Sept. 25: Tokyo

One last day in Tokyo, and what to do? Well, check the e-mail at Kinko’s, which I did, then go back to the hotel and work on this some, and then, I guess, head off to “Kitchen Street,” Kappabashi-dori, to see the plastic food, and, maybe, buy some.

In the lobby of the hotel, on an obscure rack stuffed with tour brochures, I found an actual Tokyo subway map, inserted backside-out in the rack so that its title wasn’t visible. Had I had this earlier, it certainly would have solved some problems, I think. But I also saw that it’d be relatively easy to head to where I was going, so I struck out for the far reaches of town. It’s true that the temple at Asakusa had been highly recommended, but with the stress of the news and the daily wearing-down of the journeying, I wasn’t in much mood for any more culture of that sort.

Instead, the place I wound up gave me a lot more culture, of a different sort. Basically, if you are opening a restaurant, you can get every single thing you need, except, of course, a chef, waiters, and the food itself, on Kappabashi-dori and a few of its side-streets. Crockery, cooking equipment, a few wholesalers of some of the more exotic (ie, foreign, mostly Indian and Chinese) foods, order pads, chairs and tables, signs that say “open,” neon, and noren, those white half-curtains you drape across the entrance. Oh, and the plastic food, sampuru, although as it turned out there were only a few places selling them, and only two looked like they catered to the trade rather than to tourists. I was fascinated by the crockery shops, but the ware was really heavy (good for a restaurant, not so good for a guy with a suitcase) and I wasn’t sure what the minimum purchase was. Bought a sushi watch in one place catering to tourists (hell, it was less than ten bucks), and a glass of Kirin beer (extraordinary detail: light condensation on the outside, excellently rendered bubbles) and a small (toy sized, actually) bowl of tempura udon in a place that was trade-oriented. They also had much better stuff, including a sashimi’d fish for about $140 that was so good I really had to stare at it to see it wasn’t real. The profusion of stuff on this street is dizzying.

An ad on the subway now led me to my only really stupid purchase on this trip. Casio has these “Wave Ceptor” watches, and I’d been struck by how nice they looked when I’d been in Akihabara, and on the long trip out to Kappabashi, I saw an ad in the train that made me check to see how far Akihabara was from where I was going. Not far. My intention was to go back to the big store I’d cruised on my first trip, and to look in the duty-free part, because I’d noticed they didn’t have those GPS watches there because they were only good in Japan. But on my desk in Berlin, I have a radio-controlled clock made in Poland that I got for about $15, so I figured this thing would work in Berlin. Thus, I hit the first Casio discount place I found, made a selection, and bought it. The salesman, of course, said nothing about it, and it wasn’t until I got back to the hotel and unwrapped it that I saw the big map of Japan on the front of the all-Japanese instruction booklet. I figure I can eBay it to a collector.

That aside, though, what impressed me was that today I was actually able to navigate the subways easily, paying the right fare and finally figuring out that tickets that get rejected, as had happened in my nightmare in Shinjuku, were for competing subway lines. This, more than anything else, is the hardest part of the Tokyo rapid-transit thing to figure out: there are two subway lines, plus the JR lines, and they each use separate tickets. Even back in the old days in New York, when each of the three lines was privately held, one token worked for all. Tokyo could figure a way to make that work, I think.

I experimentally packed back at the hotel -- it was just after 5 -- and realized I hadn’t had lunch, so I ate some chili rice-crackers and had my last Water Salad. Weirdly, everything fit nicely, the bag wasn’t too heavy, so I left it packed. I was going to have dinner at the tofu place, and had to get there early because they closed at 10, and last orders were at 9, so I called Cal to see how I could get his books back to him. He said he was teaching, but would be free by about 7:45, so I asked him to join me.

This place was again at Bel Common, and I later found out from Robb it’s a chain, but the food was exquisite in taste and presentation. We should have had reservations, I discovered, but the place was largely English-speaking, and had a very clear English menu (with calorie counts on all the “sets”) that made my stomach growl. Given the delicacy of the food, that was an odd response, but, as it turned out, justified. Cal wasn’t all that hungry (he’d been at McDonald’s when I called), so he ordered something with “bento” in its name, which came largely packed in a picnic-basket. They cooked up a soup for us to share, and then someone came with a large pan of soy-milk and set it in the center, part of my “set.” It was astonishing what they did with tofu: one of my items was a shumai with tofu wrapping instead of pasta, and later in the meal, when a skin formed on the heated soy-milk, a guy came out, poured some sauce into a bowl, grated a bit of what he said was Japanese mandarin orange peel into it, deftly lifted the skin, and plopped it into the bowl, a wonderful treat. There were tons and tons of tiny things, including three drawers’ worth in a small chest they brought to the table. There was minced whitefish rolled with tofu into a jelly-roll sort of thing, two pieces of mochi with different toppings, small vegetables, and...writing this three days later, I realize I should have taken notes. Management panicked as 10 drew near -- again, Robb says this is due to their being in a department store building where the security goes off duty at 10, although come to think of it the other place in this complex we’d eaten at closes later -- and I had to gulp my beer and dessert, which was black-bean “sherbet” made with soy milk.

Walked back to the hotel with Cal, and as we said good-bye, I pretty firmly told him I thought it’d be a good idea if he moved elsewhere. The ex-girlfriend continues to stay in touch, which he says is okay, but I don’t think is -- I think it’s passive-aggressive -- and since he doesn’t speak any Japanese after two years and apparently isn’t too interested by the culture or anything, it’d probably do him good just to ankle the whole shebang and go somewhere else.

Back in the room, I started clearing things out. Tomorrow, I could leave, and you know? I was looking forward to it.