Tokyo

The Trip To Japan – Tokyo

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Tokyo is an incredible urban agglomeration. It’s much more than a city, it’s an urban conglomerate made of 23 wards, with a core population of 8 million people. Adding the adjacent urban structures and we have the world’s most populous metropolitan area, with 35 million people (significantly more than my entire country, Romania, which holds 21 million people in its boundaries). Of course, you can learn that by reading Wikipedia. So why I’m starting with this info? Because the most powerful sensation you have first time in Tokyo is this overwhelming feeling of human presence. Huge, unstoppable, continuous human presence.

There are people everywhere: in the subway, in the trains, in the cars, on the streets, in the hotels, in the malls, in the restaurants, in the gaming huts, in the offices, everywhere. Silent, huge and powerful presence. 35 millions of people. And I was one of them for about a week. Welcome to my first post about my trip to Japan. It will be a mix of touristic information about Japan and my personal ramblings about what I saw.

Tokyo Transportation

Tokyo has several subway lines and a lot of surface trains. In fact, most of the transportation in Tokyo seemed to be built around trains. Although there are a number of expressways, the most important way for getting in and out of the city is by train. There are several subway lines, such Oedo and Ginza lines, and several surface trains, such JR lines, one of the most popular being JR Yamanote line. Train lines are everywhere, at the ground level or suspended, sometimes getting over each other for several levels.

Suspended train lines in Shinjuku

Expressways are going up to the 8th or 9th level, while trains are going up to the 4th or 5th level.

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The Trip To Japan – First Impressions

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Today is my last day of my trip to Japan, I’m leaving tomorrow for my beloved Auckland. I’m having mixed feelings right now about this trip, but I guess it’s normal. It is by far the most challenging trip I ever had, far more challenging than the trip to Thailand, and much more demanding than my trip to New Zealand.

I had a lot of things to do here and every day was filled with challenges. I wasn’t bored not even for a single second. But I’m happy to leave now. And maybe the biggest reason for being happy to leave now is the fact that I didn’t know the language. Despite the fact that I can read a little katakana and hiragana, I can’t extract too much meaning without serious knowing of Kanji. This was a huge handicap. In Thailand everybody seemed to know English and also seemed happy to talk. Here, even if somebody knows English, and even if people are most of the time very kind and willing to help, it’s very difficult to have a normal conversation. I understand that is my task to learn the language of the country whether I’m staying in Kyoto or Bangkok and I will be sure to do that from now on. But the frustration is still there.

Another reason for being happy to leave is my raw food diet. As I predicted, I had to make a lot of compromise regarding my way of eating. It’s almost impossible to keep a raw food diet as a visitor in Japan. Not only fruits and vegetables are horrendously expensive (it’s a volcanic island, after all, with little or no agriculture) but it’s quite difficult to find them, at least in central spots of Tokyo, where I was walking. Although I managed to keep a rough 50/50 balance between cooked and raw food, I still had to make big changes to my diet. And that was not ok. My body reacted extremely good to this change, I had no health problem whatsoever, which means that in the last 7 months of eating raw I improved a lot my body digestion capacity. But the fact that I can safely eat now cooked food doesn’t mean I have to. On the contrary, I miss the feelings of clarity and balance I have when I’m on my regular raw food diet.

I’m going to write more about this trip, as I’m just arranging my notes and mind maps, but I felt the need to write something about it while I’m still here. And since I’m not going to write anything descriptive or conceptual, I thought it would be better to just post some photos. Those of you who are already following me on Twitter have already seen those photos.

The following posts about this trip to Japan, which I guess I’ll be able to publish once I will be back in Romania, next week, will not follow my regular chronological pattern, there will be no day one in Japan, day two, and so on. Instead, I’ll write about places, ideas and feelings. There will be for sure posts about Tokyo, Kyoto, Tea Ceremony, Nikko and Odayba. There will be a post about Japan – the aftermath, because I leave this country with a huge feeling of growth.

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