Japan – sushi, sweat and urban sprawl in Tokyo and beyond

Japan has always been at the top of my travel bucket list.

Far-off and unique, it’s appealed to me for a long time.

I’ve been a fan of various aspects of Japanese culture, actually, since I was a teenager.

And finally we’re here.

Morena’s booked us a trip to Japan. Officially, this was supposed to be my 40th birthday present, but last year we ended up spending our money elsewhere.

This year, with the decline of the yen – and the general price increase in Europe – it started to look like Japan is no longer more expensive than anywhere else.

So Morena booked us a flight across Europe and Asia, and a day later, here we are – checking into a hotel in Tokyo.

The hotel lobby is on the 18th floor of a building in Hibiya, near the Imperial Palace. Our room is on the 24th. This is high enough that my ears pop on the way up in the elevator.

I’ve been fasting all the way from Barcelona, because I thought arriving in Asia hungry and on very little sleep would be a funny joke. And it is. We leave our bags in the hotel room.

Time to hit the streets.

Tokyo night life

It looks like Morena might have gotten us a hotel in the red-light district.

I’m not sure, though. There are plenty of bright lights and people, restaurants and bars.

Drunk guys are out and about in groups, all wearing black pants and white shirts – I think that’s just the style around here. And on several of the streetcorners, young women are standing dressed as sexy schoolgirls, holding signs saying “Girls Bar”.

This may just be a typical Japanese street scene after dark. But neither of us have been here before, and we’re a bit confused.

We wander up and down the streets near our hotel, looking for something to eat. Having little knowledge of the culture (and even less of the language) we can only guess what kind of food is served in most places.

Morena makes liberal use of the camera function on Google Translate. I just look in the windows. The fact that a lot of restaurants seem to be on the 8th floor of some building doesn’t help. Street life in Tokyo is several layers deep, and to have a look at some restaurant involves getting in an elevator and then walking up and down hallways searching for the right place, past massage parlors, thrift stores and karaoke bars.

Finally we find a barbecue place – Korean or Japanese barbecue – to satisfy my protein needs.

We’ve only been here a few hours, and I’m already worried I might be offending people. Japan is famous, in my mind, for its obsession with politeness. The wet napkin on the table – should I use it now, or after I eat? Am I holding my chopsticks right? Or is my poor technique an insult to someone’s ancestors?

(I’m not even making that last bit up: the Uncanny Japan podcast has a whole episode about chopstick etiquette, and there’s a LONG list of rules about it. You could even be summoning evil spirits with your mishandling of a pair of chopsticks. It’s totally a thing.)

In any case, the dinner is cheap and satisfying – pork belly, various cuts of beef, rice and kimchi – and we get out before causing some sort of international incident.

Afterwards, Morena wants a taiyaki – a waffle in the shape of a fish, filled with red bean paste. I’m hoping for some ice-cream, but the Japanese seem to be unfamiliar with the concept of chocolate.

Oh well. Morena gets her taiyaki. I find a small tub of ice-cream (flavor unknown) at 7-Eleven, and we go back to the hotel room to sleep off our jet lag.

Clavell, Murakami, Suzuki, Mishima

I feel like I know a bit about Japan already. At least I’ve read a few books about it.

But nothing really prepares you for being on the ground in an Asian country.

My first trip to India was pretty shocking. I also went to Thailand that time. A couple years later, I was back in India marrying Morena. So this is my third time in Asia, and so far Japan is even more surreal than I imagined.

Chaotic isn’t quite the word: it’s well-organized and clean. But Tokyo is the world’s biggest city, with over 37 million people – even the quiet areas have a lot going on, I would assume, and I have no idea if where we’re staying is a quiet area or not.

About those books, though…

There’s James Clavell’s Shōgun, which I read as a teenager. That one’s recently been made into a miniseries, again. It’s about political intrigues in medieval Japan, and has a lot of great cultural detail.

There are a couple by Haruki Murakami, who writes magical realism – I’m not sure what I learned about Japan from him, but his books can be fun to read. And there’s Shunryu Suzuki, who wrote an introduction to Zen Buddhism called Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind – it’s a classic within that (small) category of books.

And then there’s Yukio Mishima, who wrote a series of novels about the decline of Japanese culture through the first several decades of the 20h century – all the while running a paramilitary organization and organizing a coup attempt. When the coup attempt failed, he committed ritual suicide like one of the old samurai, screaming “Long live the Emperor!” and thrusting a sword through his own belly.

