Sunday, December 28, 2025
The clear umbrella people outnumber us, but a black umbrella is classier.
And black leather.
We met up with Kyle in this park where he planned to film the Japanese rockabillies dancing. It was late in the morning and raining, so I don't know if he ended up getting any footage, but he did impart to us some words of wisdom for foreigners traveling in Japan:
Words to live by, and entirely true.
I got my socks from Uniqlo, though. Our first day was soaked, so after touring some gardens and temples we stopped by a store to change into dry socks. My wet socks ended up in a conveniently placed clothing donation box. It's gross but I don't feel too bad about it.
My traveling companions walk, I mean they really walk. Sasha has a step counter that allowed him and Pasha to enforce a daily soft quota. We walked for miles and miles the first day. I took the following morning off to rest my feet.
A mix of jet lag and my companions' uncompromising devotion to rising early had us seeing things early, but it worked out well because it gets dark around 4:30 PM.
That's Pasha walking through Golden Gai around sunset. That area is neat, I remember Zach telling me about it. There are tons of tiny bars. Each bar can sit maybe five people, has one bartender, and sometimes a toilet. Maybe it's like being below deck on a small pirate ship. Smoking is allowed. One bartender was a drummer in a J-pop band. He learned English by doing Duolingo. We met an Englishman and his girlfriend. Next door, the bartender spoke perfect English and presided over a bar full of Americans, save for the Japanese guy to my left with a passion for racecars.
Roman brought us to a Nissan themed cafe in Ginza where they can print your face onto the surface of a coffee.
Our last day in Tokyo, we walked through a park before boarding a bullet train to Hakone.
Hakone is a resort town in the mountains known for its hot springs, views of Mount Fuji, and traditional ryokan. We, however, stayed at a two story villa Airbnb with a built-in sauna.
I slept up there. Pasha and Sasha each had a bedroom in the chilly lower level.
This guy was busy hunting crickets until I apprehended him for questioning.
He was not alone.
We boarded a pirate ship and sailed across Lake Ashi to a ropeway headed for a geothermal power station in the mountains.
Without the zoom:
We walked back along the shore and got dinner at a little restaurant with floor seating.
Flower arrangements are a theme. Watch out for the theme.
The next day it was off to Kyoto.
Pasha lead us to a tiny cocktail bar in the back of a building. Inside was a small windowless room with two men behind the bar and stool seating for six or seven. We were the only ones there. We each ordered a gratuitously priced drink and made smalltalk with the bartenders. It was probably 4:30 in the afternoon.
Then this babe walks in. She took off her gray wool overcoat and started talking animatedly with the bartenders in fluent Japanese. Pasha, Sasha, and I were in agreement that she looked Ukrainian from the nose up. The rest of her looked to be in her early twenties, though from what she said later she was likely older.
When is she going to stop speaking to the bartenders in Japanese? She might not even speak English. Maybe we'll get lucky and she'll speak Russian or something. Finally Sasha wedges a gap in her Japanese conversation with an English icebreaker.
Line is her name (pronounced like "Lina"). She's from a mid-sized town in Denmark and works as a bartender at a geisha bar. The three of us sat there in a row looking at her talk about Japan's culture of communal obligation and its social chain of trust, and rail against the sporting chauvinist core of American masculinity in contrast to the lofty expectations of family man, provider, and head of household central to Japanese machismo. She got accepted into medical school in Copenhagen, has a boyfriend with kids in Seattle, and wonders if she will one day open up her own geisha bar in Kyoto.
Sasha told her that she was "very unusual" and hinted at contact information. She seemed flattered but did not bite. I told her that her boyfriend was going to move his family to Kyoto and that she would run a geisha bar instead of going to medical school. I offered to buy her another drink. Please don't leave.
She left, on her way to work. Perhaps one day we will be married.
Before leaving, she recommended another cocktail bar to us, and warned us of which ones to avoid. Pasha lead us to the address, and it was a hookah bar. We decided to stay anyway, later discovering that it was indeed the wrong place.
A young man with long curly hair wearing a red and white tie-dye hoodie with matching sweatpants sat next to his Chinese-Japanese girlfriend and listened to our conversation. Then he started speaking to Pasha and Sasha in Russian. Turns out he's an eighteen year old student from Russia who's been attending university in Kyoto for ten months. He was hungry to speak Russian, and probably judged us to be of high enough status that he was eager to impress. Sasha said he was full of it, but Pasha wagered that he was probably just from a wealthy family and wanted to sound cool. For my part, I understood only the English portions of the conversation.
That night or another we ended up at a karaoke beer bar, just us three and the festive bartender. A Japanese guy ducked his head in briefly, but a few seconds of Sasha's rendition of Will Smith's "Miami" convinced him to move on.
I kept to my ritual of late night edamame almost every night we were in Japan.
We had a traditional Japanese dinner featuring wagyu beef in a private room,
and sipped mediocre cocktails in a lounge where the bartender operates a record player that pipes jazz though huge speakers above the bar. The current play is always on display.
We toured castles and whatnot.
