Tag: street scene

Saturday Night Out and About, Tokyo

This walking street near Ueno Station in Tokyo is crowded with people looking for a good dinner and a good time on a Saturday night. A great place to spend my final night in Tokyo before heading to Kyoto the next day.

I have been taking a lengthy, unwelcome break from editing photos due to a contorted muscle in my hip that makes a nearby nerve unhappy, the result being eye-opening pain in my left leg. For those interested, the malady is called piriformis syndrome. Although I am still struggling with this miserable affliction, I have decided to get back to working on the folder brimming with photos from my October trip to Japan.

Sushi for Breakfast, Anyone?

The man in the photo is getting ready for the day’s business, cutting fresh tuna to be sold as sashimi to people who visit his small stall in Tokyo’s Tsukiji Outer Market. The only way to get all of what he was doing in a single photo would have been to stand directly in front of him and get right in his face. These days I am not as inclined as I used to be to get on top of people with a camera, so I settled for two images to tell the story.

At one time, the Tsukiji Market was Tokyo’s largest wholesale fish and seafood market, a place where freshly caught fish was auctioned off or sold to retail buyers every day in the early morning. Around the commercial market there were food stalls and small restaurants serving some of the freshest sashimi and sushi in Tokyo. For those who liked Japanese style fish for breakfast, Tsukiji Market was the place to go.

A few years ago, in 2018 if I am not mistaken, the wholesale market moved to a new location in Tokyo, leaving behind the food stalls, restaurants, and market stands selling everything from fish and fresh fruits and vegetables to kitchen utensils and household goods that had grown up outside of the buildings where the wholesale market conducted its business. The area was renamed the Tsukiji Outer Market. Today, it is a destination for tourists, both domestic and foreign, looking for good eats and a Tokyo slice of life, as well as for local shoppers doing their marketing.

Some of the eateries had people stationed outside cajoling visitors to try their offerings. There were lines waiting to get served at some places. My thoughts about choosing a place to eat among dozens of choices I am unfamiliar with in a market I’ve never been to before: Walk around, look at the choices, pick one that looks decent. Yes, I do sometimes read customer reviews but am skeptical because too often I see “the best food I had on my trip” followed by “what a dump, worst meal ever.” As for lines, I am very much of the opinion that it makes no sense whatsoever to stand in line at one place because a YouTube “influencer,” someone whom I neither know or care about and who quite possibly is an absolute moron, told me that particular place is special and better than the other places. As for the people who are influenced to stand in line, all I can say is thank you. When I do decide to take a chance on a place that looks appealing, it is less likely to be crowded with people because you are waiting in line elsewhere.

Be all that as it may, I eventually went into a small restaurant that had a menu in the window and nobody outside with a sales pitch. The place had a good feel about it, and that was enough to recommend it. The sushi chef behind the counter served up a delicious selection of sushi and an exotic Japanese mushroom fried in tempura batter. I’d been lucky and picked a winner; I left the restaurant feeling full and satisfied.

One thing it never occurred to me I would see at a market famous for fresh seafood were booths selling Japanese wagyu beef on skewers. I had come to Tsukiji for sushi, and did not pay much attention to these booths or the prices they were charging. It was only after looking at the image below on my computer at home that I checked and discovered ¥5000 is equal to a bit more than $32. Yikes! That’s a hefty price tag for what appears to be a skewer with less than 100gms (about 3.5oz) of meat. On the other hand, I had checked online for restaurants serving Kobe beef dinners and learned that prices for dinners serving the genuine item started around $150, and went up – a long way up – from there. A small skewer grilled by a shop in Tsukiji would have been a relatively inexpensive way to sample this delicacy, but I was not thinking in those terms, and passed on by.

For those with a sweet tooth or looking for dessert after sushi, there were a number of alternatives. Some of the offerings were tempting, but I was full from breakfast. The women in this photo are looking at large strawberries set into pastry shells filled with several kinds of sweet concoctions. I wonder where these women are from. The lady furthest away could be from pretty much anywhere in East or SE Asia, but the woman in the middle is difficult to peg.

I had arrived at Tsukiji Outer Market at around eight on a sunny Saturday morning. There were people walking around taking a look, but the place was not crowded. By the time I finished my sushi breakfast some time after 9am, the market had filled up with people and the lanes lined with shops were packed. It was time to move on.

A Neighborhood Stroll, Tokyo

On my third day in Tokyo, I woke up to a beautiful sunny morning. I decided to walk the two kilometers to Senso-ji, a venerable Buddhist temple founded some 1700 years ago, and the one of Tokyo’s premier tourist attractions that was in easy walking distance from my hotel. I set out shortly after 7:30am with my camera and Google Maps’ directions on my phone to stroll through the Taito City district of Tokyo.

The part of Taito City that I saw was a pleasant but rather non-descript urban residential area. The term “non-descript” is not intended as a criticism; it simply notes that the area had none of the urban glitter that Tokyo is famous for, nor was it an area with lots of traditional architecture that took me back to a distant past. The streets were lined with simple … and perhaps this is a better choice of words … unremarkable low rise buildings that people lived in. The streets and sidewalks were spotlessly clean and adequate, but not expansive; there were very few trees or greenery along the way. In short, Taito City appeared to be a no-frills neighborhood that had a lot of people living together in a limited amount of space.

