At sea

Until recently the weather has been good and the seas largely calm. Last night we discovered that our cabin at the back of the boat with its bizarre arrangement of  three wash basins is prone to pitching up and down when the seas are less temperate. This may be why we were allocated it. Throughout the voyage our fellow passengers have been entertaining and generally good natured. Political discussion has been notable by its almost omertà like absence. The accompanying lecturers have provided depth and insight to our shore  visits. One after dinner speaker gave a very Stanford insight into Chinese Taoist dissident literature. This is not something you’d get on many ships.  Being a California cruise the day starts with Pilates on the fore deck. In some of the smaller islands the primary school kids and their grand parents run down to the dockside to greet us. This is rather like the innocence of Scotland 50 years ago. We have seen lots of azaleas, some olive trees and a few hardy orange groves.

The ships WiFi became temperamental shortly after we boarded and has retained an impractical quirkiness ever since. Downloading photos is impossible.  These will need to wait until we make it back to Tokyo. The ex servicemen among the passengers have discovered that if you stand behind the bridge and hold your phone up over your head there’s an outside chance the satellite will do what it’s supposed to do and you’ll catch a few minutes of connection time. From a distance they look like a gaggle of swaying ravers .

The woman at the table next to us in the dining room likes to have  a Bloody Mary with her breakfast . She has gluten allergies so the vodka must be Smirnoff . The Filipino bartender deals with this very first world problem with good natured third world charm. At our next port of call he heads off in a taxi to pick up half a dozen bottles from the nearest liquor store. For the last black tie ‘Gala’ dinner Bloody Mary woman and her husband appeared in shiny matching gold outfits. The look is remarkable and ‘The Font’ quietly wonders if they might be in show business. The food on board is becoming slightly repetitive and slightly drab in a brown rice with crayfish sort of way. The logistics of feeding forty passengers for three months between the Malacca Straits and Sakhalin must be a nightmare of planning and delivery. Dinners  ashore are a welcome change.

Earlier in the week we briefly went to Hiroshima. We thought the site of the atomic bombing would be a place of quiet reflection. Not a bit of it. Princess Cruises, Hapag Lloyd and Seabourn had huge ships in port and all of their passengers had made a bee line to the museum to be first in line for when it opened. On top of that every school in Japan seems to have chosen the day we were in town to come on a field trip. There must have been a queue ten thousand long when we arrived. Unable to see the displays we manoeuvred our way through the crowds and headed for the exit. More moving was a small almost invisible marker in a side street by the children’s hospital that marks the exact spot  where the bomb detonated. An intense young German man with his equally intense girl friend looked at the marker stone and  quietly cuddled. Apart from us and them there wasn’t a tourist to be seen.

We head back to Tokyo next week before flying onto Edinburgh. How quickly our three week break will have passed.

Rainy Yokohama

No pictures this morning. The cable that enables photos to be downloaded from the phone to the laptop has been packed away ‘safely’ and can’t be found. A new one will be bought when the stores open . The second we get home you can be sure the original cable will magically reappear.

The flight out took 14 hours . BA had a brand new Airbus on the route which had that unmistakable but transitory smell that you only find in new cars and aircraft.  Everyone likes to criticise BA but the service was smooth and efficient despite every seat being taken by exuberantly happy families on their way to view Cherry Blossom season. It was not a smooth flight and became ‘lively’ over northern China. Seemingly all Beijings airports were experiencing the strongest winds in half a century . 41,000 feet above things were also turbulent. We both watched Conclave which was good until the overly sentimental and improbable ending.

Immigration at Haneda was a nightmare. There was a queue with at least a thousand people in it. Seems every flight from Europe is operating full . Thankfully, after twenty minutes, a young woman in a day glo jacket arrived took one look at Angus and announced ‘You very old’. Ordinarily a greeting like this would not be well received but on this occasion it proved to be our ticket to a ‘priority’ line that saved us another hour of standing amid jet lagged  back packers.

No news from the organisers of the trip regarding the whereabouts of our ‘luxury motor vessel’ which is somewhere en route from Borneo with its collection of Palo Altoans and assorted guest lecturers. A review of the passenger list shows that there are five ‘Bob and Laura’s’ onboard which considering the boat can only hold 36 must be some form of record.

Farewell to Tokyo

Time to head home.  Weather and distance conspire to give British Airways  scheduling an element of randomness .Thankfully, the flight is shown as going on time. The flight out from Heathrow was delayed by an hour and three quarters due to freezing weather and the need to de-ice the wings. Fog in Japan added another hour.  That's how a 14 hour flight becomes a 16 hour plus ordeal. 

We've had a great time. The weather has been changeable and at times the winds have made Scotland look balmy. If we'd come three weeks later we'd have got warmth and cherry blossom time. We'd also have faced even bigger crowds. Tokyo has pretty much the same climate as Atlanta so we wouldn't be happy sightseeing in July or  August. I'm guessing peak times for tourism are March/April and September/October.

On our way to dinner we pass a golf store. From the number of golf stores I can only assume the Japanese are mega keen on the sport. This is not the attire one would wish to be associated with in St Andrews if you wanted to blend in. The shoes and the golf bag are perhaps a tad too modern for rural Scotland.