That’s the kind of author biography that would get 20-year-old Daniel on his bike to the nearest bookstore. When I heard about Mishima from a co-worker back in my barista days, I went out and got a copy of Spring Snow. Then, living in Spain a year or two later, I read the rest of the books in the series.

They’ve got sex, death, reincarnation, and plenty of yearning for Japan’s imperial past. Maybe not for everyone, but they sure got my youthful brain tingling with thoughts of someday visiting Japan.

And while we’re on the topic, I can’t go without mentioning Dan Carlin’s series of podcasts Supernova in the East, about the Asian and Pacific part of World War II. We don’t talk about that nearly as much as we do the battle against fascism in Europe, but it was just as brutal – perhaps more so.

The Japanese Mind

The next day I’m up early looking for some iced coffee.

I manage to get through the formality of purchasing something in a Japanese café with a straight face. The girl behind the register shouts a greeting as soon as I walk in. IRASSHAIMASE!

The greeting is then repeated by all the other workers: IRASSHAIMASE! IRASSHAIMASE!

I glance at the menu and point. She pours me a large glass of iced coffee, which comes out to 450 yen – under 3 euros. Apparently, to say you want to pay by card, you say “card-o”, after which the person at the register will offer you a “receipt-o”.

I sit down at a long table next to an older guy who’s napping with his chin on his chest.

This is real iced coffee: strong, cold and abundant. The Spanish system of “here’s a shot of espresso and here’s an ice cube, mix them as you will” is bullshit.

Japan 1, Spain 0.

Time to text some Japanophile friends for recommendations.

Andrew out in Madrid recommends a book called The Japanese Mind by Roger J Davies (and others). I get it with my Audible credits and start listening. From Chapter One I learn that “the Japanese tend to think that people who express themselves openly and clearly are childish”.

Apparently, the Japanese think of themselves as members of certain groups (a school, a company, a club) more than as individuals, and they value group harmony above all else. Expressing yourself too directly can start arguments – ruining the group harmony and eventually leading to your exclusion from the group.

This approach to communication even applies to dating and marriage. Silence reigns in “conjugal relationships, because the couple are in love, but too embarrassed to express their feelings in speech”.

Interesting. I’ve always wondered, living in the US and in Spain, if there are cultures somewhere that value introverts a bit more. Maybe Japan is one of them.

The fish market and the Buddhist temple

Back at the hotel, Morena wants to go to a fish market.

At the Tsukiji Outer Market we spot some giant oysters – for a few hundred yen the guy puts them on the grill for us. A few minutes later, he adds a squirt of soy sauce and hands them over. Payments in cash – despite the country’s reputation for being high-tech, a lot of places in Japan don’t take cards.

Wandering around the market, we have sushi, skewered wagyu beef, grilled salmon and more. Around the corner, Yonemoto Coffee claims to have been “loved by John Lennon”.

Next to the fish market is a large Buddhist temple, and we get there just in time for… something.

A lady at the door tells us to sit in the tourist section, and we do. A minute later, some monks come out. The older one bows before several sacred objects around the altar while the others sit and play a long droning song on instruments that sound like kazoos. Eventually they start chanting.

They’ve been chanting the same 8 verses over and over for about 20 minutes by the time Morena and I leave.

I’ve had a long relationship with Buddhism, of the sort where you sit on pillows in someone’s living room and listen to a dharma talk, maybe meditate for a while. But this is my first contact with actual organized Buddhism, all the way in Asia, and I leave a bit confused.

Was that a Buddhist mass? I’m not really sure.

According to Wikipedia, the architecture of Tsukiji Temple is famous for its Indian influence, which Morena notices right away. There’s actually a lot of Indian influence around Asia, and I’m sure there’s considerable backstory there.

But before I get too deep into Hindu theology and the avatars of Vishnu, let’s talk about the weather.

Visiting Japan in summer

All the research Morena did for this trip suggested that we shouldn’t go to Japan in summer.

“But how bad could it possibly be?” I thought.

I’m from Arizona, after all, so I have a high tolerance for heat – I wasn’t worried. I laugh at people who feel hot back in Barcelona. Mild mediterranean climate got you down? Try growing up in the Sonoran desert!

But listen: Japanese summer is hot. Really hot. The sun beats down like a sledgehammer, and there’s plenty of humidity to ensure you’re constantly sweating through your clothes as well.

