Marine Commencement - Week 33 (December 30 - January 5

Marine Commencement

Week 33

Alright! Winter vacation!

Well, maybe that’s a bit too energetic. It was generally a pretty relaxed week for Sophie and me. A lot of sleeping late, a lot of good arguments and discussions at night, heated enough that I received a noise complaint about a month later tucked into my door. I guess one of my neighbours is a cry baby. Or the walls are even thinner than I thought. I’ve got the little business card that the complaint was written on and I’m going to be sure to bring it home with me next year. I missed having opportunity to really argue about something, it’s been awhile. Thanks Sop!

The big days, the important ones for this week anyways, and perhaps the main focus of the vacation, were the 31^st of December and the 1^st of January. New Years. And it began early.

Sophie and I travelled down to Shinjuku to meet up with Winny around 3 PM at Starbucks. Our plan was to meet up with Sean and Kayoko at Kanda station at 9, but before then we had quite a while to kill.

I started by running across the street to Yodobashi camera while Winny and Sophie relaxed so that I could buy a new lens for my camera, a nice 55mm-250mm zoom. Very cool, not too expensive, only a couple hundred dollars new. After deciding to go back in order to pick up a protective filter for it I too was ready to go.

We were going to take Sophie up to the top of the Tokyo Metropolitan building to get a nice view of the city at sunset. The red airplane warning lights of Tokyo winking on always make an impression.

Sadly, the building was closed. It would be open the next morning, and I would guess quite busy, but this didn’t do us any good. Too bad.

We ended up looking around Takashimaya Tokyu Hands looking for food in the food court area towards the top. It was a bit busy (and too expensive) so we were about to leave when we chanced upon the sky garden. Getting out on top of the building we were treated to a pretty satisfying view of the city, including an illuminated Tokyo Tower across (what I think was) Shinjuku gyoen. Looks like Sophie and Winny got their view after all!

So we walked around a bit more before swinging by the station for a quick meal. Before long we were enroute to Kanda station where we met a Burger-King porting Sean and Kayoko. A quick introduction was made between Sean, Kayoko and Winny, having not met before, and then it was off down the subway tracks to Senso-ji, the biggest shrine in Tokyo.

It bears noting that I’ve been here before (actually it appears that I visited but never wrote about it due to an internet outage...) but the character of the place was definitely different this time. There were festival stalls all over the place selling osechi (festival food) which Sean has expressed on numerous occasions a profound infatuation for. I had a really good corn on the cob myself as well as a beer and a really nice baked potato with lots of butter. Mmmmm good. It was nice to have the warm food in my stomach too due to environmental conditions. The wind had really picked up and was blowing like crazy the whole time we were there, whipping tent flaps around and generally making itself a nuisance.

There are two main attractions at Senso-Ji on New Years. The first, and most popular, is to get into the incredibly long queue for the prayer box at the temple itself. I do mean long. It was probably close to 300m long at one point, all the way down a covered arcade of shopping malls. Our group decided that waiting that long in line was for chumps, so we secured a nice view of the temple bell.

The main ritual of New Years at a Buddhist Temple is the ringing of the bell to cast out all the 108 wants of humankind. Every strike of the bell is executed by a different person, making for a veritable parade of number-bedecked officials. Since Senso-ji is a huge shrine in the middle of Tokyo, the people striking the bell also tend to be slightly more famous than they might otherwise be. As the clock struck 12 and the bell began to toll, Kayoko educated the gaijin element of our party as to some of the people hammering away at the brass. Politicians, celebrities, grandmothers, even a few women dressed as (but not necessarily) maeko-san. We watched and applauded the strikes delivered with particular gusto while chatting away and stamping our feet to keep warm. In an odd but perhaps not unexpected turn of events, Winny and Sophie had both already had WAY too much to drink which, from a conventional point of views, was not very much. This was due more to constitution in the case of the former and medication in the case of the latter. It added a very festive feeling to the night.

By the time the 108^th want had been cast out, we were all getting pretty tired. A short speech by a Japanese politician followed and then we were on our way out in the midst of the thronging masses. We stopped just outside the temple at the giant lantern for a group photo taken by the local long arm of the law. The officer was nice enough, but I don’t think he understood SLRs that well. Afterwards it was a short trip down to the station onto the ginza line and a long trip across Tokyo to Omotesanda station and Harajuku.

Kind of a quiet train ride. Sophie and Winny were both still pretty tipsy so they spent most of the time giggling or sitting quietly. I got some nice pictures.

Having left Asakusa and Senso-ji at about 1:30 AM, we arrived at Harajuku closer to 2:30 AM. We stopped by a small soba shop and had well...soba. It was a standing room only restaurant, and the food was excellent. Soba is a traditional food for New Years in Japan. It’s sort of noodle broth similar to ramen but with a different kind of noodle. It was seriously good eating on a cold, windy night like the one we were experiencing. It also allowed Sophie and Winny to sober up a bit before the next stage of our journey.

Well girded, we set out for our second destination of the night, Meiji-jingu, in this case, a Shinto shrine. Sean and Kayoko were sort of the planners for this particular outing and the itinerary they put together certainly was ambitious. The aim was to hit both a temple and a shrine in one night and not only that, but the two biggest ones.

Meiji-jingu was packed, enough so that they had police officers escorting groups of visitors along in groups corralled together by long ribbons held by the officers. It was a nice night and the yellow-ish illumination from the lights around the temple really made it feel surreal.

We fought our way to the temple entrance and after waiting in line for a little bit, made it up to the foot of the shrine and made our wish, throwing a few coins into the courtyard (5 or 15 yen, 10 is bad luck). They’d actually covered all of the front steps of the temple in a large tarp to collect the coins being thrown. Meiji Jingu sees millions of visitors on the first of January, so I suppose it was a necessary precaution in order to collect the tons of money that would be deposited there by the next day.

