I unfortunately injured my knee about halfway into this particular run, but hopefully with time I will be back to scenes like this one.
I've only been in Japan for cherry blossom season once in my eight visits. This is one of several camera photos I snapped in March 2008 on my last full day in Tokyo on that 7th visit; it is the main thoroughfare into my wife's hometown.
Cherry blossom season is amazingly beautiful, with miles and miles of suburban roads lined with mature trees. Many of the trees are tagged for maintenance and upkeep - a true national treasure.
Anyone who follows my photos will soon notice that I adore unique architecture - and even not-so-unique architecture, when the light is right. For someone with my tastes, Shinkuku, Tokyo, is a wonderful place.
In addition to the iconic and classic Shinjuku Tower, the Skyscraper District is full of classic and modernist business buildings, such as the three-peaked Shinjuku Park Tower. The area around Shinjuku Station is also now home to the beautiful Mode Gakuen Cocoon Tower, opened in fall 2008, after my last trip to Tokyo.
The Cocoon is home to three colleges, and is a sparking addition to the skyline from the viewing platforms of Tokyo Tower, and much of street-level central Shinjuku.
Shinjuku is home to two distinctions - a great electronics bazaar and a vibrant nightlife. So you can buy a world-class camera in the afternoon, and hit the clubs in the evening.
It is not the most crowded of nightlife districts in Tokyo, but close, as you can see from this photo. Just about all hours of the day, the Shinjuku Station - a major junction - is crowded outside with boys and girls waiting for their dates to arrive, and at night it is mad with activity, including hawkers trying to get you in their karaoke bar or restaurant.
Leaving Shinjuku at night is also an experience, with bone-crushing people-jams on the express trains.
Sankeien Garden is a luxurious preserve nestled on high ground just off Yokohama Bay. It was first established by a wealthy silk trader in the 19th century, and opened to the public in 1906.
It hosts not only a wealth of seasonal blossoming trees and flowers, but more than a dozen historic buildings relocated to the site. These include the amazing Three-Storied Pagoda of Old Tomyoji, built in 1457, and the Old Yanohara House, in incense-filled Edo period headman's home.
We visited as part of a bus tour and were rushed to try to take in the Garden's incredible sights. I would recommend reserving several hours for touring this wonderful place, followed perhaps by dinner in Yokohama Chinatown and then a stroll down by the Bay.
I've been to Yokohama Chinatown a couple of times now, and while it is not quite on my "must-see-each-time-I-am-in-Japan" list, it is an impressive several blocks of shops, restaurants and pavilions.
We visited this year as part of a bus tour, and had fabulous dim sum. It has both cheap trinkets and more authentic Chinatown fare such as whole roasted duck and swallow's nest soup.
Yokohama is also known for unique flavors of soft cream, the sugar-coned treat which is practically the national dessert of Japan's tourist destinations.
Kamaura is a World Heritage site not far from Tokyo by bus or by train, full of temples and stunning landscapes and gardens. The city proper is also a bustling tourist trap full of trinkets, food, and the occasional gem of a shop selling custom carved goods, whistles or jewelry.
This year was my first trip to Kamakura, and I will be glad to go back with more time to poke around. There is a giant Buddha that I did not get to see on this visit, and it is definitely worth an all-day visit.
I you can get there when the sun is shining, the beauty of the gardens is absolutely incredible. The site pictured above is groups of temples and residences centered and hidden into a small valley carved into the bedrock. Many of the sites are as much as 900 years old.
You know how when you live IN a city, you sometimes miss it's biggest tourist attractions? I lived in Manteca, CA, for several years, twice, and never went to its famous water slides. I have worked in San Francisco for nine years and lived near it my whole life, but have never been to Alcatraz Island.
Yesterday, my wife bit the bullet and took me on a bus tour of the greater Tokyo region for my birthday, turning tourist for a day. A Tokyo native, it was her first time on the bus tours, and we visited at least two spots new to her. These bus tours are a very cost effective way to see a lot of Japan in a short amount of time, and the Hato Bus that we went on was great. Fleets of tour buses wait outside Tokyo Station, and it is easy to book online.
We took the Yokohama-Kamakura tour, which included visits to the Sankeien Garden, Yokohama Chinatown (where we had a great dim sum lunch), and two stops in the World Heritage site Kamakura.