People deal with the weather in odd ways. A lot of women carry parasols, of course. Others wear arm sleeves when outside – kind of a long glove to keep your arms from tanning.

At Uniqlo, they’re selling UV protection hoodies – they’re not meant to keep you warm, apparently, but to keep the sun off your arms and face.

Guys working on construction sites wear puffy vests with little fans installed over their kidneys, presumably to circulate cooler air underneath. I guess they go home at night and plug their vests into a USB port for charging.

I deal with the heat by guzzling iced coffees and hanging out in 7-Elevens whenever I need to cool off. Luckily, there’s a 7-Eleven on almost every block.

(Founded in Dallas, Texas, in 1927, 7-Eleven was bought by a Japanese company in 1991. In Tokyo it’s your one-stop shop for basic groceries, prepared food, coffee and other drinks, an ATM, paper products and more.)

Sitting on a riverbank, several days later, we’re looking around. To our right, there’s a lady with her husband and young daughter. The lady is wearing a UV protection hoodie plus a full face mask – all you can see are little slits for her eyes.

I figure she’s some sort of wackjob germophobe, but Morena says she’s covered up to avoid getting sunspots. After a few minutes, her husband wants to take a picture, so she takes the mask off, briefly.

Luxury shopping in Ginza neighborhood

An interesting fact about Morena is that she likes luxury handbags.

It’s an Asian thing, apparently.

And now that she’s in a sales job where people like to show off, she’s taking time on our trip to Japan to look at all the luxury thrift shops.

For me, any kind of shopping is basically torture: I buy two packs of black socks, and the same t-shirt in 4 different colors and I’m done for the year. I’ve saved my size of Levi’s on Amazon so when one pair wears out, another one appears on my doorstep the next day.

In any case, in order to escape the heat, I end up inside more than a few shops selling used luxury goods.

“Japanese women take really good care of their bags”, Morena says, in one such shop in the fashionable Ginza district of Tokyo. “Look how these Chanels keep their value!”

She points at something that costs as much as seven months of our mortgage.

It’s black. It’s leather. It’s bag-shaped. Otherwise, I don’t know what to say. I glance at the Rolexes. There’s one for 2.8 million yen – that’s about 17,000 euros.

Another fact about Morena is that she claims she used to live in a slum in Delhi. I’m not sure how literally I should take the word “slum” here, but much of Delhi isn’t what we in the West would call luxurious, and when she was a small-town girl going to university in the big city, she couldn’t afford to live in a nice neighborhood.

Bored with shopping, I point to something and ask, “So when you were living in the slum, did you ever imagine that some day you’d be in a shop selling Prada bucket hats for… 75,000 yen?”

She stops what she’s doing. “No,” she says. “There were times I didn’t have 25 cents to buy vegetables”.

Ramen bars and eel bowls

The ramen bars are, at first, confusing.

Usually, you order from a machine at the front door.

It looks a bit like a cigarette vending machine, with a hundred small buttons representing different foods and customizations – all in Japanese.

For various reasons, I’m trying to avoid massive amounts of gluten these days. But we end up in more than one ramen place.

The machine takes your yen and spits out a ticket, which you hand to the waiter. It’s fast food, prepared in two minutes. People walk in, eat their ramen and leave. In lieu of ramen, I’m usually able to get a rice bowl of some kind, with an extra egg on top. Morena’s noodle obsession is such that she sneaks off for breakfast at various ramen bars – a lot of them are open 24 hours a day.

“I can’t believe I’m eating ramen in Japan!” she exclaims, at the first place we try.

Then, a few minutes later: “It’s pretty good. Not great.”

Other Japanese versions of fast food include mild curries – rice with a fried pork cutlet on top, drenched in brown sauce – and the seasonal eel bowls. Eel isn’t actually half bad. It’s fatty and satisfying, even if you only eat a little bit. You can also get it on nigiri sushi, which we do.

The sushi restaurants we go to are often large, with several old guys cranking out balls of rice or slices of tuna. Sometimes, though, it’s just a lone sushi chef and his wife. My favorite place has about 8 seats at a long bar, and a gruff 70-year-old chef who just slaps the sushi down on the wood in front of you. Fewer plates to wash, I guess.

At some point, this guy learned how to say “Right away, boss!” in heavily accented English – so heavily accented that it takes a few tries before I even understand that’s what he’s saying.

It’s pretty hilarious, actually. I guess you had to be there.