On one of our last full days in Kyoto, we got up even earlier to take a bus tour of various shrines and temples. We were guided by Sakura, a human bundle of sunshine.
The first stop was actually the same temple that we toured at sundown the first day, now just after sunrise. But there were several other stops as well.
Can you see her practicing? At first I thought that it was a piano store, but it's a music school.
Our last night we went to a swanky chill cocktail bar inside of a fancy hotel, and then across the street for decidedly unswanky ramen. More my pace.
I snore at night. Loudly. So does Sasha. We shared a room together for four nights in Kyoto. Pasha is a light sleeper and so was happy to keep a wall between himself and the lawnmowers.
Several times in the middle of the night and early in the morning, I'd hear a loud short shout that would wake me up. I suspected that this was Sasha hearing me start to snore and waking me so that I wouldn't. This seemed rude, since he snores loudly for much of the night, and I quietly endured it until I fell asleep.
In the morning I confronted him about this. He told me that he certainly wasn't shouting to wake me up. Sometimes when he is awakened in the middle of the night, he lets out a loud noise. His past girlfriends have told him about this.
He was lying, you see.
On the morning when we were to check out, I caught him at it. He was lying on his back looking at his phone, and then shouted to the ceiling just as I began to nod off. I told him that at this rate I would have to start waking him up, too, and then both of us would be miserable and that's no way to be on a vacation. He said that he just can't contain himself. I told him to exercise some self control and to stop being so selfish. He said "I guess you're just better than me."
Pasha saved the day in Osaka by electing to sleep on the futon in the living room. This put one door between him and Sasha, and two doors between him and me. Sasha and I agreed that this was the optimal arrangement for preventing sleeplessness and homicide.
The apartment was on the top floor of a building in central Osaka near the famous night life district of Dōtonbori. It was tiny but adequate for my purposes. On the other hand, I had my own room. You'd have to ask Pasha how the accommodations really were.
The building shut off our water for two hours one morning to perform maintenance. The host refunded us $13.07.
We went to an art museum and saw some surrealist paintings. It was alright. I mean enough with the Dalí already, you know?
The top of a nearby building has panoramic views of the city.
If you look closely, you can see the photographer.
There's a castle that has an overheated museum inside and more views of the area at the top.
Christmas Eve we went to a really very tiny jazz cafe where the owner/bartender/cook/host picked up his sax to play with a drummer who I think I recognize from New York and a bass player almost hidden from view.
For Christmas dinner, Pasha and I took a train out to just outside of Osaka to visit my cousin and his family. We brought a bottle of Japanese whiskey, which we then got to sample with my cousin as his daughter bopped around presenting her mostly Disney themed Christmas toys. The menu included pizza, fried chicken, and homemade chili.
The traditional Christmas dinner in Japan is a bucket of KFC fried chicken. Yes, I'm serious. The problem is that the chain is so popular around the holidays that you have to order days in advance. Put a hat on Colonel Sanders and you've got a pretty good Santa Claus.
On the Shinkansen bullet train from Osaka back to Tokyo, I opted to buy a more expensive seat in a premium car.
We passed snow on the way. In fact, there was a perfect view of Mount Fuji at some point on the left side, but I didn't get a photo.
I booked the tickets based on our destination district, Shibuya. I didn't notice that the destination station was not Tokyo station, but a smaller station one stop before. I wake up at some point and hear the English announcement, "We will be making a brief stop in [...], please make sure that you have your belongings before the train comes to a stop." I check google maps, and it says that this is my stop, which is a little alarming. I checked my ticket, and indeed this is the correct stop. So I ran off the train and checked our group WhatsApp chat.
Pasha and Sasha had been trying to contact me for quite a while. "Let's get off at the next stop, google says that it's closer." "David, wake up!" I had a few missed WhatsApp calls.
I replied, "yes, that's the destination on the ticket." They had remained on the train just in case I had also. Pasha was not amused.
I returned to the park where we had met with Kyle more than two weeks previously.
The Japanese are serious about sorting their recycling. It seems that they recycle steel, aluminum, and PET, and then burn whatever else they can.
There are very few trash cans around, so you have to take your trash with you. It's a faux pas to eat while walking. You even have to bring your dog home.
There is also no lighting of fireworks or campfires, no feeding of crows, no motorcycles or mopeds, no remote controlled toy cars, no wielding of rackets, no kicking of soccer balls, no swinging of golf clubs, no riding of skateboards, no wearing of roller skates, and no throwing of round objects while wearing a billed hat.
We met up with Roman again, and this time also with another former coworker of Sasha's, Alex. Roman was trying to lure us into a club for the cultural experience. Sasha and I refused for different reasons, but Pasha and Alex went along and saw the scene.
Our last night in Tokyo, we went to another bar district similar to Golden Gai, this time in even smaller venues where we met a former flight attendant, some guys from Connecticut, and an English educated bartender. He said that the boarding school was just like Hogwarts. His house was like Slytherin.
Sasha has access to American Express's premium airport lounge, where we camped out until our delayed flight was finally ready for boarding.
The ramen places really are just like in New York.