Photos from Tokyo

These photos were taken in and around Tokyo, in February of 2007. Click here to view the corresponding blog entry.

Trash cans at the first station coming into Tokyo on the Shinkansen (bullet train). They are see-through due to worries about terrorists. For the same reason, banks of lockers are disappearing, as are benches. Japan has been relatively terrorism-free, although there was a very significant domestic attack on the Tokyo subway system on March 20th of 1995, when Sarin gas was released in five separate locations, killing twelve people and sending another five thousand to hospitals.

Bicycles outside one of the subway stations. Bicycles are fairly common in Japan, although probably not nearly as common as in China.

Random drinks from vending machines in the subway stations. If you're worried that you shouldn't have a drink before 5pm, I believe that it might have been Jimmy Buffett who sang, "It's five o'clock somewhere." When we left Osaka for the trip to Toyko, I wanted to get a couple cans of Coca-Cola for the train ride, which was a couple hours. It turned out that the Coke was about $3.00 per can, but beer and coolers were between $1.00 and $1.50 each, so we just ended up having a bunch of drinks on the train (because "open liquor" is permitted in Japan).

This intersection should be easily recognizable to anyone who has watched the movie, "Lost In Translation."

We spent the first part of the evening wandering around downtown.

A random store. It might appear that I spent most of the trip trolling through the seedier districts of Japan, but the Japanese culture is just more liberal than the Canadian culture in many respects.

We went to dinner at a place called The Lockup, which was designed like a dungeon, with separate jail cells for each dinner party. Needless to say, the evening included some interesting audio-visual effects, and lots of visitors in costumes.

This piece of food was evil. It was part of a plate called "Heaven Or Hell," but I think the term "Russian Roulette" would be more appropriate. There would be an appetizer plate with six items, five of which were delicious, and one of which was INCREDIBLY spicy. To understand how spicy, let me put it this way: I like spicy foods, and it isn't uncommon for me to put an ounce of tabasco on a plate of food and consider it to be pretty tame. I had this little delicacy, not knowing that it was going to be the hot one, and I literally could not speak for ten to fifteen minutes. Naturally, Ian Warney made fun of me for this, and when the next plate came out, he grabbed one and downed it pretty quickly, thinking the odds were in his favor. He was wrong. He almost died. That was the end of alcohol and eating for Ian for the rest of the evening - all he managed to choke down for the rest of the night were a couple glasses of water.

Our waitress.

A bit of a "Primitive Radio Gods" flashback, although this booth works.

There are usually multiple basements in many of the downtown buildings, so they are labelled B1F for first basement, B2F for second basement, etc. Space is at a premium - if you wander around the city and just look at stores on the ground level, you are probably missing at least three-quarters of the city.

This car was pretty amazing.

Driving around Tokyo with Yuka. Her car had an amazing GPS system built into the dash so she could navigate around the city.

Still driving around. You can see the rail lines over the street, supported by the giant concrete pillars.

A snack from the convenience store - shrimp tempura on rice with sashimi salmon and other bits of stuff.

A pretty funny sign.

Delicacy mushrooms. By the way, translating prices from Japanese yen to Canadian dollars was really easy while I was visiting, because the exchange rate was pretty close to $1 CAD = 100 Japanese Yen. So basically, to figure out the prices on anything, you just added a decimal point to the price in Yen, lopping off the last two digits. Therefore, these mushrooms for 1850 yen per package were the equivalent of about $18.50 Canadian dollars.

Dried squid, about $12 each. These were sort of like buying beef jerky, I guess, although I suspect the taste would be closer to that of dulce (dried seaweed), rather than tasting like beef jerky.

On the subway. This car is only moderately crowded.

There is where the Harajuku girls show off their designs every Sunday afternoon. If you don't know who they are, just ask Gwen Stefani.

We went to visit the Meiji Shrine next. This photo was taken in the park (in downtown Tokyo), on our way to the Shrine. The park is about 175 acres, so when you're inside it, you don't feel like you're in the middle of Tokyo.

Enormous jugs of ceremonial sake (rice wine). These jugs are about halfway between the size of a keg of beer and an oil drum. Needless to say, this is a lot of sake.

A sign commemorating the donation of a large amount of wine from the people of France to the people of Japan.

Barrels of wine donated by the French.

The Meiji Shrine.

A large ceremonial drum at the Meiji Shrine.

