Saturday, Nov. 4, 2023 – After 11 years and at least three canceled trips, we finally made it back to Japan yesterday. It felt like a real triumph just to step off the airplane at Haneda. Six and a half years ago, we had already checked into our flight to Tokyo when a doctor told me not to get on the plane because I had blood cancer. I never thought I would make it back to Japan, or anywhere, ever again. Then a stem-cell-transplant a few harrowing years later, we planned a second trip in March 2020 with Mitchell, Alex and Will – that was obviously abruptly canceled by the pandemic. We tried again in 2021, but Japan still hadn’t opened back up to the world. I was increasingly anxious in the days leading up to this trip, certain that something horrible was going to happen. At the Seattle airport, we were told there was problem with our flight – a volcano in Russia blowing its top and sending a huge plume of ash into the sky, cancelling all flights into Seoul and Shanghai. I thought once again we would be foiled, but our flight made it, via a 2-hour detour south, stretching our trip into more than 12 hours. We were so grateful to make it. “Tadaima” is what you call out when you return home – and your family calls back “Okaeri-nasai!” or welcome back. I feel so lucky to be here.

I will try to keep this short, since we are exhausted. Rick reminded me today how I pushed our friends Helen and Mike so hard on our first day in Tokyo 11 years ago that Helen actually cried because her feet hurt so bad. I still feel terrible about that, but Rick said I almost pushed him as far today! Not really, but it was a long day that started about 1:30 a.m. when Rick popped awake and never was able to go back to sleep. I think I woke up about 2:30 and called it a morning, fixed coffee and did laundry (no lines at that hour, conveniently the coin laundry was across the hall.) We are staying at a great hotel in Toyosu called the Matsui Garden Hotel Toyosu. Great design, absolutely phenomenal views from our 34rd floor room. It is small but perfect, and located very close to the new Toyosu wholesale seafood and produce market that replaced the old fish market at Tsukiji (more on that later). The hotel is also a short walk to the TeamLab Planets immersive digital art experience. (Elon Musk visited recently and loved it – it was also just named the leading attraction in Asia – yes, all of Asia.) We had no trouble making it to the tuna action at Toyosu Market at 5:30 a.m. We had won the lottery (only about 25 people a day win the lottery to get close to the daily tuna auction, where fish from all over the world are auctioned to the highest bidder and fish can go for over a hundred thousand dollars – per fish.)

From there, we got in line at the digital art experience a half hour before it opened at 9 a.m. Though there were probably three dozen people in front of us in line, somehow we managed to get our shoes and socks stored in the lockers before everyone else and were the first people in. It gets very crowded so we felt lucky. We first navigated a hellish room with an uneven surface of collapsing marshmallow fun-house pillows – I fell at least three times – and from there it got better. There was an insanely beautiful “infinity” piece, where thousands of LED lights created gorgeous and dizzying light shows all around us. The mirrored floors and ceilings heightened the effect. It felt like Kusama Yayoi’s infinity pieces made infinite. Rick’s favorite was a room filled with water that reached up to our knees and was filled with digital fish swimming all around our legs. It was beautiful and so colorful. The images reacted to our movements, which was a little freaky. Perhaps the most gorgeous, but dangerous was the room where you were literally inundated with digital images of flowers. It was crazy – beautiful at first but then both Rick and I had severe vertigo – the whole room was spinning- and we fled.

From there, we headed north, and stopped off in Tsukiji to buy a knife for Rick. I said, oh it’s close to the station, let’s just pop in to the Aritusgu knife shop. Well, we and about 100,000 other people were just “popping by” for lunch. The tiny streets around Tsukiji were crammed with holiday-goers, lining up in what looked like insanely long lines for sushi and ice cream and ramen and grilled anything. It was actually hard to even move at times it was so crowded. That experience drained us a bit, but not deterred we headed for Kappa-bashi, a street in the old part of Tokyo near Asakusa that caters to restaurants and chefs looking for everything needed to run a kitchen or a restaurant – knives, dishes, aprons, plastic fake food for display in the window, the signs and the curtains hanging over the entranceways to restaurants. It was so fun, but very hot and humid (in November!) and we wilted a bit. We bought some “Daigaku imo,” or university potato, a sticky-sweet roasted potato from what looked like an ancient shop, but could find no place to sit and eat them. You cannot eat on the street in Japan, which is hard when you want to eat street food! Rick was a gamer and we then took a subway to a neighborhood called “Kuramae,” described as the “Brooklyn of Tokyo.” It was filled with super hip coffee shops – on every block, filled with mostly fashionable young women – and expensive purse shops. It was a lovely, quiet neighborhood, the kind of place where a man noticed we were having trouble finding a subway station and walked us about 10 minutes to the correct entrance. Lovely.

We finished our day eating one of the “5 heritage rice dishes” of Japan – kamameshi – or the old fisherman’s dinner of clams over rice in the Kiyosumi-Shirakawa neighborhood on the east side of the Sumida River. We found a wonderful old hole-in-the-wall, famous for its kamameshi and just down the street from one of our favorite museums ever – the Fukagawa-Edo Museum. We brought Will here when he was little, and Mike and Helen a few years later. This was the first neighborhood where we saw Japanese women out walking in kimono – not the tourists in the rented “kimono” which were all over Asakusa, but just regular people out visiting the museum and temples in their neighborhood. (When I was here in the 1980s, kimono seemed much more common.) Here it seemed just normal. No one was taking selfies.

We are now back in the room – with our stunning view of skyscrapers stretching south along the Sumida River to the Toyosu Market and the bay beyond. Tomorrow – we head to Kanazawa. Hold onto your hats and stay tuned!