Feb. 16, 2001
Tokyo, Japan
It's about 7 pm or something like that. We're stuck in traffic. I haven't been here in 17 years, but some things don't appear to change too much. We're on the two-hour airport "limo" bus that costs 3000 yen a head (about $30) and is supposed to shuttle us to the Tokyo Hilton.
Our flight from Taipei left on time; it was a 747 Bigtop. My very dear friends and business partners Anjan and Indrani Dutta-Gupta sat on the top deck cramped up with a second deck full of passengers. For some reason that section must have gotten booked up first because my section was nice and empty. Mei and Irene, two of the flight attendants came by and taught me Mandarin at every opportunity. My vocabulary is still extremely small (20 words perhaps?), but I'm recognizing more and more characters after having started yesterday with our translator Wendy.
Wish Janel were here... I've enjoyed talking to her once or twice a day on my Ericsson T28 world phone. No doubt my ultra light 83-gram phone will be a dinosaur in just one or two short years, but now it seems like an incredible marvel. I can take it to most of the countries in the northern hemisphere and probably several others as well and use it for $1.50 to $8 a minute for outbound calls and $.50 a minute for inbound calls. $8 is pretty steep, but that only applies to Cambodia and Uzbekistan or places like that which I don't plan to visit any time soon. I generally call Janel if she doesn't call me first, use up my valuable one minute for $1.50 (Taiwan) or $2.50 (India). After about 50 seconds, I hang up and then she calls me on 770-310-2000. We then chat for five to twenty five minutes. Now that we're in Japan, which is about the only country in the northern hemisphere and certainly the only advanced country that's different, we can't use our cell phones.
Traffic is moving a lot faster now, perhaps five to ten miles an hour. Our bus is cramped with every seat completely full. There must be 40 or more passengers making this trip worth about $1200 for the bus company. That beats Marta, which must charge about $40 per average bus... I wrote too quickly. We're at a complete stop again.
Our plane, Cathay flight CX450 made good time. From overcast Taipei, we took off over wet fields that looked like watercolor rice paddies and lush green mountains and made it into the clouds... I took a photo or two. The beverages were served and very shortly thereafter a meal. I watched Remember the Titans which I last watched with Janel and maybe some friends.
South of the Japanese mainland, we passed a smoldering volcanic island, all black and completely devoid of life except for the ominous horizontal drift of steam heading off in a straight line over to the northeast. In view of the great bay south of Tokyo, we fell into a holding pattern for 45 minutes as the sky grew darker and darker and the sunny blew turned into pre-dusk gray. Then we finally ran 180 degrees along the coast, turned 180 degrees again and then headed in toward the airport. Below were drab gray buildings like in Taipei, but more greenery and a great number of gold courses. Three hours after leaving Taipei, we landed at Narita. The whole process from the debarkation to the gate to the customs and out of the airport was relatively efficient and painless. We spent more time trying to get our excess luggage checked in and getting money and limo tickets than the rest of it.
We're moving again...
Now we've moved off of the highway and on to real streets that follow a swirling grid pattern centered loosely on the Imperial Palace. If I didn't know better, it could almost be New York or any downtown in the US. But the signs are different. I can read some of the characters now. We are just outside of the Pearl Hotel that looks exactly like where we stayed by the river 17 years ago. I wonder if it is. There's also a restaurant off to the left (viewed from the bus) on the ground floor. The roads are backwards too, and the city is spotless in the dark... Everything is subtly glitzy unlike the exuberant neon that bedecks Hong Kong and parts of the Taipei. Wow, there's even a Kinko's here. Stopped at a traffic light at Nihombashi Station on the Akasusa Line... The tourist behind me pops out his cell phone and I hear him saying in a rather effeminate voice, "Hello, Tyler, I still in the bus." Courtesy of the interrogative American redhead sitting next to him, I understand that he's from Thailand. "Can I met you in the Starbucks?" he continues before getting some kind of acknowledgement and then handing up. Huh, Starbucks in Japan too?
The guy next to is bored and has been staring at my laptop trying to figure out what I am writing.
I haven't seen any signs for Georgia coffee yet, but I'm sure that I will. My stomach's incredibly upset and has been since our Chinese dinner last night at the Shanghai Restaurant in the Grand Hyatt Taipei where we stayed for the past three days. I can't wait to get to our hotel....
We are headed to the Tokyo Hilton near the Shinjuku area. The Meiji Temple is nearby. I plan to go there and also to Shinjuku to scout out the electronics if we get a moment. Our agenda is primarily to go some on the ground intelligence to see what is going on with NTT's iMode competitor to WAP. Indrani's cousin Arko is also here with his Japanese wife Kasumi. So we'll probably meet them too.
