Good morning!
It was the first real big day in the biggest city, though not my first time. Twice have I come to know the streets of Japan’s capital, twice did I leave feeling mediocre about the experience. Just a few extra moments between business to sneak into a nice restaurant or a quick walk around a famous neighborhood. Nothing immaculately spectacular. Today hope to approach the sights and sounds more casually, to check-off the items accumulating in my “Next time you’re in Toukyo” list.
At the top of a list under the tile “things to see” is a sight that has lost some fan appreciation over the years. Not with me. It is no short stretch for me to tell you that I am more excited to see this morning’s first aatraction than most other Japanese sights. Temples and castles may be Japan’s proudest models of engineering and architectural heritage but none as stylish are as stylish as this life size mobile Gundam space unit. Gundams, for those of you unknowing, are mechanized 250 meter human piloted armored battle units from the manga under the same name. There are many, many renderings and models of Gundams since the peak of the anime’s popularity back in the early 1980’s and 90’s. This life size unit is iconic as it is modeled after the first in the series.
Japan has a fascination with giant mechanized robots. If you don’t understand this fascination, respect the passion within the fascination. To posit a personal example, I am not a “car guy.” Don’t know much about how they work, what is under the hood, or what the small details are to look for which dictate which model came from which year, and so on.
However, I can appreciate my friend Brandon’s love for cars. It is apparent from the passion in his sentences that he is fascinated with a car’s physical impression and performance prowl. It is, actually, the same way my sister talks about bikes.
Can you spot me? This thing is HUGE!
Many rivers stretch through the city, connecting its different regions, retaining the natural constant that has remained its boundaries since streets of soil.
No matter how many images I look at or photos I take, the elongated lines of a vanishing points remain my favorite. These lines drawn by hand rails, expressways, and shadows are simple to stumble upon in city and in nature if you keep your eyes open. You have to imagine them, and this is where part of my fascination comes in, when you pencil two-dimensional art.
In addition to finding harder places to camp, the city mandates other changes to the go anywhere, cook any time, urinate against any tree lifestyle. Cooking with open flames, as you might imagine, is not smiled upon within city limits. Breakfast this morning comes not from the pan off the back of my bike but from a favorite breakfast place of mine that resembles more an American style set course than Japanese. Eggs, sausage, rice, veggies, miso soup, packaged seaweed nori, and cup of sticky natto with spicy mustard in the middle. Yum, yum, yum! Finding natto will be of some great difficulty once my tent is pitched across the Pacific once again. A feeling that saddens me a short bit since I have really come to enjoy these fermented beans in the morning time.
After breakfast and some annoying bridge crossing, I came to the one place in Tokyo where no one seems to be. Maybe I had just arrive early. I had been to Toukyo twice before and skipped this one favorite sight. There would not be a third.
I kept searching the city skyline for my goal, wanting to find the Gundam with the kind of surprise you only get from not pinpointing a location via smartphone. I knew the general area and direction; that was enough. In the back here, is the building that looks as though it came from the set of Christopher Noland’s Inception movie. Then, some department buildings provide a little more camouflage. A set of green trees set the scene, and stand tall as reference markers for the taller yet Gundam hiding between them in the field.
If you are going to build a giant mechanical robot in Japan, you don’t skip on the details. This mechanized unit is built with a fan’s appreciation for detail held high in mind. Drawing from the paper manga’s simple and boxy, black and white representation to constructing this life size model spectacle complete with fueling ports, actual bolts, and outer atmosphere maneuvering thrusters must have been a fun project to work on for the fans.
Standing tall over the tree line, overlooking the sea with the city scape behind it, the Gundam’s stance looks as though it rests in casual defense but ready to come alive at the touch of a few buttons and defend the city from Godzilla or whoever.
This is a shot of that Inception building from the front. With its connection platforms forming tesseract like cubes, this building idea is just a few lines short of an optical illusion.
My bike against the Toukyo skyline.
I spent enough time in this part of the city to allow for a bridge crossing. The Rainbow Bridge is not open to pedestrians before 9am, for some strange reason. There is another something strange in this picture. Do you see that which ought not be there?
I don’t this this rear wheel bike brace cobbled together from used DIY shop parts was meant to hold the weight of my rear tire holding about 25km of weight. Actually, on a bridge where cyclists are mandated to push their bikes across, this is a clever way of preventing pedestrians from cheating. I know that I certainly have the temptations to cycle where “no cycling” signs are posted.
After making it across the Rainbow Bridge, after pushing my bike the whole way across and a very friendly security guard removed the brace, there was still plenty of time in the day to run some shenanigans. You know, you can find modern art museums in any big city. You can usually find a sports team complex of some kind, and there are always city centers and markets to see. But things are a little stranger here. Instead of visiting the Toukyo Tower or Skytree, I opted for something a little harder to find. A little stranger.
