Tokyo, Japan

First of all, may I say how nice it is to be back in the Northern Hemisphere. The stars (not that you can see any) are the right way up and water goes down the loo the proper direction as well.

From a distance, Tokyo resembles a lot of other cities in the world: full of concrete and blanketed with smog. Zoom in though, and I discovered how utterly bizarre it is, and totally different from anything else I've ever experienced.

I must confess I'd planned to write rather sooner than this, so that I could give you a more running commentary of what I was doing. As it's turned out, though, this will be more of a postcard, I've been here, here and here. The weather's nice, the people are short, and so on and so forth.

For a start, I was going to give you my initial thoughts from when I arrived. The airport is absolutely colossal, and more than 60km from Tokyo. This provides all the companies running transport to and from the city and the airport a convenient excuse to introduce the fresh-faced and freshly yenned traveller to the expenses of living in Japan. The bus into the city cost 3000 yen! That sounds a lot even before I worked out that at 200 yen to the pound it's no less than £15 to travel the 60km to the city. Thus spending a fifth of the money in my possession within, oh, an hour and a half of landing (it seems that the arrival of four jumbo jets simultaneously need not require more than three immigration officials to let them in. As I later learnt, this is most confusing and not very Japanese at all) I hurriedly boarded the "Limousine Bus" that would whisk me to Shinjuku Station in Tokyo, where I was to meet up with the people I'm staying with here in Japan.

The next observation that I cleverly noted was that Friday evening in a city of 25 million people was probably not the best time to catch a bus into the centre of the city. You see, Tokyo has a, er, slight traffic problem. Actually, it's a stupendous, enormous, Godzilla-proportioned traffic problem (not literally, though he would screw up the traffic flow a bit more I imagine) made the more impressive given the scale of the public transport system. Allowing for 80% of the population to commute via public transport (about the same as London) the idea that 20% of the population was squeezing onto these roads was incredible. It's not as if they've been slack in road-construction as we have in the UK either: everywhere you look there are expressways running on viaducts (sometimes double-decked) or in tunnels (they're currently building an entire ring road underground), and everywhere you look they're absolutely packed with Toyotas going nowhere fast.

Well, enough of that. I did arrive at Shinjuku after a mere two and a half hours, and managed to meet up with Richard Thomson, my host for the week thanks to the convenient if slightly tenuous link between us. After stopping off at a Japanese restaurant (funny that) close to their local railway station, he took me back to the huge expat apartment that he presumably swings lots of cats in with his wife Julie and two kids. After spending four weeks in youth hostels it took a bit of getting used to. "So, this room is just for me? And what time is check-out? Uh huh... and I don't have to take my room key with me when I have a shower? Cool!"

Not losing any time, the next morning the seven of us (Julie's parents are also staying at the moment) boarded a train to go to Takao-san, which is the nearest mountain to this part of Tokyo. Actually, it's still in Tokyo, which is impressive seeing as we were on a train the best part of an hour. On completion of the arduous climb (aided somewhat by a cable-car most of the way up) we joined about 500 other people for a picnic at the top. Thanks to the Japanese mentality of organised fun combined with not much space for them all, it's rare to have anywhere to yourself, and this continued to the table we shared with a climber who had brought a little gas stove to warm up his saké and who insisted we share his lunch. Reciprocating was the obvious course, but it appeared he didn't like Pringles! Each to his own I suppose. In the inquisitive manner of a very small (but vocal) minority of Tokyo-ites, he wanted to know who everyone was, what they did and so on. After seemingly establishing everyone's identity, blood type and favourite rice, he kept asking Richard about me (he spoke no English, and I no Japanese). "No, what's he really doing here? He's a friend of your brother, and you let him stay with you? You gaijin are a strange bunch. More sushi?" Anyway, he was impressed when he was told that yesterday I was in Niu Jiirande (and before that in Osuturaria) and today on the top of Takao-san. "Ah!" he said enthusiastically, shaking my hand.

I hope you're still with me! I've only covered the first 24 hours in Japan... I'll try to be less wordy from now on.

Sunday's activities included going to Tokyo Baptist Church in the morning (part of the Southern Baptist Churches; it even had a fiery Southern preacher. I was impressed) and then lunch in an obscure Japanese establishment known as Star Bucks, followed by a trip to the park. I've been very fortunate in arriving at just the right time to see the cherry blossom, which makes the city look surprisingly attractive. Anyway, a Japanese tradition is to go to the park and photograph the blossom ("and this was '98... or is it '99?") and, being Japanese, everyone has to go at the same time, namely, the first weekend that it's out. So it was that we found ourselves in Shinjuku-goen with, and I kid you not, 100,000 other people all photographing blossom and having picnics. It sounded like someone was firing a machine gun with all the shutters going off!