This trip would have been so much more fun if Janel had come along. Oh well, at least she has joined NFI finally and should be able to come along on future trips if the money permits. I am sure that with her penchant for marketing that our sales will go up and that she will be able to make us extremely profitable.
Now we're passing a tower of the Mies van der Rohe school of design that looks like the towers adjacent to Navy Pier in Chicago. I think that I just glimpsed the Tokyo Tower in the near distance, but that would be too close. Now we've come out from a tunnel that is much closer; there is a big DoCoMo logo and a smaller NTT one right above it. So here we are at the physical home of our biggest technological threat. Or opportunity... Time will tell.
Anjan and I are joking in Bengali that this is actually the bus to Atlanta because it's taking so long. Other tourists are wondering if we've made it to the very distant island of Kyushu yet...
Shinjuku Station
The taxis are little colorful boxy things with mirrors that flank the front headlights. There are many people here taking advantage of the confluence of a multi-modal station and a few quivers of tall office buildings. They are bundled up for four to one, in dark colors, to keep out the forty-degree temperature. It's funny... no one has any pets.
Tokyo Hilton Hotel
Room 2513 again. I just had the same room in Taipei. What are the odds??? It's about 10 pm. Just got back in from a one and a half to two hour stroll for dinner. I'm sitting at the foot of the bed stuck in the shirt that I've been wearing all day, but otherwise pretty comfortable lounging about in a pair of shorts. We finally made it to the hotel about 10 minutes after I wrote the above paragraph at the Shinjuku Station stop. Check-in was pretty smooth. The hotel is rather downscale in comparison to the two Grand Hyatts in Delhi and in Taipei, and looks like it was probably built in the 70s and face lifted in about 10 years ago. But the exterior is rather modern and certainly much more interesting than the International style. The building is basically a 35-story sine wave, of what appears to be some brown granite, sitting on a three-story platform block which houses the common areas. So from the outside it is both daring and imaginative on one hand, and still amazingly boring on the other. The corridors leading to the rooms are rather dated and remind me of the narrow and poorly lit hotel corridors that were so commonplace until the 1960s. The room is similarly downscale in comparison to the wonderful Hyatts. This bed is a twin or optimistically a queen. There are four flat pillows, no obvious plug points (I had to unplug the coffee maker to start recharging this laptop), a minimum of wood and a minimum of luxury. It is, all in all, rather Japanese in its austerity. On the plus side, it's extremely quiet, the view is nice, and the TV is a wide one with an HDTV aspect. Speaking of the view, I almost fell 25 stories out the window when I half-fell over the chair next to the window. I had planned to sit on the 2-foot wide window ledge and type while looking out over the window. Talk about a room with a view! My hands stopped two inches short of the window on the inner windowsill. The bed-stand radio has the garish silver knobs that were the rage of 1970s HiFi systems. I feel like I'm in some kind of reverse time warp even though I'm in what must easily be the most advanced city in the world.
The food selection at the hotel didn't look that great, so I called downstairs to find out what kind of food I could get near by. A pleasant voice on the other end suggested the Island Towers next door. I went there, to a place called Royal Post or something and had an excellent bowl of seafood soup. I've been vegetarian so far on the entire trip, with the exception of this, now, exactly two weeks from the start of the trip Friday two weeks ago. That reminds me of Janel...
The restaurant was nicely done with warm wooden tones and stainless steel and bronze colored accents. I was the only tourist, which I enjoyed. It's funny, but no matter where I go and no matter where I have gone for the past 34 years, I'm always the odd man out thanks to my unique Franco-Indian or Franco-Bengali roots. That's something that no one will ever understand... I'm sure that's had a tremendous impact on my psychological development and well-being. Still, I think I'm pretty well adjusted. In so many ways it's been a wonderful boon to be so unique. But just once in my life, it would be nice to meet someone like me that I could relate to or talk to or just hang out with for a while... Then again, maybe I'm better suited than anyone else to enjoy the entire world. (Sounds pretty arrogant, doesn't it?)
Everyone is so nice at the restaurant. All of the staff use as much English as they know on me and I try to use all of the Japanese that I have now forgotten after having studied it nine years ago. Most ate in groups. A few ate solo and checked their cell phones as if they were expecting a call or as if they just wanted to be able to read something like I usually want to do while eating alone. Two single twenty-somethings dressed completely in black sat next to one another at a square table with a small stack of fashion magazines between them. One thumbed through them and the other one stared at her cell phone and laughed at whatever she was reading on it. Using a combination of Chinese food soup-spoon and wooden chopsticks, I finished the bowl in about 10 minutes and decided to head out. It was/is cold! It was about 40 degrees when we landed at 5 pm, so it must easily be 36 or so now. In any case, the wind-chill has left my face numb. I can feel the heat returning now that I've been back in the room for 20 minutes.
