Please allow me to begin this post with an irate, whiny rhetorical question: how are there so many damn mosquitoes still alive this time of year? And how do they keep getting into my room so easily? Actually, I can guess the answer to the first question: it hasn't been consistently cold enough. And I'm on an island. An island that gets huge bouts of rain.
As for the second, I'm pretty sure that's attributable to poor window design--and to the fact that only half of one of my windows has a bug-screen. (Yes, half of one of them. With two windows, that means 3/4ths the window-space in my room are unprotected.) I get a lot of mosquito bites--enough that at first I was concerned they might be caused by, e.g., fleas or ticks. But, when I pay attention, I see mosquitoes sneaking onto my flesh (or hear them buzzing near my face in the dark) so often that I'm still willing to give them credit.
Though, I often seem to get several bites somewhat near each other, which is supposedly symptomatic of ticks or other parasites.
Maybe I'm thinking too narrowly. The mosquitoes could be teaming up with ticks.
What's the kanji for "bug repellant"?
With that out of the way, let me tell you a little about last weekend. Friday, several of my friends expressed the thought that going to see a fishmarket in the morning would be fun. I was hard-pressed to disagree, because, heck, what is there not to like about seeing a bunch of giant, dead fish at an obscenely early hour of the morning?
Thus the following plan was hatched: meet downtown, go drinking, take a train to the
Tsukiji district, stay there until 3:30 AM, then visit the
biggest fishmarket in the world. Yes, you need to be there that early to get in: they only allow 140 visitors in at a time. Surprisingly popular, considering that it's just... fish being sold. REALLY REALLY EARLY. Did I mention that it happens early in the morning? It happens pretty early in the morning, if you didn't catch that.
Anyhow, I actually missed out on the "go drinking" part of the plan, but I followed along gamely enough with the remainder of it. I should probably start using names so I can stop referring to people as "the French girl" or "the Swiss guy", etc. Said French girl's name is Claudia, and the party consisted of her, her boyfriend Ackeem (recently arrived in Japan. Also, I bet $10 that his name is spelled differently than my guess right there), one of her Japanese friends named Mami, and me. We'd attempted to conscript some of the other post-TEFL trainees, but they thought they had more important things to do, like sleeping, so they hung out only for the drinking part of it.
(Shibuya, in case you've forgotten what it looks like.)
Sometime around 12 AM, the night found us wandering around looking for a restaurant; more specifically, Ackeem wanted to find a place that served udon noodles, which proved to be surprisingly difficult, when you think about the fact that we were, you know, in Japan. (I should add that we wanted to find an
affordable place. That's probably what made it most difficult. Also, it being late at night narrowed options a little, though not as much as it would in some cities (*cough Portland cough*).) This is one of the places we considered but rejected because we didn't want to wait for a table to free up:
So back to wandering. Our method for finding restaurants mainly consisted of querying nearby helpful people for their opinions, something made possible only because we were traveling with Claudia's friend, Mami. A quick word about traveling with a Japanese native: it's really, really convenient for us Westerners. It simplifies everything, even if that individual is not necessarily very experienced with Tokyo in particular, as was the case here. It almost feels like "cheating", actually, because you can have that person take care of (mostly) everything, and it becomes easy to stop paying careful attention to the other people and the language around you. But it's really nice. It's different from traveling with a Westerner who speaks Japanese, since there's greater fluidity of communication and a more facile rapport. This strikes me as unfortunate, for the sake of inter-cultural relations, but it's hard to compete with the shared set of experiences and understanding that two natives have in common.
Mami herself is great, since she is very sweet and patient, and she puts up with a lot of my silly questions about Japanese culture and language. She isn't shy about asking for help from passers-by, either; and thus it was we ended up hanging out near a street-side
takoyaki (fried octopus dumpling) vendor, watching him work.
I'm pretty sure she was originally asking him for a good noodle place that would be open at this hour, but we seemed to end up hanging out longer than I'd expected. He was very friendly, and chatted with Mami while preparing a set of takoyaki and two
okonimyaki. ("Fish pancakes".) He encouraged us to "help" with flipping the dumplings and the okonomiyaki. I couldn't really follow any of the conversation, and Mami didn't give us translations too often, but I did learn that he'd been doing this job for 40 years (!), and that he visited the fish market-our intended destination-every weekend to buy octopus. (I think.) He also asked questions to/about us through Mami, and told us to have a nice time in Japan. Here's a somewhat blurry shot of the okonomiyaki, soon after the batter has been poured out:
Here it is after having cooked for a while, plus the new batch of dumplings. You can see Claudia's hand as she helps flip them over.
Sadly, I didn't take any photos of the end results, but they looked pretty similar, only garnished. They were also quite good! I believe he only charged us for the okonomiyaki, and gave us several takoyaki gratis, which I thought very kind of him.
Thas settled the food issue. Our final destination for the night was a
manga kissa, a sort of internet cafe with manga to read and DVDs to watch. Another passer-by directed us to one several blocks away, and he even went so far as to walk with us on the way there, as a guide. More surprising (to me) kindness! Maybe the people here are just very helpful, given the opportunity; or maybe Mami is just especially good at chatting with strangers.
"The space for relaxation you've been looking for!"
In a manga kissa, you rent a private "room" (more like a cubicle) with a TV, computer, and/or couch. My cubicle (the same kind that the others took) was basically a big cushion with a computer. This photo doesn't quite do it justice, but:
It pretty much was just about that small.
I think it was around 2:00 AM when we arrived, so we didn't have that long to wait. I just messed around on the internet (and struggled with a Japanese keyboard) for the duration.
3:30 AM came along and, noting that the weather had gone from a mildly unpleasant "ehhh" to a chilly downpour, we hailed a taxi-cab. Around 4:00 AMish, we got there, and we began waiting in line. In the rain. Fortunately, it wasn't too long before they let us inside and issued us these neon green jersey things: they were required for visitors to identify them as such.
And then we waited more. It didn't "open" until 5, I believe.
This was me wondering what I was doing there at 4:25 AM:
Actually, I don't really have any reason to complain about this being "early" when it was really "late" in the sense of having stayed up the entire night. And given my sleep schedule tendencies, that isn't too unusual anyway.
But eventually, release! Dodging past fork-lifts piloted by impatient workers (they weren't actually fork-lifts, but they were of the same nature, I'm pretty sure) and huddling 'neath umbrellas, we visitors made our way to the tuna auction house:
The visitors stood in this crowded little railed-off passage through the middle of the warehouse, looking both ways. Both directions looked about the same: frozen, giant tuna corpses being inspected and prodded with picks. Yep.
Here we are. (Visitors).
A few of these tuna hadn't been "scalped" or whatever, and their heads had been cut off instead. I have no idea why that was or what it meant. But I photographed it for whatever morbid reason.
Moooore fish.
Wait, something exciting is happening! A bell is ringing! People are gathering around someone who's starting to call out in the immediately recognizable tones of an auctioneer. And people are apparently bidding!
This happened several more times in different parts of the house. I captured a little bit of the sound:
fish auc.mp3
And then we were hustled out, and that was that.
I have to say, I was a little disappointed. I'd been expecting to see more kinds of fish and sea fauna sold, and I'd been envisioning something more like a gritty marketplace than a warehouse. I'm sure something like that exists elsewhere in the place, but it wasn't what we sightseers were exposed to.
We stopped for sushi afterward (how can you not, when you're that close to a giant fish market?), but this post is already long enough, and that could be a tale in of itself.
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