Good Fortune tablets. Visitors can buy a blank tablet and write their wishes, and hang the tablet on the wall. I believe that the tablets get burned about once per week in a special ceremony which supposedly ensures good luck for the owners of the tablets. It was pretty interesting reading a lot of them. I could read all the English, French, and Spanish messages, and I understood a fair amount of the Italian, Portuguese, and German messages that were left by tourists. However, I had no luck whatsoever trying to decipher the Japanese, Korean, or Chinese tablets.

This was one of the more random messages. I believe that JT refers to "Japanese Teacher," although I'm not positive.

Visitors were encouraged to take a sip of this special water to help purify themselves.

This was one of the many exotic species of tree in the park. There are supposed about 365 species of trees in this park, taken from all over Japan.

Another subway photo.

On a platform in the station.

Next, we went to the Electronics District to spend a few hours wandering around (no surprise).

And by "Electronics District," I mean that they had absolutely everything. Street vendors had stalls which specialized in items as specific as wall plugs, resistors, and LED lights. It seems funny that there can be an "extension cord store."

This photo doesn't really do this store justice, but there are stores in Tokyo that are about the size of a Staples outlet in Canada, which can have entire floors devoted solely to cell phones, or to Ipod accessories.

Computers are getting smaller.

I took several photos of cameras so I could compare the prices when I got back home. Here's a Nikon D200 for the equivalent of about $1,786.00 Canadian. Most of the prices on electronic items in Tokyo (hard drives, USB keys, media, computers) were actually a bit higher than the equivalent prices in Canada, although the selection was better. Camera prices were decent though. If I was ever going to buy a fairly good camera, I'd get a D200.

The Mark 2 is designed for professionals, but it is not a cheap camera. I think this model is quite a bit over-priced for its capabilities, unless you truly are a professional photographer and you need that extra edge (although it can be purchased in the United States for a lot less than the sticker price shown here).

Telescopes.

How's that for a telephoto? This one is double the cost of the mid-range telescopes they had on display.

A lower-end Sony Digital SLR.

Cell phones. The Japanese LOVE their cell phones. A large percentage of people are completely absorbed in their cell phones on the streets or in the subways, either sending text messages or watching TV on the newer phones (hardly anyone ever actually talks on their phones in public though). There are a lot of different providers in Japan, so it isn't uncommon to see six or eight separate cell phone stores beside each other.

This was one of the funniest signs that I saw on my entire trip. Apparently, East and West are both in the same direction. Perhaps I got lost and I'm at the North Pole?

The Tokyo Municipal Building.

These next three photos turned out really well - they were time exposures taken from the window of a restaurant that we went to for dinner, which was located on the 49th floor of the fourth-highest building in Tokyo.

Myself, with Yuka.

A breaded shrimp dish - so tasty.

Yuka and Danielle.

Kevin, checking his cell phone.

Yuka's fingernails.

We stopped into another convenience store, and I couldn't resist taking photos of a bunch of the seafood products that were on display. If you look closely, you can see that these packages were full of baby squid on the left, and the red items on the right were either octapus or squid tentacles.

A wide variety of flat-fishes.

Sardines, with salmon and tuna.

I think these were all raw oysters.

This would be Japan's equivalent of the breaded fried chicken & pork rack at the local 7-11. I'm not sure what all these items were.

At six in the morning, we went to the convenience store and picked up four Smirnoff coolers, some chocolate milk, Pringles, sushi, salmon sashimi, wasabi paste, and sweet dinner rolls. Of course, this was a late-night snack, not breakfast.

Dave Twomey - the Promoter when I played at Velours, and of course, one of Japan's very top DJ's.

Velours is a sort of fashion bar in Tokyo, very fancy, with a very high-class clientele. Imagine chandeliers, Victoria Webb models, bottles of Cristal, etc. I wish I had gotten some better photos, but this is the only one that I took and it's a bit fuzzy. It was definitely one of my favorite places that I've ever played at, and probably one of my best live sets ever.

Danielle with a few of her friends.

Me in the DJ booth.

Myself and my sound technician for the evening.

This public school doubled as an earthquake shelter. I was told that Tokyo has a very major earthquake approximately every seventy to ninety years, and since the last big one was in 1923, the city is "due" for another disaster. Unfortunately, the city is so developed now compared to eighty years ago that even with supposedly "earthquake-proof" architecture, Japan could be absolutely devastated by the next quake.

A photo of myself at one of the subway stations, before wandering off to try to figure out how to find the airport.

On the train from Tokyo to Narita airport, which is more than an hour outside the city.

These two people worked at the airport, so their English was excellent. They got me pointed in the right direction to catch my flights to Vancouver and then Seattle.