So, a few yen lighter, we allowed ourselves to be carried on the human wave out of the temple complex, but not before I purchased an exceptionally cute cow-shaped bell in honour of the new year, the year of the cow. Also goes well with Blue Oyster Cult.

At this point, with both religions satisfied, we had but one more date with destiny for the eve. That involved a short ride on the Yamanote line to Shinjuku, then a 30 minute wait at Shinjuku station for the first train of the day to run on the Chuo Line. And that train we rode for nearly an hour to make it all the way to Takao at the far Western edge of Tokyo prefecture.

Long time readers will also know that I’ve been here before on a relatively long hiking trip up mount Takao all the way to Jimba-san. This time though, it was a race against the sun rise. It was also unfortunately one that we lost, but not by much. We ended up taking a chair lift even though Kayoko really hates riding the things. We had a great view of the sunrise from up on the chair. Arrestingly beautiful on that cold January morning.

After making it up the chair Sophie, Sean and I left Winny and Kayoko to sit down, relax and have something to eat while we made a beeline for the summit. We were a bit slow moving due to the insane size of the crowds there, but some perseverance and the good old-fashioned “I’m a gaijin and I’m too stupid to know this is a line” act served us well in summiting about 20 minutes after we left the two girls.

Now, when I was up here last time it was on a sweltering September day (I know that sounds stupid, but seriously, September was hot this year) and I could see a only few smog shrouded peaks nearby.

This time it was QUITE the opposite.

Airborne particles are more of a rarity in winter, so we had a crystal clear view of the white pinnacle of Mount Fuji! Awesome-です! Bad-freakin’ ass! What a way to start of the year! If there was any way I could describe it...hmmm...

Extraordinary...no...

Transcendent...no, that was climbing Fuji...

Everlasting memory...nope...

Hmmm.

Super pimp. Yeah, that’s it.

So yeah, it was a super pimp experience. It’s really not that often you can say that you’ve had a super pimp experience, especially not on top of a mountain.

All joking and mildly sexist writing aside, it was truly amazing. We spent a long time goofing around up there.

Stop looking at me funny.

C’mon, it was like 8 AM at this point.

We’d been up all night and were about 900m higher than we were used to.

What do you expect?

So we drank beers. They were okay. Slightly fizzy at the beginning though.

After many photos were taken we linked back up with Kayoko and Winny and headed back down the cable car to the train station. We were fucking exhausted at this point, everyone was pissy and falling asleep on each other. Except Sophie if I remember. She seemed unnaturally perky. Thus I suspect she is, in actuality, a nosferatu, the undead, a vampire.

Or not.

The walk from the station felt like a bleeding marathon. We got home, myself, Winny and Sophie, dropped our shit, set up the sleeping spaces and just passed the fuck out. Thank god. We woke up at around 9 PM the same day, prowled the moon-lit streets to Matsuya for some good solid food before heading back to the house for even more sleep.

The end of this particular odyssey comes at around 4 AM January 2^nd when all three of use woke up to escort Winny out to the train station so that she could catch her Shinkansen to the Kansai area. She was headed there to spend the rest of New Years with an old acquaintance from her time previous to arriving in Japan.

With this adventure successfully complete, Sophie and I walked back to my place and promptly messed up our sleep schedule really badly. It took most of the rest of the week to re-establish it.

We finally got back to normalcy in time for the 4th and spent the day wandering around Ikebukoro and more specifically Sunshine City, a very large office building/entertainment complex. They had a really neat aquarium there that also featured a few land animals. Sophie and I had great fun checking them all out, especially a tank that had river otters and, oddly enough, little marmosets or something. That’s a bizarre freaking combination.

We also got to wander among a few little critters that seemed mostly to be from the continent of Australia and other places with relatively arid climes. Kayoko informs me that there is only one small desert region in Japan located in southern Honshu, so I assume these guys were mostly from other countries. A few penguins, pelicans and armadillos aside, it was pretty much fishy. The aquarium/zoo was a bit atypical in that we were allowed very close to the animals, almost petting zoo close, especially considering that one of the animals was a small fox that could conceivably give a decent little nip.

We ate at a restaurant specializing partly in Gyoza (Chinese dumplings) something that Sophie had been craving since we got there. By the time we finished it was getting a bit late so we headed on back to the apartment. We’d had some plans maybe to go out clubbing this last weekend but, unfortunately due to most of my acquaintances being out of the country travelling, no dice. You gotta hit the floor with a big group, right?

And that was the week! Not as intense as I was expecting, but still a lot of fun!

Still reporting from the past…

Ian “Mello Yello” Cantello

Photos: 1. Shinjuku from the roof of Takashimaya, 2. Senso-ji festival stands shortly before midnight, 3. the bell used to expel the wants of humankind, 4. A pair of women who may or may not be authentic geisha/maeko-san, 5. This dude won for most vigorous ring of the bell. He really smacked the hell out of it, 6. mildly inebriated Sophie and Winny on the Ginza line to Harajuku, 7. Entrance to Meiji-Jingu, 8. The whole crew...waiting in line, 9. Tarp at the foot of the shrine in Meiji-jingu. My money is on there somewhere..., 10. Sophie spotted what is perhaps the best engrish I've seen since I got here on this woman's bag. Also, ironic. 11. Dawn from the chair lift on Mount Takao. First light of 2009, 12. Sean demonstrating his trademarked Atlas pose. Fuji was clearly shown who's boss here, 13. Fuji from the summit of Takao, 14. Shinjuku as seen from Takao, 15. A small fox at the aquarium in Ikebukuro.

All photos copyright Ian Cantello, 2008/2009.