3:16pm we touched down exactly on time, after 11 hours and 50 minutes in the air, but it was Sunday instead of Saturday. Long day, weekend gone already. Immigration did not like the fact that I had no local address, but settled for Adam's name and cell. People in uniform were everywhere. I tried to ask a question of a bunch of what looked like policemen, complete with caps and white gloves, but they were taxi drivers. You never seemed to be out of sight of railway personnel just watching, smiling, inviting you through their door or gate. Downstairs through a series of jestures and pointers I found the Japan Rail Pass Office and exchanged my voucher for the actual pass. The agent-lady made me a reservation on the next NEX express to Tokyo and in little more than a hour after landing I was in my reserved seat on the train and had made contact with Adam. Phew, now I could relax. The map above my head turned out to be an LED display showing the train's progress along the route. Very cool.

5:10pm Tokyo central. Holy moley. My instructions were to meet Adam in the Starbucks near the Nihombashi exit. But I was currently in what appeared to be Basement 5. I started taking escalators. Each floor seemed to have 10 to 20 exits and none of them had anything to do with Nihombashi. Finally at ground floor level I found a You-Are-Here map. Still no sign of Nihombushi, but I remembered something about us needing the Marunouchi line and there were several exits called Marunouchi. Where-I-Was, and Where-These-Were was naturally a good distance apart, but at least it was a clue. I randomly selected the South gate, and as I closed in on it finally started seeing Nihombashi signs. They pointed towards Marunouchi Central, but that's only because one had to walk passed Central to get to the North Gate, and Nihombashi was just beyond that. Then Starbucks was easy. A solid 25 minute walk with my two backpacks, but there was Adam with a chair and refreshment. What a welcome sight. Let the games begin.

Shibuya

After I stopped sweating (temporarily) we agreed the best course of action was to go directly to the hotel, drop my stuff, and then scoot back out again for a bite to eat. And perhaps a beer. I was especially pleased to realize that we were staying in Shibuya, which was one of the districts one was supposed to visit as a tourist. Sure enough, the underground train station was right at Shibuya crossing, one of the highlights. It was now dark, and the denizens were out in force.

This cute shot I stole from xojapan.jp has to make up for the fact that I seem to have singularly failed in my attempts to capture the scene. What this day time crowd lacks in terms of numbers (because at night this whole scene is just a gridlock of bodies) it makes up for in illustrating the crosswalks which encourage folks to pretty much take off in any direction once the traffic stops.

The other thing it doesn't show is how homogenous the crowd is. I stand out like a sore thumb because I'm two or three times older than average, and we both stand out because there are almost no other westerners in the crowd. Not only that, but these are the trendy young things. No girls in pants, no boys in shorts, everyone was dressed to impress everyone else ("posin' 'til closin'" as CDT would say). We plowed through the crowd, headed a couple of hundred yards up one of the many exits from the crossing and found the hotel more or less where Adam thought he'd left it (only one wrong turn).

With the spritely step of one who has been relieved of a heavy bag, and revelling in the comfort of a fresh, dry, shirt, we rolled back down to the crossing in search of a suitable first supper. Noodles. Adam found his favorite noodle bar tucked under one of the railway bridges. Talk about a hole in the wall. It was just big enough to hold about a dozen customers if it was full, each perched on a stool by the bar that surrounded the "kitchen." Every couiple of minutes a train rumbled overhead. The menu was a light box by the door, you pressed on the picture of what you wanted, and it told you how much money to enter. It spat out a ticket that you then took to the cook. We were going to eat in a lot of places like this. It certainly cut down on the communication problem, provided you could make out the difference between what you would want from what you would not want, just by looking at the pictures. It sounds easy, but in a noodle shop, where every dish starts off as a big bowl of noodles it is harder than you might imagine. Fortunately I didn't have to think even that hard. Adam ordered two different things, and I got to eat what they placed in front of me. Wisely, the order included two mugs of beer.

Module Hotel

One of the features on my todo list, I was a little worried about how I would deal with the module hotel. Between claustrophobia and my need to pee multiple times per night, this set-up had some built-in causes for concern. As it turned out, as it often turns out, one's fears are ungrounded, generally because they are replaced by something else that makes you forget them. In this case the distractor factor was smoking. My throat is tightening up again just remembering it. There were no-smoking floors, but we did not seem to be able to get on one for love, money, or a Japanese-speaker helping with the reservation.

