Tuesday, March 23, 2009

 Well, Will broke the 30,000-step pedometer sound barrier yesterday, racking up 34,804 steps in one day. Somehow, I only came up with 29,000 steps, but we were both duly exhausted at day’s end.

  We started the day out with an attempt to go to Sea Disney, a theme park next to Tokyo Disneyland. We knew it was a risk, since some school children are out for spring break this week, but we hoped that enough of them were still in class to make a visit worthwhile. We’d gone to Disneyland three years ago, and were appalled by the 2- to 3-hour waits for rides like the Teacups. It really isn’t fun to wait 3 hours for a 3-minute ride.

 So Will and I struck out for Tokyo station – which at rush hour was an experience in itself for Will. His eyes were literally wide as he clung to me and watched the ocean of people pouring out of the trains, onto the platforms and down the stairs. It’s hard to describe the feeling of trying to swim across such a mass of moving people, thousands of them rushing to get to work, as you try to get to a safe eddy out of the literal cascade of people down the stairs. After we braved the commuters, we had to walk a long way to the platforms for the train headed toward Disneyland, and I could see from the number of young people that we were in trouble. A woman with a bullhorn was making some announcement that sounded dire, but I couldn’t understand it very well, so we soldiered on. Finally, we reached the stairs (and these are WIDE stairs) leading down to the platform and I saw something I’d never seen before: the stairways themselves were a traffic jam. No one could even get onto the platform, which was jammed. Will and I turned around, and Will was amazingly zen about the disappointment.

  “We dodged a bullet,” I said, as we walked past hundreds of young people still headed toward the train.

 “More like a missile,” Will quipped, cracking me up. I love my son.

  We then decided to go to Yoyogi Park instead near Shinjuku, a park I remember as lush, green, filled with families cavorting on the verdant lawns. Instead, it was bleak, muddy and filled with homeless people. Perhaps it’s the season, with winter just behind, or lack of city finances to maintain it, or just the need for someplace for homeless to sleep, but it was depressing. Sweet Will chased the wind, not seeing it for the dreary place that it was, and kept spotting the few branches of cherry blossoms that were in bloom. We then visited Meiji Shrine, the most important Shinto shrine in Tokyo, where 20 years ago my brother, future sister-in-law, and my homestay family visited on New Year’s Eve, along with 1 million other people. It wasn’t nearly so crowded Monday.

 After that, Will and I had sushi on the 13^th floor of the Takashimaya department store in Shinjuku, with an amazing view of the skyscrapers of West Shinjuku. We then tried to visit another park to see cherry blossoms, but it was inexplicably closed. We ended our afternoon by taking the Yukikamome monorail out to a futuristic and rather depressing area called Odaiba – a reclaimed part of Tokyo Bay filled with bizarre architecture, expressways and Las Vegas-style shopping experiences, complete with fake Renaissance architecture and painted fake ceilings.

 We finally joined Rick for a long rustic dinner at a restaurant in Ginza near our hotel. A charcoal brazier was stoked at the table, and various unidentified vegetables, meat and fish were cooked on the coals by women in traditional dress. A group of loud, drunk English, German and Japanese pharmaceutical executives occupied the only other table in the tiny restaurant, diminishing the experience for us, but it was fun, nevertheless.