My tight schedule gave me only a week in Japan, so I quickly abandoned plans to go scooting about the place on the bullet trains, especially when I saw the prices. Thankfully, the Tokyo Metro is rather more affordable at about £1 a shot, so I restricted myself to sightseeing in the great city. And what a great city it is! You can climb to the highest observation platform in the city and not see anything in any direction except city. I suppose Los Angeles might be similar in its scale (I'll find out tomorrow!) but that at least is planned, to a degree. In between the arteries of rail and road that criss-cross the city, the residential neighbourhoods are incredibly randomly laid out. The streets are narrow, the flats are small and millions of people live in these districts that have been swallowed up by the expansion of the city.

I won't bore you with explicit detail of my visiting districts that you've never heard of, but I can tick the boxes next to Ginza, the Imperial Palace, and most of the centres of the city. I've seen the statue of Hachiko the dog at Shibuya station, visited the Meiji shrine in Yoyogi-goen, had a look at the temples and pagodas in Asakusa, window-shopped at the posh boutiques and shops in Ginza and Omote-sando (supposedly the Champs-Elysées of Tokyo; a slightly generous description in my opinion), goggled at the electronics shops in Akihabara, taken the obligatory snaps of swans in the moats of the Imperial Palace (the land it takes up is unbelievable: you can't even see the palace from the edge. Selling that land off would bring the whole country out of recession at a stroke!) and inhaled sharply at the price of almost anything except basic sustenance and transport, which are surprisingly affordable. Although it's an absolutely colossal city, it took me three and a half days to see everything interesting, which is considerably less than somewhere like Sydney. But I digress...

One of the most striking things about Tokyo is the huge number of people employed to do seemingly nothing at all. Japan is one of only two countries in the world where Starbucks cannot make a profit (the other is the UK), because for some reason all shops must employ at least three times as many staff as they need. I went to have a look in the Apple Mac store in Ginza, and the second I poked my head round the door twenty-seven t-shirted assistants all looked at me. Thankfully, I can do a good pretence of not understanding a word they say, which is entirely true. But it's not just shop staff: there are security guards absolutely everywhere, sometimes doing nothing more than guiding vehicles out of a car park lest they run over some errant pedestrian. The funniest example of this was on Omote-sando (it's a street, by the way) where a massive redevelopment is taking place. The site has about six entrances and exits, all of which are guarded by two guards. Two! I had the misfortune to arrive at one of the gates at the same time as a lorry wanted to enter. Quick as a flash the two guards opened the gates and then held back the surge of people (about four) on either side with legs and arms spread as if trying to stop a tsunami. I'd have taken a picture, but I was laughing too hard.

Having pretty much exhausted the city, I took a trip today (Thursday) to the nearby city of Yokohama. Mind you, it's still part of the conurbation, and there wasn't any hint of a break between Tokyo and Yokohama. They've reclaimed a lot of land by the harbour there, which leads to a distinctly un-Japanese sight of wide, straight roads without power lines, railways or expressways (or all three) piled on top, with a subway underneath for luck. The landmark of this area is the cunningly named Landmark Tower (just so you don't forget) which I paid the princely sum of Y1000 to ascend. Mind you, they have the fastest elevators in the world at an ear-popping 750 metres per minute. I'm glad the ride only lasted 40 seconds, otherwise I'd have had an extremely elevated view of the city! Anyway, the view was... interesting, in that at least you can see the harbour rather than 360 degree concrete, which tends to be the case in Tokyo. Rather bizarrely and a little disturbingly, there was a performing monkey show at the observation deck, which had the poor little chap wearing a waistcoat I wouldn't inflict on anyone and jumping through hoops to the acclaim of the audience, who didn't seem remotely concerned at the incongruity of standing on an observation deck looking away from the windows. Strange bunch of people...

Well, you'll be pleased to know I've actually finished this entry... shouldn't you be working? Anyway, tomorrow I fly to Los Angeles, where I arrive, also tomorrow. I'm already feeling like an extra in the movie Groundhog Day, but it'll be a change from The Foreigner Show which I have been presenting for the last week. Hey, at least nobody asks me for directions here!