I had dreamt of visiting Japan since I was a kid. When I thought of it I painted in my mind images of big cities, rolling hills, cherry blossoms and tall mountains. In college I took Japanese as an elective because my fascination with this country didn’t fade as I grew up and listening to my Japanese native teacher speaking conjured up the images I had as a kid. After three failed attempts, it finally came the day when I was going to see all this with my own eyes… and my camera’s “sensor”; at last a photographic trip across Japan. The 12 hours between Houston and Tokyo were spent watching movies and absorbing the
information contained in my faithful Lonely Planet guide and it wasn’t long before the landing gear touched down on Japanese land. Nihon e irasshai mase, welcome to Japan,
pronounced the flight attendant.
I wasn’t even out of the gangway and I already had a grin on my face that I couldn’t wash out. My first mission was finding the travel agency on the ground level where I could exchange my voucher for an unlimited use 14 days train pass and meet up with my friend Lindsey who was arriving on a different flight. The agency was easy to find and Lindsey showed up an hour later, right on time.
Those of you who read my Peru blog will remember that on that occasion Lindsey showed up three hours late, making me wonder if she’d show up at all.
Getting to Tokyo was easy and the train ride across the countryside was enjoyable. At the station we met a lady from Singapore who made a trip to Japan to admire the cherry blossoms (sakura) her yearly pilgrimage. Her fluency in Japanese helped us get some subway tickets to Asakusa, the part of Tokyo where we were staying, but somehow managed to get us lost inside the train station. I rarely get lost, my inner compass seems to work quite well even in pl
aces I have never been to before, it must be a sense that gets developed with years of traveling, but I followed her because it seemed she knew where she was going… so we thought. Once we found ourselves again, and the right train, we ended up in Hasakusa. It was dark. The very pleasant lady from Singapore was still with us as she had not booked a hotel and trusted that we had made the right choice. All we had was the address to our hostel and my knowledge, gained in college, that Japanese streets don’t have names and therefore when people tell you how to get to a place they often draw a map or ask the police which, not unlike Scotland, major task is to help people find their way. I remembered a nightmare I had months before when I dreamt of being a pizza delivery guy in Tokyo, I had woken up with a sense of panic.
I saw a police kiosk on the opposite side of the street and asked, in a rusty Japanese that had not seen a grammar book since college, for directions. Out of professional deformation, I have no idea why I did that, I also asked where was the closest camera shop. The police was very friendly but even after they consulted their maps for a while their directions didn’t help much. We ended up walking for about thirty minutes to finally get to destination, and find out that the hostel was just 5 minutes walk from the subway station we got out of, had we taken the right path. Lesson learned. We stopped at the bar downstairs for a little while to talk to the other hostel residents and ask about their experiences then called it a night. I pretty much fell asleep as soon as I hit the bed and slept deeply in the silence of the night (no sarcasm, it was really quiet).