Yes, that’s right. The sign reads “Parasitological Museum.” It’s still early in the day, and a workday too. I have a feeling however that even if I had arrived on Friday night date night there would not be many couples holding hands and taking in the exhibits, whispering their impressions to one another. I have the feeling that this is more of the exaggerated expression variety of museums. 
Things in formaldehyde kept glasses!
Parasites come in all shapes and sizes. Some are beneficial, most are detrimental, all extremely unique yet similar in function. From the stomach, lower intestine track, blood, or simply behind one of your eye balls, these little creatures are found all over the body across all types of bodies.
If for no other reason, we can say that here in Toukyo you can find one of the World’s tallest buildings and some of Earth’s tiniest creatures in two buildings that are not all together that far apart from one another. Funny how this little parasite resembles the number 6. Too small to see without magnification, the existence of this little guy here is one of those unsettling reminders that are worlds which we can never penetrate, and leave up to the writers of fiction and philosophers to hypothesize over.
Take a good guess at what this photo is of. We have two creatures here, one on the left in the circle and one on the right.
Taking a few steps back to see the full picture. Did you guess correctly? The little parasite highlighted in the circle for reference, is the normal size for the specie. Next to it, that white line that curves up and down against the blue display glass is an actual parasite of the same species, found inside an actual person. If sizes of the normal variety count for only a few centimeters, then it is truly amazing that this record living parasite happen to grow to an astonishingly long 8.8 meters in length. That’s right, 8.8 meters. To put that in reference, in a normal sized room, from floor to ceiling, is 3 meters.
All the cool looking creatures behind sets of glass makes for a great off beat museum, and one that actually showed a descent amount of people for 11am on a weekday. Of all there parasites to wonder an existence over, my favorite exhibit is this one. These are journal entries of early researchers from a long time about. Before the massively large archive of information accessed on the Net, before microscopes with photo capturing technologies, the people who held the rare fascination for microscopic life had to keep journals and draw by hand.
An artist, even with an honest desire to represent an objective reality depiction of subject, adds individual renderings and style. That is what I find most fascinating from these personal journal entries, the distinctions and artistic styling of creatures too small to see without microscopes.
After scrawling through both floors of the Parasitological museum for enough time, I said good bye to the many variety of parasites. That really is “good bye” and not “see you again.”
Now, cycling around Toukyo is not always easy. Stairs making a bridge over un-crossable train tracks does not make for a smooth cycling experience. Nor do all the red lights that are timed to stop any one car or bicycle from ever building up serious momentum or falling into any sort of effective rhythm. Still, I made my way across the city to check into my hotel across town. I didn’t want to sleep at the edge of town again next to that airbase strip.
Along the way, many attempts of city life were made to grab my attention. Gambling houses, tons or bars and disco dance halls, cute girls passing out flyers in provocative outfits making quick passes at lingering men to come inside and order some food from the restaurants that hired them.
Also, to my surprise, lots of amusement for children and things to do together with families. Some parts of the city feel to be in perpetual states of carnival antics. Even the passing of just a simple stroll along a random street in Toukyo can produce wonder if you just happen to look up, and realize that there is a something more wondrous just beyond the forest line you thought was just a park.
It might surprise you to hear that I was kicked out of a hotel. Maybe not. Before I could even take my shoes off (that is the Japanese way of saying "before I could even get in the door"). After getting kicked out of the first hotel before I could even take my shoes off, for having tattoos, I had to fall again into a wondering state and look for a new, cooler, establishment to provide my residency. Really, I thought this was Toukyo and more flexible with foreigners and their tattoos. Turns out, I was wrong.
Wondering around this area of town, I just happen to catch a glimpse of Toukyo’s newest tourist sight. “Well, I wasn’t expecting that,” I thought to myself. I had no expectation of going to the Skytree. Looks like I’ll have an alright view if I can just find someplace to bunk…
Welcome to bunk number 330, Toukyo. Japan hotel rooms can really be small. In Toukyo, they most certainly are. And, if you are going to go small, might as well pack in all the way. Never had stayed in a capsule hotel before so when the opportunity came my way, I jumped on in. Or, in it.
With an onsen bath, sauna, and free wifi at about 70% the normal price of a single room at a hotel chain, this option is really not that bad. It’s not like there is no room to move around in the capsule, and there is plenty of communal room, no one is ever too loud that you can’t fall asleep. Really, all you are sacrificing from buying a hotel room is the little bit of privacy in the bathroom. In exchange, you get a capsule that I would warmly describe as cozy – if you’re not claustrophobic.
Once I checked into my capsule, I was essentially useless. A quick dip in the onsen, two trips to the sauna, and some friendly travelor conversation with a group of backpacking French couples in the lobby, and I was spent. Even still, I knew that I would not be back in Toukyo again for a while. So, I forced my body out of bed with the promise of a beer at the next convenience store. Did you know it is totally legal to drink and just wander around the streets? Yeah, pretty amazing. Totally different experience than walking around sober in the day time.
Not a bad day in the life of.
Neon lit Love
-A