Bullet train to Kyoto

When I was a kid, I read an article in some magazine about the Japanese bullet train.

It seemed like a marvel of technology – whizzing across the country at 200 miles an hour. These days, Spain has a network of high-speed trains that rivals any in the world, but it’s still cool to be on a real bullet train in Japan.

Tickets from Tokyo to Kyoto cost about 75 euros each, and there’s a train every six to eight minutes. Just buy your ticket and hop on the next one. Take that, AVE!

In Kyoto, we visit a couple of temples and a bamboo forest on the outskirts of town.

The Arashiyama neighborhood still has a lot of historical buildings, so it doesn’t look anything like the rest of the city. As part of the tourist vibe, there are some rickshaws around that are pulled by authentically sweaty Japanese guys. The clientele for rickshaw rides seems to be elderly couples.

The Tenryu-ji Zen temple is simple, with tatami floor mats you can sit on to look out at the garden. More organized Buddhism. Teenage me would have his mind blown to know I’d someday be sitting in a real Zen temple, in Japan of all places.

Afterwards, we walk around in the heat, searching for the bamboo forest, which sounds like a good place to cool off. It’s not. The forest is small, with round blue-green trunks towering over everyone’s heads, and it’s just as hot there as everywhere else.

Back at the hotel, there’s a Japanese bath. We’ve taken to googling rules of etiquette before going anywhere. So about public baths, we learn that most baths are separated by sex, that you’re expected to be fully naked, that tattoos are usually forbidden, and that the Japanese “tend not to shave their pubic hair”.

Morena goes down to the bath one morning while I’m out getting coffee, and enjoys it a lot. I don’t manage to fit it into my busy holiday schedule, but I do spend a moment imagining a few dozen old man dicks floating lazily in a pool of hot water, surrounded by a cloud of geriatric pubes.

Swastikas everywhere

If you open up Google Maps anywhere in Japan, you’ll see the swastikas.

Officially, the cartographic symbol for a Buddhist temple in Japan is a left-facing swastika. That’s why they’re all over the maps, and on street signs.

They’re also used as decorative elements at a lot of temples, and small shrines around the city. Some of the shrines are little bigger than one of the old boxy TV sets, sitting on a back street somewhere. People leave offerings of mochi rice balls in front of the tiny altars.

I talked about swastikas in India back in the day – turns out your favorite Nazi symbol is just a variation on an ancient Asian symbol for good fortune.

The word swastika comes from Sanskrit – in Japanese they’re called manji – and the continued use of manji in Japan is a bit controversial. But as an article on AsianStudies.org states, removing them would be an announcement “that Western sensibilities are de facto global sensibilities”.

Oh the irony! in other words… that Europeans would colonize most of Asia, only to come back a few decades later as tourists with a list of things that now offend them and need to be changed.

(It is, after all, not the fault of Buddhists that the symbol has negative connotations for many westerners.)

Still, it’s a bit strange to see so many of them around. At one point, we’re on the metro and a younger guy gets on. Shaved head, lots of dragon tattoos, and a swastika (or manji) pendant around his neck.

Tattoos are not common here. So is he a skinhead? Or a Buddhist monk?

I really have no way of knowing.

Shinto Temples in Japan

In the center of Kyoto there’s a massive food market, several blocks long. It’s in the middle of a larger shopping district. You can walk up and down eating fried shrimp or sushi of various kinds – or ask the stallholders to put something on the grill for you. Some places offer weirder things: sea urchin to be eaten raw, 1500 yen.

At one stall, I order a bowl of tripe stew, because why not? Gotta get your collagen somehow.

Outside in the shopping district there’s a Shinto shrine where they’re celebrating some kind of summer festival. This was announced on the first day we were here with a bit of a procession: it was something like the Spanish Holy Week processions, but instead of an image of Christ, the people were carrying a small tree along with them.

At the shrine, a group of men is playing a repetitive sort of song on drums, flutes and bells, sweating in the heat while a couple of small boys stand nearby fanning them. I say “song” but it doesn’t have much rhythm or melody. It’s more of a repetitive, hypnotic noise, like the kazoo music at the Buddhist temple in Tokyo.

Off to the left, people are buying bottles of sake to offer to the gods. A stern-faced police officer does crowd control, keeping a part of the sidewalk clear so people can pass around the gathered crowd.

