Day 3 - Tokyo

The day started relatively early, after a good rest and sleep till 8am. Maybe I’m already over my jet lag as this was a good nights sleep! I had 3 main missions today:

1. Go to Shinagawa and buy my Shinkansen/ Bullet train ticket to Kyushu. There are ways to buy it online but it’s not straight forward if you don’t speak / read Japanese so buying from the station seemed best.

2. Get my rear wheel fixed as the airline or luggage handler in the airport managed to ignore my carefully wrapped around FRAGILE signs and judging by the damage to the wheel and how my bike bag and internal cushioning looked, heavy items must have been put on top. The chain guard was also broken but that wasn’t fixable unless I bought a new one

3. Explore Tokyo! An easy thing to do and do by myself as Mitsu had things to do today

We left the apartment around 9.30 and took 2 trains to Shingawa station. Once we got there I already imagined myself a day later carrying all the luggage to the station. Jeez, I was not looking forward to this in any way. Many stairs, long walk ways and the trek from the flat to the first station. But it had to be done! Once we got to the Shinkansen are of the train station, I could see long queues for the ticket hall but Mitsu steered me away from thinking about queuing immediately and said that we can just buy a Shinkansen ticket using one of the many ticket machines as long as I had a credit card. This is my first time travelling with a credit card as I avoided them successfully, for better or worse, up until now. I booked one of the early trains to Hakodate (Fukuoka) leaving just after 10am the next day. This experience was as smooth as it possibly could be, ticket and receipt issued promptly, so we could go onto mission #2.

Getting my rear wheel fixed was a fairly basic affair as it involved trueing the wheel by changing the spoke tension in the wheel. Any bike mechanic would do this and luckily there was one around the corner from Mitsu’s apartment. We went back to the apartment, got the wheel, dropped it off and got told to come back in 30min. We used the time to explore the local area to find some lunch as we didn’t have breakfast yet. We went to Mitsu’s favourite Japanese restaurants and ordered some delicious set menu with roasted fish, rice, miso soup, vegetables and some pickles, accompanied by some delicious tea. That was the best tasting food since arriving, not that the other restaurants weren’t good, but this one was super! The set lunch was around ¥1600 I think or about £10, with unlimited rice refills. I was pretty stuffed without any refill but Mitsu had another helping, whilst I ordered another small dish of picked vegetables. “Oishi desu” - very tasty!

We then picked up the rear wheel which was fixed expertly for about ¥1300 or £8, they event pumped up my tire and the whole wheel looked like new. Great job! The bike shop was blasting reggae music and put us into a good mood. We then walked back to the flat, had a quick nap before Mitsu went about his business and I went exploring. 

I wanted to go to Yoyogi park (Tokyo’s equivalent to New York’s Central Park or London’s Hyde Park). To get there I decided to walk, which was about 1h 20min. There was nothing left from the morning sunshine and good weather and the sky was now covered by thick layers of heavy clouds and the weather forecast said that there was a high chance of rain for the rest of the afternoon. Undeterred and purposefully leaving my umbrella behind, as I didn’t fancy carrying it around with me, I set off on my walk. If you live in a big city like London, other big cities are only half as scary. Once you decide to walk to places, distances often shrink and you get to see different sights whilst taking in the various changes from one ward or area to the next one. My walk would lead me past the imperial palace and some nice bits of greenery and the occasional shrine or temple, even through there isn’t as much greenery here as in London, which is a pity. Parks and trees make big cities more appealing I think.

I got to Yoyogi park in an hour and half as I stopped here and there to check things out. My feet were already tired and I was longing for somewhere to sit down. I managed to continue my walk through Meiji Jingu, a large Shinto shrine, surrounded by a vast woodland of 70ha and an iconic entrance. It was built in the 1920s to “commemorate the virtue of Emperor Meiji and Empress Shoken who took the initiative to make a foundation of modernised Japan.” Once you are in the woodlands of Meiji Jingu, it no longer feels like you’re in Tokyo, the sounds of cars and trains are muffled and replaced by the croaking of crows and other birds. As it started to rain, the park was largely empty with just a few lonely tourists and visitors dotted around.

En route to Yoyogi park, a Ginko tree or two

Meiji Jingu park entrance

Statue en route to Meiji Jingu 

By now I had enough of being on my feet and I was desperately keen to sit down somewhere and have a hot drink. I had tried many coffee shops already asking for decaffeinated coffee, to no avail. My only chance was to go to Starbucks on my way back to Yoyogi station. I arrived there and asked if they had decaffeinated coffee and they looked at me for a while but eventually understood what I wanted. I don’t think decaf coffee is popular in Japan ;) I managed to find a nice spot, quickly reserving it with my backpack before someone else claims it. In general, you have to put a personal item on a seat and then order. Some people left jackets on a chair, someone a backpack, someone else just left their tiny headphone case. That’s the way things are. If you don’t do it, don’t be surprised to have your seat taken by someone.

I had some tasty blueberry scone and a decaf mocha. What a treat! It seemed that prices didn’t change much for Starbucks coffee from what I remembered from 2019. A decaf mocha with creme on top was about ¥600 or £3.75 and the scone set me back ¥220 or £1.40. I sat down and copied my blog post from the days before from my notebook onto here and then chilled out for a bit more until the heavy rain subsided.

I left Starbucks and went to nearby Yoyogi station to get back to Roppongi and Mitsu’s flat. I had to take a couple of trains to get back and I felt pretty exhausted by now. I decided to have dinner in a restaurant near the station, which was a similar type of Japanese restaurant as our lunch spot. More fish, this time pickled Mackerel and replacing the veggies from lunch with salted cabbage. More hot tea too! Once I got to the flat I had a bath. This made me feel alive again as I was on my feet for the whole day. It always takes some time into the swing of things here. I always feel a little bit like an alien here as I don’t speak the language, am a foreigner and don’t live in the city. This feeling somewhat disappears after a few weeks but it’s never fully gone. Some of my friends who live and have lived here for years and even decades say that the feeling never really disappears, no matter how much you want to integrate and no matter how long you’ve lived here. I’m fine with forever being a ‘gaikokujin or gaijin’ - a foreigner or Westerner. That is the way.

Eventually Mitsu came back to the flat, we had tea together and talked about work and life. We talked about how we ended up doing the things we now do and what led us here and where we would see ourselves in the future. I shared with him that I usually think of life in 5-year intervals and how I think about designing or planning things within these. It’s not a hard and fast rule, more like a yard stick. But I feel it’s helpful to check in with yourself whether you’re still aligned to who you are, with what you do and where you do it. Life is full of choices and it’s good to experiment. This reminds me of the song from The Lion King - Circle of Life - “Theres more to see than can ever be seen, more to do than can ever be done, there’s far too much to take in here, more to find than can ever be found…”

After a long debate it was finally time to one much needed shut eye.

Before that, here another poem:

Rather than hearing it from others,

somehow I want to find a way

to tell you myself, 

just one thing—

‘Now I must give you up!’