Tokyo

Mom went home to Seattle from Honolulu, and I flew over to Tokyo where I met up with my daughter Liz.  We'll be traveling together for a month before I have to go back home for work and she goes off on her own adventures in Nepal and northern India.  We spent 5 days in Tokyo and barely scratched the surface. Tokyo is the largest megacity in the world, 35 million. The subway system is incredible - very complex and yet we found it quite easy to use after the first day or so.

Tokyo subway map

The thing that made our Tokyo visit really special was the families we stayed with. Liz has been using couchsurfing.org for a few years now. She set us up to have several couchsurfers stay at our house in Seattle over the past year and all were good experiences. So when she suggested couchsurfing on this trip, I was up for it. We stayed with two families, one for three nights and the other for one night. Our contact for the first family was Chie, a 28 year old young woman who did a lot of traveling before becoming a mom. She and her husband and two daughters (6 months and 2 1/2) were very welcoming. They provided us a room to sleep in, invited us to share a couple meals with them, and took us on a walk through the neighborhood to see a Buddhist temple. We had interesting discussions about our two countries and we could ask them our questions about Japan. They lived a short walk from a subway station so it was very convenient to go sightseeing from their house.

Me with 6 month old Shima

Chie, Koji and 2 year old Eina

Liz with Mick and her family

 After three nights with them, we went to Yokohama, about an hour south of Tokyo, and stayed with Mick and her family. She teaches English to blind students and is fluent in both Japanese and English braille. Her husband teaches English at a junior high school. They have two sons - 4 and 9. We again had our own room, this time with a tatami mat floor and futon type beds to sleep on. So comfortable and so Japanese. Mick met us at the subway station and took us with her to pick up her 4 year old at daycare. Then we went to a grocery store to buy supplies to make spaghetti for dinner. It is so interesting to go to grocery stores in foreign countries! We wanted to make a cobbler or cookies for Chie's family but couldn't find the ingredients. It's just so different. We prepared dinner together at Mick's and had interesting conversation. Her husband videotaped Liz and I and asked us a few questions about our thoughts on Japan. When we were at Chie's we had lunch with a friend of hers and her 11 year old son. He also asked us questions, for school report. When we asked him his impression of the US, his quick answer was "guns". When we asked Mick's husband the same questions, his response was "powerful corporations".  It's hard to be very happy with either answer.  

Some observations on Tokyo:
- cars drive on the left, so people also walk on the left. On the busy escalators in the subway stations, you stand on the left and people can pass on the right. We kept forgetting this :)
 - Many people ride bikes, especially in the residential neighborhoods. Most bikes have baskets and many had seats for small children. Many bikes seemed to be unlocked. - The Japanese are very polite, courteous, and helpful. The subways are very quiet. There's a sign that forbids talking on cellphones on the subways and the one time I saw someone doing that, he had his hand over his mouth. We also saw two women leave their purses to save their seats at a food court while they went to get food. I had to take a picture.
 - There are no tattoos. Our host families told us it is associated with the mafia and a person cannot get some jobs if they have a tattoos. I also saw very few sleeveless shirts on women, which I was wearing because it was so hot. And no visible cleaveage.
-  We were surprised by how few tourists we saw anywhere. Most of the time we were the only non-Asians on the subway. We couldn't find postcards anywhere or other tourist information. Mick's husband told us postcards used to be popular maybe 20 years ago, so maybe technology has done them in.
-  One last thing - we saw Mt. Rainier coffee in cups in stores in the refrigerator section. Both host families were familiar with the brand and wondered if there really was a Mt. Rainier. The brand has been around for 20 years and is a Japanese company. It has a logo very similar to Starbucks and is named after my favorite mountain. But only found in Japan.

Mt. Rainier coffee - it's not Starbucks