About halfway to Senso-ji, I came across Matsuba Park, a bit of green space with some shade, some benches, and a small playground area for kids. Nothing fancy, but pleasant nonetheless. There was an information board in the park explaining that Matsuba Park was part of the municipal planning response to the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923. City officials noted that green spaces and parks in the city acted as firebreaks that helped to control the fires that ravaged Tokyo after the earthquake. This small park is one 52 parks Tokyo built in the aftermath of the earthquake to help contain the spread of large fires, and to improve quality of life in neighborhoods throughout the city.

Matsuba Park on a quiet morning.

Japan’s capital city only took on the name Tokyo in 1868 during the reign of the Emperor Meiji. For those interested in such things, in the written Japanese language Tokyo is 東京, two characters originally from Chinese that mean in that language “eastern capital.” This name compliments the names of two important Chinese cities: 北京 (Beijing, northern capital) and 南京 (Nanjing, southern capital). Be that as it may, prior to 1868 Tokyo was named Edo, the city that served as the seat of government for the Tokugawa Shogunate that ruled Japan from 1603 until the Meiji Restoration began after Emperor Meiji ascended to the throne in 1867.

The resting place of the Tamagawa brothers in Tokyo.

As I walked through Taito City, I came across one traditional building secluded behind a gate that reminded me of Tokyo’s long history. This quiet site houses the tombstones and graves of two brothers whose engineering work on behalf of the Shogunate in 1653 helped to alleviate water shortages in Edo. In recognition of their contributions, the Shogunate awarded the brothers a small parcel of land and gave them an honorary surname. After the brothers passed away towards the end of the 17th century, they were laid to rest at this site. The original structure was destroyed by the Great Kanto Earthquake; the building pictured here is a reconstruction. The plaque in front of the gate, with its brief introduction to the Tamagawa brothers, contains another, and I suspect unintended, reminder of Japan’s history. The municipal government provisionally designated the building a historic site in 1924; it was not until 1955 that the designation was formalized.

As I got closer to Senso-ji, houses and apartment building began giving way to more street-level commercial buildings and activity. I would arrive at the temple soon.

The World of Anime, Tokyo

Everywhere you look in Akihabara Electric Town, there are shops large and small selling manga and anime——animations, comics, books, videos, drawings, games, dolls, and an endless assortment of anime paraphernalia. I know virtually nothing of manga or anime beyond the fact that they exist and are very popular with people a lot younger than I. That said, I enjoyed walking around to see what was on offer. Tokyo’s electric town also has Bic Camera, a five story emporium dedicated to every kind of electronics imaginable. The floor devoted to photography was downright astonishing. It took an act of will to escape with my bank account intact.

Raw Rainy Day Morning, Tokyo

My Vietnam Airlines flight to Tokyo (Narita) left Da Nang at just past midnight on 8 October and arrived at 7:30 the same morning. There is a two hour time difference between Japan and Vietnam; flight time was roughly five and a half hours. Narita is some distance from Tokyo, and there are a number of options for covering the distance. Taxi or car service would have busted my trip budget before I checked into my hotel, so they were out. My choices boiled down to an express train taking 50 minutes for around $20 or a limited express train (i.e., a train that makes several fewer stops than a local train) taking about an hour and fifteen minutes and costing about $7.

I opted for the $7 ride, first because I am cheap about expenses like this, and second, during a trip to Japan I would rather spend my money on sashimi than spending an additional $13 to save 25 to 30 minutes on a train ride. A third not unimportant consideration: Whichever train I chose, I would be arriving at my destination in Tokyo a bit before 10:30am and check-in time at my hotel was 3pm. Three o’clock? A bit late in the day for a check-in time, don’t you think? But all of the three hotels I booked in Japan had check-in at 3pm and check-out at 10am. And the place in Tokyo would not cut me even a little slack. Four and a half hours wandering around the hotel’s neighborhood on a couple hours of sleep after an all-night plane ride made for one grumpy curmudgeon by the time 3pm rolled around.

By the way, have I mentioned it was raining? I have lived almost 35 years in East and Southeast Asia, and this was my first visit to Japan. Rain on the first day of that long-awaited visit was definitely not on my wish list. It was not a hard driving rain, but it was hard enough that I used an umbrella, among various reasons, because I didn’t want my new, well-engineered, expensive, water-resistant but not waterproof camera directly exposed to the rain as I walked around waiting for check-in time for my hotel room to roll around. And just to dot this particular “i”, holding a camera and composing a photo while juggling an umbrella is not really my idea of a good time. Grumpy curmudgeon indeed.

It rained on my second day in Tokyo as well. Though after that, with the exception of a bit of drizzle in Kyoto, the weather for my remaining 13 days in Japan was lovely.

Untangling the Nets, Phan Thiết

Along a street near the big Phan Thiết fish market, a group of mostly men were at work untangling the nets used to catch the fish. These days, no natural fibers in sight – the nets are made of a thread-fine synthetic of some kind. After watching for about 10 seconds, I realized I had no clue how these people went about sorting out and making sense of the huge piles of netting they were working with. Better them than me. I would go off the rails completely in a matter of minutes trying to untangle all those tiny threads.