The hotel was perhaps 30 ft by 30 ft by 10 floors (yes feet!). Ground floor was reception. In front of the reception desk the floor had a clear demarcation line. On the street side, the floor was linoleum, on the hotel side it was carpet. "Do NOT step on the carpet" Adam warned. But the plastic slippers lined up along the seam were a definite flag. We took off our shoes, crossed the threshold in bare feet (perfectly acceptable apparently) and we checked in. We were given a key each with which to lock our shoes into our individual shoe lockers. We returned to the reception desk where our shoe keys were replaced with bigger ones with the same number. We took the rinkidink elevator to the second floor, which housed the main lockers and the laundry.

Inside the lockers were a pair of shorts, a little kimono jacket (actually called a yukata, a cheap cotton version of the much more elaborate kimono), a towel and a wash-cloth. We stripped off. I couldn't tell which was the right way around for the shorts so I just put them on. Of course they were the wrong way around. Put them on the other way around and had exactly the same problem. Put on the jacket, grabbed the towel and moved on to the third floor, the bathroom, or rather the bath room.

A dozen plastic milking stools sat in front of a dozen low basins and shower heads on flexible hoses. Off with the pj's, squat on the stool and hand shower. It was most important to be clean with a capital C, and absolutely no soap left. A final hand basin of water scooped from the hot tub (big enough for a dozen people) tipped over one's head symbolically proved to the other occupants that one was suitably soap-free enough to enter the bath. After a good soak, back on with the pjs and head up in the elevator again. Passed the fourth floor lounge, where all the chairs were those bulbous massage chairs you see outside Brookstones or the like and on to the ninth floor.

We beat our way through the smoke, threw the remains of our bags into our modules and followed them in. It was around midnight, and I was so tired after 30-plus hours without sleep that I didn't care about the smoke. Getting horizontal and shutting my eyes was heaven. And okay, a couple of glasses of shōchū were probably helping too.

Note to self: remember the ear plugs tonight. At 4:45 someone's cell phone went off, and did it again every five minutes for 45 minutes. I fell asleep finally and woke up at around 7:30. Took my time getting up, used the soap, razor, Q-tips, and potions they provided and since there was no sign of Adam went down to the lounge. A surprising number of the massage chairs were occupied, and whirring quietly. I re-packed ready for leaving the big bag in Tokyo station. By 9:15 there was still no sign of Adam so I texted him which I think woke him up. We checked out around 10 and started the day in Starbucks.

Starbucks was packed with folks working the free wif-fi hard. I made my first cultural note when I watched a woman grab one of those cross-legged magazine racks with the cloth loop in-between, and having set it up next to her chair put her handbag in it, preventing it from having to sit on the floor. No such treatment for our packs, which we were carrying already because we'd checked out of the hotel in anticipation of our travel to Kyoto later in the day.

Hama Detached Palace Garden, Sumida River Cruise, Senso-Ji Temple

My research of Tokyo attractions implied to me that two of the sites on the list (one of them a must-see) were at each end of a new boat cruise. Knowing how great it was being able to see other cities from their water (Boston, London and Paris to name but three) this sounded like a wicked wheeze, and after the breakfast briefing in Starbucks we agreed this would make a good start.

Coffeed up, we took the train back to Tokyo station. Sweat through and only 9am, we started looking for a locker in which to stuff the bags. Adam had done this a million times before, never had a problem, and hugely recommends it even for smaller loads. But neither of us had anticipated that this was a holiday. The good news is that the vastness of the station meant that there were literally hundreds of lockers. The bad news is that the vastness of the station meant we walked for miles. After nearly an hour, and tempers severely tested, I noticed that one of the signs said left luggage office, not lockers. Of course it was another five minute walk, and it was full to bursting. I'm not kidding, you couldn't approach the desk for all the bags in front of it, on the grounds that there was no room behind. But ever helpful, that was the deal: they'd be happy to look after the bags, but we needed to understand that they would not be as secure as they would like. The bags would join the pile. No problem! Thank you! Most fabulous! We skipped out of the office. The only thing to regret was the hour this had cost us.

Now the Hama Detached Palace Garden awaited our inspection. It is Detached because it is an island, one edge on the Sumida River, and the other three a moat. So we needed to take care to approach it at the only spot where a bridge crossed the moat. Finally my first genu-ine Japanese Garden! And the verdict was, well, kinda disappointing. It was nice and all, and it was definitely Japanese, with it's manicured lawns, and sculpted trees, some even propped up to force them into the right shape, but I was hoping to be blown away, and we definitely were not in that territory. I guess we were lucky at that late point in the season to find anything in flower, but after checking that the cruise did indeed run, and that the next one was only 20 minutes away, we were in no doubt that we should be on it. We checked out the famous 300 year-old pine, but there was no point in the formal peony garden, and everything had a decidely closed-for-the-season feel about it. I was interested to read later as I researched this material that the above pond Shioiro-no-ike is in fact sea water, (Shioiri means incoming tide) and is the only one of its kind in Tokyo. The sluice gates regulate the water level against the rise and fall of the tide. In turn this means the pond is stocked with salt-water fish such as black mullet, sea bass, goby, and eel.