Highlight of the trip the temples in the mountains outside Kyoto.

The less visited temples ( devoid of tourists ) also a delight.

'The Font' keener on street food than Angus. In fact it can be said that 'The Font' is much keener on street food than Angus who has a staunch Presbyterian reticence when it comes to 'exotic' fare.

Having said that there are some things that neither of us feel the need to try. Octopus in quails egg being among them.

Our last night in town and the discovery of a large hotel with a lobby frozen in the 1960's . How cool is this ? In the bar on the top floor , which is also deserted, we are served plates of small star shaped biscuits that turn out not to be biscuits but pure sugar. A glass of Champagne is two thirds of the price charged in London . Go figure. 

Lightning :https://twitter.com/VisionaryVoid/status/1766215576081318396

Tokyo's newest ( and soon to be opening ) hotel at an eye watering price  :https://www.janu.com/janu-tokyo/

The texture of liver pate.

 

That stage of the trip when the homeward journey starts to cast a damper on proceedings. How can the time have flown by so quickly ? Our abiding take aways are cleanliness, safety and affordability. Tokyo really is a modern marvel of a city. There's always a subway station with a three minute walk that can whisk you safely and cleanly where you want to go. I guess our surprise is that we thought the place would be bland but there's no other city that we've been to that matches Tokyo for urban design and a culture that is startlingly creative. 

A quick bullet train trip to see an outlying coastal  town. The train nearly empty ... or certainly emptier than a British train. There again British trains don't run every twelve minutes.

You can eat cheaply. A sausage curry costs £4.50. 'The Font' has insisted that we don't eat in restaurants with European cuisine. This has worked well although Angus has had some reservations about trying grey 'unknown' things with legs and  the texture of liver pate.

In the window of a barber shop a hand drawn sign. This is presumably targeted at bobble hatted  Australian tourists who appear to be here in huge numbers to try the local ales. German tourists and Americans with young families appear to be the other leading demographics. Kyoto was wall to wall with visitors.

We've seen lots of temples.

And like all British visitors followed Monty Dons guide to Zen gardens.https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p070vf37

Seems there is a down side. From our hotel window we can look across the street to the open plan offices of a large industrial company.  The staff arrive early and stay much later than you'd expect in NY or London. This seems to be a replay of the old 1960's idea of management that says the more time you spend behind the desk the more work you'll get done. GLWT ! A friend who works here says that corporations hire youngsters straight out of college. This provides job security but it also means that promotion and pay are based on the length of time at the company. Smart youngsters can't rise quickly and new ideas are ignored. There's little incentive to work more efficiently than you have to as productivity isn't recognized. Job hopping, the natural remedy, is treated with suspicion.

I don't think we have ever walked as much as we have on this trip. That 10,000 paces a day has probably been closer to 25,000.

A different experience

The i-Phone and the i-Pad are now happily talking to each other but in the process half of the photos on the i-Phone have gone to a Japanese version of the cloud and seem to be irretrievable. Angus quietly wonders how he'll cope with technology when he's ten years older.

For foreign visitors there are four things that stand out about Japan. 

1) Everything is clean. We've seen workmen washing the white paint on pedestrian crossings. This morning the cleaning staff were busy hoovering the escalators in the lobby. That's something you don't see every day back at home.

2) Shops and restaurants seem to employ 6 staff for every 2 they would employ in the US or the EU. This makes service quick and easy and comes as a shock to British visitors who are now used to a post-Brexit hospitality industry chronically  short of people.

3) There are policemen everywhere ( and no apparent crime ).Government functions don't seem to have been hollowed out in the way they have in Europe.

4) Japan excels at dense, mixed use urbanism. Basements and the lower floors of high rise buildings are full of good, low cost restaurants and cafes to a degree unthinkable in New York or Berlin. This is an urban experience quite different from that found anywhere else in the world. Five minutes away from the main streets and you can find yourself in an oasis of complete silence and calm. 

Taken together, even if you live in a tiny apartment, the city around you is free and accessible. People are really friendly if you manage to speak a little of the language.

Japanese wine is a new discovery. It's more than enjoyable - fresh and flinty - but not likely to challenge the French anytime soon. I shall look at the prices when I get back to to Scotland but can't believe they'll be competitive. To our surprise ( and Angus's delight ) prices for almost everything else are lower than you'd expect to pay for something comparable in the UK and much lower than they'd be in the US. This might explain why there are so many tourists around despite this being the off season.

Stations have signs warning tourists against unexpected dangers. A favourite has to be this one of the dangers of selfie sticks and overhead railway power lines. 

Not everything is cheap. These strawberries were seen in a department store this morning. I don't think I've ever seen individually packaged strawberries.

I'm not sure what these are. Wild strawberries perhaps ?

There's lots of new building in Tokyo. The serious man in the grey suit in the parliament building yesterday told us that every day more and more companies are taking the view that they want to de-risk from China. They're also taking the view that Asia isn't going to be displaced as the worlds electronics manufacturing mega-cluster. Japan, not surprisingly, seems set to be benefitting from this trend.

A couple more days and then we'll be facing another sixteen hour flight home.