Tokyo: Arrival Day

Soon after our arrival at Narita airport in the early evening, we headed to the metro to get to our hotel. 

Using the metro was made easier by using the Suica transport card which could be loaded on to our iphones (but is not available on Android).  In fact this was a principal reason why I moved from Android to Apple about a week before the holiday after a lifetime of saying i would never do so. Japan was already changing me.

Our hotel was in the Shinagawa district and check-in was via kiosks not involving human interaction. 

After dumping our bags, we headed out to get something to eat and settled on a ramen place nearby.  

I tend to rely quite a lot on Google ratings and would rarely go somewhere scoring less than 4.0, but such reviews were hard to find. 

It seems that in general, the Japanese rarely give high ratings perhaps because their standards are so high. 

Although I have come to love eating ramen, my history of eating any variant of noodle soup is that of being frustrated trying to wind the noodle onto a spoon, plus the soiling of many white t-shirts in the process. 

No such problem here as everyone just slurped away, and soon I was slurping away myself with impunity.  Very delicious it was too. I’d give it 4.5 (= Japanese 3.6 I reckon). 

We then headed out to take our very first glimpse of Tokyo in real life. Now, I have seen many pictures of the bright neon lights but in person it is nothing short of spectacular.

As it had been a long 24 hours, we then headed back to the hotel.

Two things of Japan origination which have inexplicably failed to set the West alight are the Japanese toilet and the onsen. 

The former welcomes you as you approach by opening its lid, and then washes you when you are done. Some even blow dry your backside.  Why aren’t these everywhere?

Onsens are bathing facilities that have been around for at least 1,300 years and they sprang up (pun intended) because there are over 25,000 hot springs through the country some of which feed these facilities.

It became a feature of public life that people would bathe together, the majority of homes lacking their own bathrooms. There are also sentos, which perform a similar function, but which do not use natural spring water.

Many hotels have their own onsens or sentos which are open for most of the day and night, only closing for cleaning. I cannot tell you the joy to be had from sitting in a hot bath before bed at 1 am in the morning, without having to have filled it yourself which, in my experience, can take a long while, assuming you even have a bath in the room.

It is a far cry from the hotel spas of the west, which, even if they had hot baths, are rarely open when anyone would want to use them.

And so to bed to recuperate for seeing more of Tokyo the following day.