I try to visit Enoshima each time I am in Japan. It is a jewel of an island in the Kanagawa Prefecture, just over an hour away from Tokyo by train (depending on where in Tokyo you start). There is also a popular beach nearby.
Enoshima is chock full of Buddhist shrines, and hawks wheel above as you pass through the narrow, winding streets. The foot of the island is full of souvenir shops, and the back side full of sea-view restaurants.
In the center of the island is a lighthouse lookout with stunning views of the island.
Shopping centers in Tokyo are what I imagine could have been the future of those from the U.S.'s distant history. Each major train station has one, and as a rule, they have basement grocery, then a level full of luxury sweets and snacks.
Higher floors have botique clothing, toys and jewelry shops, and usually a book or media center. Many brands are recognizably American or European, but most of the retail shops are on the smaller side.
In the groceries, the fruit is absolutely beautiful - you will find much better California fruits than in California. The top floor or two is full of restaurants and cafes, sometimes surrounding another open shopping area.
Parking is expensive and rare in Tokyo, including in the suburbs (it is an old city with narrow streets). Little space is wasted. In addition to schemes like this one, it is common for small businesses to have electric roundabouts for squeezing more cars into tight lots.
I also have noticed that many department stores have a few levels of parking as their top floors, which never seems to be the case in California. Not sure why.
Another ubiquitous quirk of parking in Tokyo is that folks back into their parking spots as a rule. Again, not sure why.
Roppongi Hills is on my Tokyo 'must visit' list. It's now several years old, but still one of the top new neighborhoods in Tokyo (probably until the Sky Tree development opens in 2012). The centerpiece of Roppongi Hills is the soaring Mori Tower, and there is a beautiful Japanese garden near its base.
Before the Roppongi Hills shopping and leisure district was developed, Roppongi was known chiefly for its nightlife. It is also an embassy town, with literally dozens of foreign offices. You definitely can feel the international presence when walking around the city, especially in contrast to the homogenity of many Tokyo districts.
Roppongi is also an art mecca, with three museums, including one in the Mori Tower.
Ginza is one of the tip-top premier destinations in Tokyo, known for its luxury shopping and dining. The building with the odd-shaped windows is a Mikimoto Botique, and the undulating tower is the De Beer's retail shop.
Tokyo is a one of the world's top shopping spots - there is a Tiffany's in Ginza, then another one just a short train ride away in Roppongi Hills. I am sure there are plenty more, too.
One things looked pretty standard - the Apple store.
For the first few weeks of summer, the Japanese head to the beaches. When they get tired of that, it's up to the mountains and the hot springs. We did a bit of the reverse and last week made it up to the resort town of Nasu.
Hot springs are a Japanese national pastime, and thoroughly enjoyable once you get used to group bathing (most are not co-ed). Our hotel had two sets of baths, each with several kinds of soak, from the rotten-egg-smelling white water to a greenish mineral bath and a plan hot water bath.
At breakfast, you had a choice of eggs soft boiled in the springs.
This weekend our church was having a weekend of action with the international charity HOPE Worldwide. On Saturday, members went out with emotionally disturbed kids for a play day and to watch a movie. Today after service, we did a cleanup of the Shibuya area, walking from the church to the Shibuya Station.]
There wasn't a whole lot of garbage really, we pretty much got every piece of gum and cigarette butt on the route by the time 30 of us passed through (one of three groups). We did get a decent haul of cans and bottles by combing the hedges.
I love neighborhood cleanups, and my five year old had a lot of fun, too. My wife, well, ask for forgiveness later.
My in-laws live in a pretty small town by Tokyo standards, which makes it easy to forget the sheer density of the entertainment districts. Today we rode the train home from Shibuya, one of the moderate-sized towns near Harajuku and Shinjuku.
This is the middle of the day on Sunday, a block away from the train station. Several hundred people cross the street at every light.
Let me say, it is scenes like this that make me very glad I am tall.
One our way up to a hot springs resort in Nasu, we passed this intriguing WWII exhibit. After checking in an grabbing a snack, we went back down the road to check it out.
However, my wife got a bad feeling upon reading the hand-painted welcome signs. It seems that the historical collection was put together by some serious right-wingers, and instead of finding out what they thought of Americans, I just took a few shots from the parking lot and we headed back up the road.