Outside everyone is very hip and young looking. The Japanese look like they're in great shape. None of them are muscular, but a surprising number are tall. All have the thin mod faces that look great in fashion mags and tabloids. Most are dressed in thick black woolen trench coats, which is why they look warm, and I don't. Down at the Shinjuku Station, 10 minutes from here, the crown thickens and the pace of the walk picks up as everyone seems to sense that they are that much closer to getting home. One spits on the sidewalk, and another flicks cigarette ashes on to the sidewalk. Many hold their cell phones, antennas deployed, and talk while walking around others... 3,000,000 people pass through here every day making it the biggest transit station in the world.
Channel 1: Ally McBeal is on in Japanese, but I still don't like the show. I keep on surfing. Later on another channel, some movie, "Midnight Run for Your Life", written by Shaun Cassidy is on. What's interesting is that the Japanese subtitles are vertical for the name credits.
Saturday, February 17, 2001
Tokyo, Japan
Room 2513 at 10:45 am. Sitting in an easy chair, legs propped on a pillow sitting on the windowsill. The sky is completely blue if I look straight up, but looking over the city and toward the horizon I see mountains taking on a characteristic ultra-violet blue as they always do in the distance. They sweep 150 or more degrees of my 180-degree view. I never realized that Tokyo sits in a mountainous basin like this even if Japan as a whole is so mountainous and 90% un-airable. Off to the right, at about 2 o'clock, is Mt. Fuji, or so I think. Now it's almost completely obscured by the morning pollution and smog. I just moved into the windowsill. The ground is 300 feet below. The view here is great. It's like being on the first floor of the Eiffel Tower. All of Tokyo appears below. There are six buildings that are as high as I am that are within the range of one block to two miles or so. One must date back to the sixties, but the rest are ultra modern and slightly departed from the boring International style.
Maybe 10 miles distant I see another cluster of buildings, a la Defense in Paris, in the direction of what I think is Mt. Fuji.
The other buildings are a motley collection ranging from two story almost decrepit town homes that would like perfectly at home in the ghettos of Philadelphia to medium rise buildings that remind me of Bombay. Traffic flows below in an orderly fashion. At this tie of the day, there appear to be many more vehicles than there are people down there.
It's been 17 years since I was last here. Baba, Ma and Shomit and I came together as we went around the world. Last time, I was 17. That was half my life ago. I'll be 51 if I don't come again until another 17 years go by. That's a frightening thought. The world will have changed so much by then. I'll be dictating (or maybe thinking?) into some kind of recording apparatus to get my words down into some kind of electronic (?) format.
And I had a three-year old brother who was seeing so much for the first time as were we. Then I remember being so amazed at how modern and automated life was in Japan. They were so far ahead of us. It was truly amazing. I had never seen so many dispensing machines in my life. Georgia coffee? What the heck is a product named Georgia Coffee doing here in Japan? It even has a Georgian mansion on the cover art. I later found out that it was, and still is, Coca-Cola's flagship product here in the Land of the Rising Sun.
The people were so nice and so polite; it was astounding. Our Southern hospitality holds no candle to the wonderful Japanese people. How could they have been so ruthless in WWII? How could they have committed the unspeakable atrocities of Nanking, of Bataan and elsewhere? But now, 65 to 55 years later, it's hard to find any reminder of this recent past epoch of Japanese history. Indeed, we read in the American press that the Japanese have practically expunged all references to the war, that the Japanese kids don't know that we fought on different sides, and that the Japanese have never been taught any of the negatives of their side of the conflict. Our last impression of Japan on that trip in 1983 was a mother and child sitting next to Ma and Shomit. The mother and her little boy were about the same age, size and everything else as Ma and Shomit. The two three year olds jabbered about god only knows what. When it came time for their flight to board (or maybe it was ours?), the mother took a garland of candies hanging loosely around her son's neck and gave it to Shomit. Shomit was so captivated by the scintillating colors and the prospect of candy that I don't think he even bothered to look up at the mother or notice her son any more. Ma thanked her very much. The Japanese boy burst into tears once he realized what had happened. I would love to somehow find those people and repay them. It's these little gestures that build so much great rapport between different nations. Japan: What a fascinating place. And the Japanese: what a wonderful people!
Narayan Sengupta
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