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"Nozimo Express" Shinkansen, Shin Kobe station
Fishing boat, Shigasaki City (Namba Beach)
This trip to Yokohama started with Satomi dropping me off at Sea-Tac where I caught an Alaska Airlines flight to San Francisco. I then transferred to a Japan Airlines flight to Tokyo Narita, a ten hour trip that took me almost back over Seattle (the great circle route). The reason for traveling via SFO was simply due to a lack of seats on the usual Seattle/Narita route. Not sure why, but the route was sold out leading to my five hour (including time between flights) detour via the bay area. I saw a rather funny French/Japanese movie called "Wasabi" on the flight. Good crime/action farce with Jean Reno and a cast of familiar Japanese gangsters. In French (and Japanese) with English subtitles, worth watching. Also on the flight over I read most of Hotel Honolulu by Paul Theroux. A fine novel, if you don't mind having the veneer of paradise stripped from the Sandwich Isles, laying bare the seedy reality of desperate haoles seeking escape, liberation or lubrication in a rattrap hotel somewhere off the beach. Shabby affairs, shabby murders, shabby lives lived in a shabby, scandal-ridden place. I give it a thumbs-up; it's good in a Raymond Carver, sordid reality kind of way.
When the JAL flight arrived at Narita it
arrived at the same time as two other flights, meaning the lines in customs were
excruciatingly long. I stood in line (shuffling forward veeery slowly) along
with a thousand or more other foreigners, waiting well over two hours to get to
the front and get my passport stamped. In line with me were a few Americans,
some Europeans and Chinese, and hundreds of Filipina bar girls. It seems one of
the flights was from Manila, and there was no doubt where these passengers were
headed. I had plenty of time in line to sneak peaks at the thick sheaves of
documents each four-foot-ten-inch girl carried (passports, working visas and
various other inscrutable documents). They carried information
like:
The girl carrying this particular document could not have been over 16. She stood in front of me, in a group of ten or twelve other girls who sometimes sat down en masse in the line while waiting, playing with each other's hair, and babbling and giggling to each other in Tagalog. It was nearly six thirty in the evening -- two hours later than expected -- when I finally got my bag and got on the train to Yokohama. Unfortunately I had a dinner appointment for seven o'clock and I had to call the hotel to leave a message that I would be late. The train ride to Yokohama is almost two hours long, and I spent that time reading more of the Theroux book, which coincidentally featured a Filipina video bride who had done the Tokyo dancer/prostitute circuit before landing in Hawaii. I got to the hotel and apologized profusely for being late to meet Haruyama-san, who said, "It's no problem. Actually I found your site with pictures on the web and was reading your diary while I waited... very interesting, and very useful to know what you look like before we meet". That was sort of wierd: I still don't tell a lot of people about this site (certainly not the people I work for). Dang those pesky search engines. But "yokoso" anyway. I woke in the morning at 3:30, after five or six hours of sleep. It was awfully early to be getting up but I decided to use jetlag to advantage and get some work done, and to call Satomi. I needed to be at the Shinkansen station in Shin Yokohama at 7:00AM so I left the hotel before six, hoping to find a coffee shop near the station where I could have breakfast before getting on the train. First I needed to take a subway from central Yokohama (where my hotel is) to Shin Yokohama (or "New Yokohama") where the Shinkansen station and the office are located. Like the Shinkansen stations in many big cities, when it was built (in 1960) the station was close to nothing except itself. Now, however, it has a thriving low-rise business district (or "edge city", as they're sometimes called) that has sprung up around the station, making it a destination in itself. (This is a fact that transportation planners in the U.S. seem to miss: it's a waste of effort trying to build a major rail system or highway in the middle of a mature city. It won't solve the immediate transportation problems, and the cost to build it will be enormous. Instead the rail system and its stations (or the new highway) should be outside the city, where the land is cheaper. The system will bleed money for a decade or two until the suburbs and the businesses -- the "new city" -- grow up around it, easing the density and traffic crunch in the inner city. So why don't we build a commuter rail line out to, say, Snoqualmie and North Bend rather than trying to surgically insert surface rail lines into already-developed suburbs?) At this hour of the morning the subway station was very quiet, almost empty of people. There were no coffee shops open before seven, either at Yokohama or Shin Yokohama stations. I bought an orange juice and a melon bread at a kiosk and sat in the waiting area until Yamamoto-san, Maruyama-san and Suzuki-san showed up to meet me. We boarded the Nozomi Express and headed south to Kobe, some two and a half hours away. During the trip we passed through some heavy rain squalls (two typhoons have hit in as many days). I was busy with my notebook computer and didn't have much time to look out the window. Exiting the train at Shin Kobe (another Shinkansen-serving edge city), we took a taxi through downtown to a non-descript section of Kobe where I conducted a two-hour presentation to a potential customer/partner who will remain nameless. The meeting went over by thirty minutes so we had to dash back to the station with barely time to pick up box lunches before getting back on the train and heading north, this time to Kyoto. Another long taxi ride, then another two or three hour meeting with another prospective customer. Back to the Shinkansen station, time for a quick dinner at a station restaurant, then back on the train and to Shin Yokohama, the subway and my hotel, 16 hours after leaving in the morning. A tiring day to be sure. On my one day off I took the train from Yokohama to Chigasaki City to see a "haore" festival and then, after that, to Kamakura and back to Yokohama. I returned via Sakuragicho, which was absolutely packed with people, many wearing cotton yukata, on their way to the fireworks being held later in the evening. It was nice weather, though a bit hot and humid. Here are some fine pictures from the festival and from Kamakura:
Namba Beach (summer haore festival)
Beach crowds, Shigasaki
Summer festival, Chigasaki City
Summer festival, Chigasaki City
Summer festival, Chigasaki City
Summer festival, Chigasaki City
Kamakura
Kamakura
Kamakura
Kamakura
Kamakura
Kamakura
Kamakura
Kamakura
Kamakura
Kamakura
Yokohama
Yokohama
Yokohama
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