On both sides of the exhibit were active junkyards, something you do not usually see in a resort town, either.
Today we spent some time at Edo Wonderland in Nikko, 2-3 hours from Tokyo. Nikko is a heritage site with incredible temples in the forests. Edo Wonderland is a theme park with ninja shows. On my first trip to Japan, we visited both, but with the kids the theme park was in favor.
The Edo period in Japan ran from 1603 to 1868 and is rich with violent lore. At Edo Wonderland, or Edo Mura as it is called in Japanese, you can rent period costumes and fit in with the scene, which includes movie and commercial TV sets.
Along with the historical garb, we saw several groups engaged in role play with their own costumes - distinguishable from the staff not only by their silver platform stills, but by the endless photographs they took took of each other. One couple even had a professional photographer in tow.
Easily the greatest taboo symbol in U.S. is the swastika, due to its close association with Nazi Germany. In Japan, however, the symbol (in reverse from the Nazi usage) is a religious one, and on maps it marks temples.
I can never get over the culture shock of it, however, no matter how many times I see it, from printed maps to the GPS navigation system in our cars.
Pachinko is a pinball-like gambling game popular in Tokyo. You buy a bucket of little steel balls and play them through the game machines in smoke-filled parlors.
Usually, pachinko parlors are all lit up and busy, and you can find them all over the place. But today near the resort and heritage sites of Nikko, we found two large pachinko halls shut down and overgrown with weeds.
Japan's economy is suffering with the global downturn, and perhaps residents and vacationers are no longer enough to support gambling businesses.
Tokyo's streets are very well maintained, the highways even more so. In eight trips over 11 years, I have never seen a pothole or even a divot on a freeway. Tokyo freeways are immaculate.
They are also extremelly expensive. A long car trip can set you back more than $100, easily. Regular drivers keep an "ETC" card in their glove box; it allows you to zip right through the toll stations at near highway speeds.
During commute hours, people will often keep to the surface streets to avoid the high tolls when they aren't going to get you there any faster.
Bike parking lots all over the place let you know you are not in Kansas anymore. This one actually has pay stalls.
Near a Tokyo train station, you will always find prodigious bike parking, and often illegally parked bikes lining the nearby streets.
It is not that people do not drive in Tokyo, it is just that there is nowhere to park, so if you can get your bike close to the train station, that is what you do.
Tachikawa has one of Tokyo's many train-station cenetered shopping distircts, with a large mall above the station itself.
The malls usually have botiques and restaurants right off the station itself, then luxury groceries close by. Small brand stores take up several floors, then restaurants on top.
Outside the station mall, a dense shopping district continues, with everything from electronics shops and karaoke bars to barber shops on high floors. Check out more of my photos on Flickr, adrielh.
The central avenues of suburban Tokyo are lined with small businesses; they go on and on and on, branching off onto the sidestreets as well. Bakeries, hardware stores, barbers, restaurants, pharmacies, clothing botiques, groceries.
From time to time, Western economists decry the inefficiencies of the Japanese economy, but I say don't knock a middle class unless you have one.
It is a joy to stroll the streets of suburban Tokyo, never dull.
Year after year, I gain a few pounds on each visit to Tokyo. My mom-in-law is a fantastic cook and serves meals like this each night, if we are not eating out.
The first couple trips, I ate too much because I grew up in a big family where you ate or it was gone. In my new family, if you ate it all, it meant that there wasn't enough. Even my 20-something appetite had trouble matching that one, and as soon as I learned, I took it easier.
Today, gluttony is perhaps the only vice I have left.
McDonald's is quite a different experience in Tokyo, and not just the ebi (shrimp) burgers. Habitues of the American brand will recognize the disctinction when I point out that the staff of a Tokyo "Mac" or "Mac Do" are perfectly made up, perfectly pleasant, fit and attentive.
The food is also less greasy, and the portions are smaller. This particular restaurant has second-floor smoking.
All in all, this looks and feels like an American McDonald's TV commercial, not an American McDonald's restaurant.
Fresh off the plane last weekend, I headed out for my sister-in-law's wedding. She was legally wed a few months back, but this was the fancy ceremony, complete with changing from white to red for the reception.