Shinto and Buddhism coexist in Japan. The Shinto gods are called Kami and they’re represented in many shrines by an altar – although maybe “gods” isn’t the most accurate word. Kami can represent forces of nature, spirits of ancestors, or elements of the landscape, and they’re not actually visible in most shrines. Considered to be formless and beyond human comprehension, they’re understood to move around, not stay fixed in a shrine like some idol.

In one shinto temple we do a little ritual after a local couple explains it to us: put a coin in the box, then write a wish on a piece of rice paper. Next to us, there’s a fountain guarded by dragons. We drop our wishes in the water, ring the gong twice, and pray.

I screw the whole thing up by ringing the gong three times. Hopefully the Kami will forgive me.

The Shogun’s Castle in Kyoto

Also in Kyoto, we visit Nijo castle, home to the Tokugawa shogunate.

This is another pagoda-type building with the curved slope to the roof. Inside, the rooms are divided by thin walls painted with tigers – according to the guide, “to intimidate visitors” while they waited to see the Shogun.

A shogun was a sort of military leader. Japan had (and has) an Emperor, but often the de facto ruler was the head of one samurai clan or another. Wikipedia suggests that a good translation for shogun would be generalissimo, which (due to its association with the late dictator Francisco Franco here in Spain) doesn’t quite sit well with me.

Other rooms in the castle are arranged in a hierarchy according to how close you would have been to the shogun and his top advisors. There’s no furniture to speak of – people would just sit around on the tatami mats.

The rooms closer to the Shogun have natural scenes painted on the walls, representing the four seasons. According to The Japanese Mind, the sense of the seasons is an important part of Japanese culture, but (it goes on to say) these days most people live in big cities, and so nature is something they read about rather than experiencing firsthand.

That fits with most of what I’ve read. From my experience of Japanese literature, you’d get the idea that people spend a lot of time contemplating the melting snow by mountain springs, or writing poetry under the cherry blossoms – rather than wandering through shopping malls.

But that was the old days. After World War II a high-tech economy developed, a lot of rural areas cleared out, and life became a big-city affair.

The same has happened in a lot of countries.

Yukio Mishima was distraught by the state of Japanese culture in the 60s – oh no, it’s a girl in blue jeans! 

There’s no telling what he’d think of the noise and lights of modern-day urban Japan – the 50-foot billboards of impossibly busty anime girls, the flashing slot machines and the current state of fashion.

Hulk Hogan Izakaya

After Nijo Castle we head to a 7-Eleven to buy some water and cool off.

Google shows us a restaurant nearby with good reviews, so we go. Although the word “restaurant” turns out to be a bit generous. At street level, there’s nothing but a sandwich board and a narrow staircase stacked with boxes of detergent. It doesn’t really look like the entrance to a restaurant.

Climbing the stairs, we’re already having doubts. But once we’re inside it’s even stranger: the “restaurant” is a bar with four seats, a middle-aged Japanese guy and his wife behind the counter – and we’re the only customers. Too late to back out now… it’s time for a cultural experience.

According to Morena this is an izakaya restaurant – whatever that means. She points to a chalkboard on the wall, which is what we’ll be ordering. I guess the guy just cooks what he has on hand. In Spain they’d call this “cocina del mercado” and it’d be much more pretentious. Here it’s pretty good, with about 15 tiny servings of different things crammed onto a small plate: there’s some pickled vegetables, a chunk of omelette, a few bites of fish.

On the TV next to us a daytime talk show is reporting on the Republican National Convention. Donald Trump is speaking, his ear bandaged from the recent assassination attempt. The studio full of Japanese hosts make some sarcastic comments, which of course I don’t understand.

Then it cuts to Hulk Hogan, who’s showing his support for the Donald.

At the climactic moment of his speech, Hulk reaches down and rips off his black t-shirt, revealing the red Trump – Vance 2024 t-shirt he’s got on underneath. The Japanese hosts go wild.

Girls Bars in Osaka

Our trip also takes us to Osaka.

It’s another big city, full of shopping districts, temples and restaurants, and crowded with people at all hours. Our hotel is next to the train tracks, and every afternoon, some sexy schoolgirls appear outside the station with signs advertising another Girls Bar.

The prices on the signs seem awfully low, if what they’re offering is sex.

Is a Girls Bar like a strip club?

Turns out it’s not.

I do some research and find that a Girls Bar – also known as a hostess club – is a place with cute waitresses who will talk to you, and maybe even drink with you. But they offer no “further” services.

