When we arrived in Tokyo Station, we stopped quickly at the bathrooms. When we were washing our hands, Mom told me she was unable to flush the toilet no matter what she did, and she felt bad for the next person. I told her that she needed to hold her hand in front of a sensor, and it would flush after a couple seconds. She said that she didn't know you have to leave your hand there-- she thought she had to wave it or something. "Can't you read?" I cried, amused because I can't read the instructions, yet she can. She laughed, and we shook our hands dry, as there are no paper towels in train stations. We left the station and decided to walk to the Imperial Palace and explore the grounds. Mom told me brief histories of the palace, and how it was first used during the Meiji period, after the Shogun had given the power back to the Emperor. We saw many school children taking tours of the grounds and foreigners taking pictures.
After spending a good chunk of time taking pictures, we headed to the Diet building. Along the way, we passed about half a dozen taxis full of sleeping cabbies. I found it fairly amusing. When we reached the Diet, we asked the gate guards if they were doing tours. We signed up for the next tour, which would be in an hour, and walked to the Kensei Kinenkan (Parliamentary Museum) and poked around for about half an hour, checking out the historical exhibits. We were a little crunched for time, so we hurried back to the Diet building and waited in their lobby. The lady at the counter was kind enough to switch the video language to English, so I could understand it. I felt a little bad, though, as a few minutes into the video about 10 Japanese people came in. They didn't make a fuss-- I assumed they didn't mind, or were too polite to say anything.
The building is quite fantastic, but sadly un-Japanese. While the builders wanted to use mostly materials from Japan, they still fashioned it into a very European style, albeit adorned with chrysanthemum seals everywhere. There were intricate stained glass ceilings that were made of glass from America, England, and Germany; they were the only things specifically mentioned that were foreign in origin. Mom kept mentioning how much money was dropped on the construction of the building, and how much money goes into the rooms the Emperor and imperial family use (which they only visit maybe once or twice a year). "Tax payer money at work," she kept saying, as we walked past the empty, lavishly decorated rooms. Many of the people on the tour began to nod off when we sat in nosebleed seats of the assembly room, looking down onto the very Congressional house floor. A chipper female voice told us all about how parliament works and what the building was made of, but since I could barely understand anything, I found myself desperately trying to stay awake by focusing on the maintenance men performing electronics checks on the vote counters. When we got to walking again, our tour guide told us that they had recently replaced the cushy red carpet that lines the hallways, but somehow these giant, dark stains of mysterious origins appeared. I am not sure why he told us this.
Probably what fascinated me the most were the smoking stations. There are areas in the hallways for smoking, but they are obscured by glass walls and the smoker must stand next to an air intake fan, much like a fume hood, just sans hood. I watched half a dozen office workers hunched over these smoke boxes, desperately getting their nicotine fix in what I found to be a rather odd fashion.
The end of our tour led us through the garden at the front of the building where there is a walkway full of plants from all over Japan. The garden starts with plants from the southern islands, and as you progress the plant species become gradually more northernly, ending with cute pine trees from Hokkaido. We took a few pictures of the building itself, and headed back to the train station.
Mom was bent on catching a free bus that ran to Nihombashi, so we walked through the crowded Toky Station to the other side, where we could catch the bus. As we waited, a protest for what we assumed to be a hospital worker union marched by. The people were all dressed in white hospitalish clothing and waving flags, balloons, and signs. After about five minutes, the bus arrived. It was tiny-- smaller than the DASH in Los Angeles, and we decided that in the time it took for the little bus to fight through traffic we could have walked to Nihombashi twice.
By this time, we were starving. Desperate for anything that came along, we ducked into a small alley and found a little noodle shop with a ticket vending machine out front. We found those endearing, so we decided to eat there. The restaurant turned out to be quite good-- the food was cheap, and on the tables they offered wasabi, noodle water (if you decided you needed something to help you get all the bits out of the bottom of your bowl when you're done with your soup), and karikari umeboshi, which I discovered that I like quite a bit (I greatly dislike normal umeboshi). Their napkins also solved a mystery that had been bugging me in Japan. A lot of restaurants offer some very shiny paper napkins, and I could not understand why they were that way. Printed on the napkins in this shop was the explanation that they were made out of sugar cane fibers and were "tree-free" as they did not contain any wood products. I thought that was clever. I like these funny shiny napkins even more now.
After dinner, we headed to the Yamamotonoriten, which is a store specializing in seaweed and teas. We bought some hojicha and sat down for a complimentary cup of ocha. After that, we headed into the Mitsukoshi across the street. We poked around the ultra-expensive clothes before we went down to the grocery level, where all of the food vendors were more than happy to give us a second dinner in the form of samples ranging from crusty bread and gyoza to chocolate truffles and cheesecake. It was fun and delicious. We left Mitsukoshi and started heading back toward the station, ducking into the Takashimaya and doing much the same as we did in Mitsukoshi, albeit with less free food offerings.
We caught a train to Shinjuku so we could look out the observation deck on the 45th floor of the Metropolitan Building. I tell you what-- that is a FAST elevator. We were on the 45th floor in what felt like about 30 seconds or less. The view? AMAZING. I always knew Tokyo was huge, but it's difficult to really visualize the enormity of the city until you see it with your own eyes. Even though it was night and all the lights of the city were on, the city seemed to stretch farther than what I could see. I snapped some pictures that unfortunately did not come out as well as I wished.
After we left there, we went to Akihabara just to quickly poke around, get a feel for where things were, and get a few pictures. It's definitely got a high density of electronics stores, and I will be sure to hit it up when I need to burn some DVDs to distribute my pictures. I was amazed, not at how tall the stores were, but how narrow and claustrophobic they felt on the inside. It was pretty weird-- it felt like being in a town house or something.
From Akiba, we unwisely took a train back to Shinjuku as opposed to Tokyo, which in hindsight would have been a better choice as that is where the line starts and we would have been guaranteed a seat on the Chuo line back to Fussa. Instead, we had to stand for a painfully long time from Shinjuku back to Tachikawa. I was able to snag Mom a seat about halfway through, though. Surprisingly, the train from Tachikawa to Fussa was fairly crowded, too, and she was not able to get a seat until the stop before ours.
We wound down the evening by watching some TV and drinking tea. After a shower, I was ready to crash out hard core.
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