Yes, at the reception I gave a short speech about love in Japanese. Totally cribbed a bunch of quotes and mashed them together - "great things that have been said about love" and all that.
I stumbled over a few of the more difficult parts, poetical is hard in a language you've hardly mastered.
Thanks for your good wishes! I am going to be an uncle soon, and for the first time. Exciting!
The kids are on minimum days now at summer school, so we headed out for a picnic at Nogawa Park in Fuchu. Nogawa Park and No-Gawa (gawa = river) are next to an international school and an international college, so it is one of the places outside of metro Tokyo that you will find a lot of foreigners and mixed race kids (Japan in general is very racially homogeneous, almost shockingly so if you come from a cosmopolitan city). Nogawa is a large and vibrant park with lots of playground and exercise features, as well as a tiny natural history museum.
Down at the river, a group of school children were collecting specimens. We left as one of the first big daytime rains of my trip began.
The jet leg on arrival in Tokyo is miserable, and goes on for days. We are 16 hours ahead of Pacific Standard Time, which means a mid-afternoon nap puts you right back into the U.S. sleep cycle.
I have been waking up at 4:30 most mornings, and it is so overcast it is hard to adjust to the time over here. I took this shot around noon, but it just as well could have been 6 p.m.
Luckily, it is much easer to adjust on return.
Mini storage is an investor's best friend, and in Tokyo I have seen a couple of flexible sites - connex containers stacked two or three high in empty lots.
Land is at an extreme premium here, and it is interesting to see urban gardens all over the place, as well as older homes regularly torn down and replaced with newer.
However, Tokyo is not immune to the recent global real estate meltdown. A cleared lot near my in-laws' home meant for condos is still vacant, going on three years now.
Electronics shops are everywhere in Tokyo. Shinjuku, known for its nightlife, has some of the best.
Yamada in Fuchu is kind of like a Fry's, but without the warehouse feeling. Here you can seek Walkman trying to compete with the iPod. Japanese phones for a long time were ahead of the curve (just watched a woman buy cigarettes by pressing her mobile against a street vending machine), but now the iPhone and Androids dominate.
"Inception" promos are playing all over the place due to co-star Ken Watanabi. 3D TV seems to be coming of age here at about the same pace as the U.S.
Driving around (or, in my case, riding) Tokyo is first frightening, then exhilarating, then, finally, a routine adventure. The side streets are incredibly narrow, so that you'd think they were one way. Most often they are not.
Bikes, seniors, school kids and two way traffic all compete for something like 15 feet of space. Many Japanese have small cars for short trips, and bigger America models for the weekends.
My mom-in-law's boyfriend is partial to Ford and Chrysler. He is kind of a crazy driver, and even in this tiny bug of a car, he keeps a radar detector.
Hidemitsu San's political ad is all over on the street-level wooden billboards that Tokyo has set up for its political wannabes and other candidates.
His basic pitch is that he personally lost weight and knows how to keep it off - the country needs that kind of determination in its leaders to continue in ship shape. The bizarre ad reminds me of another zany Japanese politician, a former wrestler who several years back campaigned in his mask. Yes.
Most of Japanese politics is much more serious, although there has been a bad spell, mostly due to the recently resigned prime minister, who consulted with Indian fortune tellers and whose wife claimed to have been abducted by aliens. Yes.
Elections are in full swing, and my wife has been approached on the streets by canvassers for a women's rights party that is looking to make a splash. The Japanese right is the enduring fringe element, driving around Tokyo in mini-buses shouting pro-Emperor slogans from bullhorns.
For dessert, we again skipped the Aeon mall chains (Baskin Robbins ice cream) and hit up a stand selling several variations of taiyaki, a stuffed and toasted batter delicacy. Takoyaki is squid toasted up in the same stuff, also very good ;) I opted for custard; other options included red bean.
We skipped the very popular Subway sandwich franchise and opted for something a little closer to traditional fare - at least the same hemisphere. Extraordinary bimbimba. The Akirunoshi mall has sushi, traditional Japanese and easternized European fare, and a couple great Korean places.
Today we drove over to the newish Aeon shopping mall in Akirunoshi, about an hour from he family home. As Tokyo shopping malls go, it was not a standout - boutique clothings shops, a large supermarket, a movie theater. However, as in most Tokyo malls, the food was quite good.