A lot of Japanese people work long hours, apparently, and don’t have time to date. But busy men can get a simulacrum of female companionship for the price of a few drinks, plus an hourly charge for the hostess.

According to my research, most Girls Bars don’t accept foreigners – presumably because we might cause embarrassment with our lack of social graces or inability to speak Japanese.

Also, prostitution is illegal in Japan – but it’s defined rather narrowly, and you may be able to receive fellatio for a nominal fee if you go to a “pink salon”. Although once again, they tend not to accept foreigners.

(I didn’t ask around, that’s just what Google says.)

The search for protein

To my untrained eye, all these cities look pretty similar. I couldn’t, for example, say that I had a “favorite” between Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka. They all seem like variations on basically the same thing, although maybe I’m just another ignorant American from the middle of nowhere who missed a lot of nuance.

(I’m reminded of when I moved to Madrid, despite having barely spent time in a real city before. Back then I felt like any area with a few four-storey buildings was pretty cosmopolitan, and generally, I was confused by crowds. So for months I wasn’t able to tell the difference between good and bad neighborhoods. I just didn’t have a frame of reference. It’s possible that the same thing happened to me in Japan – the whole thing just overwhelmed my brain to the point of not being able to form a real opinion.)

Anyway, in Osaka we’re walking around looking for some dinner.

The different types of restaurants are starting to make some sense by now, but most places don’t have an English menu, so Morena is using Google Translate.

We end up at some small sushi place where nobody speaks any English. They seat us at the bar, and Morena points to a few things on the menu.

We have shark cartilage, scallops with zucchini and mushrooms, mackerel sashimi. Morena eats the grilled sea bream eyeball-first.

Apparently, the owner of this place is also a singer in a Japanese reggae band. There are posters around about their shows. I get the idea that writing things in English might be a hipsterish design choice out here, even though most people don’t speak it or understand much.

We order almost the whole menu, in the end. It’s great, and not even expensive, after the conversion from yen to euros. Also, as usual after a nice Japanese meal, I’m still hungry.

Maybe your average Osakan can get by on six bites of fish a day, and otherwise fill his belly with rice and pickled vegetables. My viking metabolism wants more food.

Shibuya Scramble Crossing

Back in Tokyo before our flight home, Morena has promised me the world’s busiest crosswalk.

Shibuya Scramble Crossing can allegedly have up to 3000 pedestrians crossing at the same time – a “scramble crossing” means that all vehicles are stopped, and people walk across any way they want, even diagonally.

After our experiences in Kyoto and Osaka, here in Tokyo it doesn’t seem too hot. We take the metro halfway to Shibuya, and walk the other half.

If I could just interject one complaint about Japan here, it’s that the transport is a bit confusing. There are apparently multiple kinds of trains: a metro system with lines indicated by letters, a loop line that’s apparently not on the metro network – but shares some stations with it – and more.

Additionally, it’s unclear whether you can buy a combined ticket for multiple trains, whether you need a rail pass or some sort of prepaid card from 7-Eleven. The maps in the stations are massive and confusing, and depending on how many stops you’re travelling the price changes. We spend a lot of time squinting at large metro maps, feeding our 100-yen coins into ticket machines, and then hoping for the best.

I guess transport in the world’s largest metro area is bound to be complicated – I’m just saying that if you go, you should do a bit more research than I did, because the whole metro thing isn’t exactly user-friendly if you’re foreign and half-lost anyway.

One way or another, Google Maps gets us to Shibuya. We spend a few futile minutes looking for a statue of Hachiko, one of Japan’s most famous dogs. Somehow we don’t find it. But we do find ourselves in a fancy supermarket, where Morena buys a small plastic box of very expensive grapes.

A minute later we’re in the train station overlooking the scramble crossing. There’s traffic for a minute, then it all stops, and the mass of people streams across, moving in every direction at once.

After another minute, the traffic starts moving again. The process repeats.

We watch the people crossing, then stopping, the buses turning around in a long arc below us. Morena pops an expensive grape in her mouth.

Finally she says, “It’s literally just a crosswalk.”

Yours,

Daniel AKA Mr Chorizo.

P.S. I hope you liked this one. I also wanted to talk about Japan’s aging population, about immigration to Japan, and about their strange behavior during World War II. But I left all that out because it wasn’t really relevant to the topic and it would have made this much longer. I also didn’t make much attempt to do things chronologically. Anyway, I had a good time, and I’d love to go back in spring or in autumn, when the weather is a bit better.