Here we are sitting on the Shinkansen (Bullet Train)
travelling at incredible speed – perhaps around 300km per hour at times and
pondering the last 6 days in Tokyo which was an incredible experience. The city is an amazing mix of old and new –
some parts are many hundreds of years old and others, space-age technology and
amazing buildings. The city is crowded,
as already noted, the coastal Tokyo-Nagoya residential strip totalling some 35
million people, a quarter of the nation’s population. The people are incredibly hard-working, many
working very long hours and come Friday night, they stay in the izakaya (pubs)
until very late. The number of
restaurants is amazing – in shopfronts, basements and up steep stairs to higher
floors. Most railway/subway stations
have large numbers of take-away cafes and sit-down restaurants with almost
every type of food we could imagine.
Much of it is very reasonably priced and certainly, from our experience,
very tasty and fresh.
The people are mostly well-dressed and impeccably groomed,
particularly the young women. They are
very fashionable and despite some very strange outfits, beautifully
presented. The shops and department
stores are crowded, particularly at weekends, with sweet young things looking
for the new and interesting outfits, shoes and hats they can find. They totter around on impossibly high heels
with micro-mini skirts or short shorts and above-knee decorative
stockings. We visited one of the high
end department stores during the week and were amazed at the range of product,
most appearing to be produced in Japan.
Some of the product, particularly kimonos and embroidered panels, etc.,
were extremely beautiful and incredibly expensive. This is a store several levels above David
Jones in sophistication and probably even above Galleries LaFayette in
Paris. There were several artisans at
work and we managed to buy hand-made personally embossed chopsticks for a quite
reasonable price – a nice keepsake.
In some areas there is a concentration of same-type
stores. Fashion areas, kitchen goods and
electronics in particular are grouped together.
“Electric Town” in Akihabara is an area not far from central Tokyo where
there is building after building for many blocks, where electronic equipment
and software of all types is sold. There
are buildings of 5 or 6 floors devoted to one particular type of game or brand
and there seem to be dozens of these buildings.
We can’t say enough about the welcome we’ve received wherever
we’ve been. Greetings from staff in
restaurants, shops, cafes and everywhere else has been a feature. Looking a little lost on Saturday afternoon
and pondering the map to find a particular store, we had a young mother ask if
she could help and then she led us on a 3 block detour to point out the store
we were looking for. She spoke some
English and had actually visited Australia at one time, but only the minimal
Sydney/Gold Coast/Cairns few days experience.
She had finished her shopping and was heading home when she stopped to
help, so we were most grateful. We only
wished that we’d had one of our little koalas with us to give to her little
son.
The shinkansen, as with most of the trains we have
experienced so far, are extremely efficient and clean and safe and many local
trains are very crowded. And yet,
despite the crowds, there is no angst and certainly no delays. The shinkansen are reputed to run less than 6
seconds late on average. Amazingly
efficient! And not a hint of BO despite
the crowds in the subways!
Today, before boarding the shinkansen, we purchased our
lunch which was a bento box with several types of vegetables, potato salad,
prawns, pork and chicken prepared in different ways, a cold beer and all for a
little over $10 each. Absolutely
beautiful! (Pictures attached).
