What the hell!!!

Saturday 3 November 07
Tokyo

Taking the first few steps out of the plane, everything looked reasonably familiar. It was like any other airport except for the Japanese signs. But I was yet to be surprised.

Alex and I stood in a long queue for passport control, but that went rapidly enough. I was looking at the 3 men and 1 woman behind the desk processing passports, and I started thinking that art indeed is just a replication of reality, and we see it as imaginary just because we probably do not know reality that well. Mangas, the famous Japanese cartoons look very unrealistic to us, but I looking at the way those four looked, with their wild, yet very carefully organised hair, and the way they moved and acted, I could see that it was so amazingly similar to the cartoons, that is if one is able to look beyond the blue and green hair of the mangas of course.

Everyone was passing right through but I was stopped. It was the bloody Syrian passport in action again. I was sent with a very friendly young man to a side-room where he took my passport, Swiss residence permit and the invitation from the Japanese Red Cross and disappeared for about 15 minutes. He showed back just as I was about to start worrying and gave me back the papers with an additional “permit to enter” sticker on my passport. The only disturbing thing about it is that he used an empty page of the passport which means that it will be full even sooner.

Went out, found my suitcase and Alex and started our Japanese quest. Alex has bought a Lonely-Planet book about Japan and was enthusiastically reading it on the flight. We asked a taxi driver who offered his services for the price to go to the JAL city hotel near Haneda airport and it was 26,000 yen (about CHF260) so we went for the shuttle which was only 3,000 yen. We waited for about 10 minutes and an orange bus took us on the highway. A woman was at the bus station with a wireless microphone giving the time and destinations of next busses. She was a bit clumsy, almost tripled and then dropped her microphone a bit later.

I managed to call Rania from the mobile. Thank God for Palm and the quad-band phones. Alex’s phone didn’t work so he borrowed mine to call his girlfriend.

In Haneda airport we were supposed to take a taxi to the hotel but we decided to have a smoke first. We couldn’t smoke in the open so we had to go to a smoking room outside the airport with double doors and about a dozen people inside. It didn’t make so much sense that one cannot smoke in the open but had to concentrate the smoke in a closed room with no ventilation, but that wasn’t the biggest surprise we had in Tokyo that day.

We arrived at the hotel at about 9:40am. The hotel looked good from the outside. I paid the taxi 1,750 yen and took the luggage in. Kyoko from the Japanese Red Cross was waiting in the hall since 9 o’clock. We wouldn’t be able to get our rooms until 2:00pm. We left the luggage in the hotel and went out for a tour of Tokyo which Kyoko nicely offered to guide us through.

We walked to the station and took the monorail to Hamamatsucho station from where we walked to the Japanese garden. A nice traditional garden with traditional trees and flowers that one usually sees in Japanese ink art. In this part of the city, one cannot smoke in the street. There are dedicated “smoking-stations” where people stop and smoke. They are still struggling in Europe to ban smoking in pubs while it is normal here that it is banned in the street.

From the other side of the garden we took the river bus in a 45 minute cruise to Hinode pier and then up north on Sumida-Gawa river towards Asakusa. From there we were in the older part of Tokyo. A little walk and we were in a very busy street with many little shops and restaurants. We were planning to eat at a famous Tempora restaurant but there was a 50 metres queue in front of it so we looked for a less busy one. We had an a delicious lunch of Tempora which was made of a big bowl of rice with what seemed to be sweet soy sauce and then on top there was four different pieces deep-fried in batter, those were a prawn, a piece of squid, some kind of a fish and an egg-plant. We had the Tempora with Meso soup and Asahi beer.

We walked then to the famous Kaminrai-Mon gate with a huge red paper lantern that led to little street-market with souvenirs and food. From there we were by the Senso-Ji Temple. I went in, through a coin in a huge box where everyone was throwing coins and then picked up a luck-stick. My luck was “regular” and my future was not clear yet… Fair enough.

From there, we walked back to the main street where we could see a parade passing by with people in traditional clothes. We manoeuvred our way through the crowds to the tube station towards Akihabara.

Akihabara is an unreal place. On a Saturday, there would be no traffic allowed into the wide streets and people can walk around. It is “the Mecca of electronics” as Wikitravel says. I really wanted to go there just for the fun of it but also to buy a Dictaphone. Every “shop” is anything between 3 and 9 floors of all kinds of electronics from PCs to any kind of apparel one would imagine. I really wish Khalid was here, he would have lost himself for days.

I bough a little Japanese version of Olympus Dictaphone for much less than what I would have paid in Geneva and we left soon enough as Alex and I were on the brink of collapsing. The jet-lag was hitting hard now.

Back to the hotel and we were planning to sleep for a little while before we go out again to check out Tokyo’s night life. I went to bed about 5:00pm thinking I’d wake up before 7:00pm to go out with Alex. I woke up an hour later than I wanted and I was quite tired. I called Alex and we agreed to only have dinner out rather than go down town. I also called Hervé from the ICRC who arrived after us and we agreed to meet down.

We went out and walked around the hotel in Haneda area until we found a nice looking restaurant. It had a little water garden outside and a big wooden gate. Inside, it turned to be a Korean restaurant where the chef was standing behind a big grill with several kinds of raw fish and chicken were ganging from the roof. We were received by a waitress who spoke little English who took us to a little room with a table. The whole restaurant was divided into little room with separators in between. We had grilled fish, fish soup and grilled rice with beer. The meal was very nice.

We went back to the hotel where I tried the voice recorder I bought from Akihabara. It took me quite some time to turn the language to English. I looked the model up in the internet and it turned to be a version only for Japan.

I watched some BBC World. There was a very good documentary about Allan Johnston’s ordeal and kidnapping in Gaza and then news and analysis about Musharraf announcement of marshal law and stopping the constitution in Pakistan. I thought about Ahsanullah and his family in Karachi and I really hope he is doing well… I should send him an email.

One of the very amazing Japanese things is the toilet… which I will discover later that is almost standard everywhere. I found a photo on the internet for it (http://larve.net/2006/08/anti-leeching/mark_image.php?url=2001/05/06/22_33_12.jpg). There are buttons for everything including one that shows a very nice looking bottom with water splashing it, and the seat is heated. The super-toilet was somewhere I wanted to spend time on while I could.

Read a few more pages of John Keegan’s “A history of warfare” about the war of the Aztecs, their ritual killings and cannibalism. I got frustrated because looking at that one cannot help thinking that violence can actually be embedded in human nature. I refuse to believe that because it makes the picture grimmer than I can handle. It was the religion of the Aztecs that required them to give human sacrifices to please harsh gods. I cannot help wondering weather all religions are just the same, too many sacrifices for too vague promises.