The trip was supposed to take about 90 minutes, which was a feature. Time to just sit and watch the attractions float by. The question as to why it took so long to go so little distance was soon answered as we set off in the wrong direction, down stream. But this was also a bonus, because it therefore took us out into the main harbour area close to the open sea. We pulled in at Hinode Pier, a surprisingly swanky affair until you noticed the even swankier hotel right behind it. After a brief exchange of passengers we set off north again.

Eyewitness Travel says "The city's main river, the Sumida, has been cleaned up to an extent, and river traffic is on the increase again." And that is very much how it felt, though it was encouraging to see an almost unbroken ribbon park along the east bank, and that folks were using it. A pleasant enough interlude, enhanced by the smug satisfaction of seeing a plan come together, especially one formed from a hard-copy book I had read half a world away.

Soon enough we docked at Asakusa, the northern end of the route, and just a couple of hundred yards away from what was reputed to be Tokyo's most popular (not to say "most sacred and spectacular") attraction, Senso-Ji aka Asakusa Kannon. It's a good job that the crowd was all going to the same place, because despite its popularity as a tourist destination, I didn't notice a single sign.

In AD 628, two fishermen fished a small gold statue of Kannon out of the Sumida River. This being the Buddhist goddess of mercy, their master promptly build a shrine, and shortly after that in 645 the holy man Shokai upgraded it to a temple. I'm fairly confident that the almost entirely concrete structure we were strolling around was not what Shokai had put together, and I assume that this version in fact dated from the 1945 bombings.

Sadly, the most impressive thing at Senso-ji was the pair of sandals hanging on the front (that's them in the photo above right, looking more like replicas of Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki than footware). But in fact they are O-Waraji, made by 800 citizens of Murayama City (in just a month) out of 2500Kg of straw. "They are a charm against evil because they are symbolic of the power of 'Ni-Ou'. Wishing for being goodwalkers many people will touch this O-Waraji."

The lack of signage indeed did nothing to deter the crowd. The place was jammed, and in hindsight Senso-Ji was by far the most crowded attraction we visited all trip. That said, the vast majority of the crowd was centered around Nakamise-dori, the shopping alley. Around the temple and incense burner there was a non-stop stream of folks wafting smoke over themselves "to keep them healthy" but the second we turned a corner to check out the rest of the compound, such as the pagoda, (re)built 1973, we were in much more comfortable territory. Photo ops abounded and we wandered around independently, somehow both understanding that this was a little oasis of quiet in which we could safely find each other again provided neither of us strayed back into the crowd. Merging back into the flow of peeps in Nakamise-dori we stopped to watch an old man hand-making bean curd cakes. He was sitting behind a small brazier over which were 4 or 5 cast iron moulds, clamped shut. He took the far end one off, knocked it open, and tipped its contents onto a cooling rack. Then he turned the next one over and parked it on the end replacing the one he just took off. Doing this to each in turn, it left a space at this end, into which he placed a new one. Then we watched him put a lump of bean curd into another mould, and pour an exact-to-the-drop scoop of batter over the curd. Having made sure the batter covered the curd exactly, he clamped it shut and repeated the shuffle so there was again room for the new one. It was mesmorizing to watch for a few minutes, but hard to imagine doing it all day every day. The cake-maker was best of show. The other attractions were the usual run of cheap knick-knacks, so other customers were more entertaining , some in kimonos, but most in the weirdly provocative yet innocent styles of the new generation.

We had a brief discussion about walking through Akihabara, the electronics district, but we were kidding ourselves, it was getting dark. We returned to Central Station and found the office where we'd left the bags in reasonably short order. Much more time-consuming was Adam's insistance that we get our bento boxes from a specific place. After a lot of to-ing and fro-ing including up and down stairs, we finally agreed I would stand still with all the bags, and he set off unencumbered. He still couldn't find it, but he was smart enough nevertheless to return with two boxes, four beers and a couple of other snacks. Time, finally to take the first Shinkansen of the trip. This seemed like a good idea when we booked it—making the most of the daylight, but I was frustrated that I could see nothing on the trip, nor therefore get any real sensation of our speed, so we didn't do that again. Next stop Kyoto.