Tokyo Tomorrow

For the next 2 weeks, Jackie and I will be travelling in Japan and I felt that may just be enough of an excuse to dust off my travel keyboard and indulge myself in putting pixel to virtual paper.

Japan is a beautiful, spiritual and peaceful place for me and I have loved visiting over the years, even though most of the trips were business related. The Japanese people are very gentile and gracious and they seem to get my sense of humour, or at the very least are too polite to mention that it sucks. And this visit is all the more special as we are being accompanied by our eldest grandson, Ben. I feel myself adopting the role of a tour guide, desperate to show him some of the wonders I have seen in this amazing country, although I suspect Ben sees himself as more of our carer for the next 2 weeks, helping us overcome the various challenges that travelling in the digital age brings.

I won't lie, getting to Japan is a bit of an effort. It always was a long flight time, but now the need to thread your way between the various conflict zones has added at least another hour, and the impact of these conflicts and other recent crises on airline costs has meant the airfare has more than doubled since our last visit 8 years ago. We chose to fly KLM for this trip which gave us an almost civilised 9 am flight to Amsterdam with a relatively short connection time before our 13 hour direct flight to Tokyo's Narita Airport. You are likely to have noticed that I am much shorter than the average Dutchman, which pays dividends for airline travel, with even Economy seats on KLM flights having more than enough legroom for me.

I first realised that I missed the 95% percentile for males born in the Netherlands when visiting the gents at Amsterdam airport many years ago. As a male reader, you will understand, but to anyone of the fairer sex reading this, apologies if it is TMI. The architects have assumed a certain average leg length when specifying where to place the line of urinals on the wall of the toilets in the airport. For me to make use of them means having to stand on tiptoe and the resulting loss of stability that brings is not conducive to the required function of the facility. I learned that quickly and now wait in line for the seating area, or if I am lucky, there is a lower urinal at the end of the row intended for children.

We arrived on time at Narita Airport and passed through immigration and customs very quickly and efficiently and were soon aboard the Narita Express en route to Tokyo Station and Kudanshita. Adjacent to Tokyo station is the Marunouchi metro station. A huge complex with numerous interconnecting lines and underground shopping and restuarant areas, but are very easy to navigate. We decended to the Tozai line platform to buy tickets and there the decision to not get any currency in advance came back to bite us as the ticket machines only accepted cash or Japanese bank cards. Fortunately my tired brain finally remembered you can withdraw cash on an international credit card at many of the Family Mart convenience stores and that we had passed on on the way to the platform. 

Our first hotel is the Villa Fontaine Kudanshita, located in an area very familiar to me from previous business trips. We always stayed in the same business class hotel in Tokyo, the optomistically named Grand Palace, which unfortunately didn't survive the covid years and has now been demolished. It is fair to say that our current accomodation is not so grand, but the rooms, although small, are very comfortable and most impartantly are air conditioned. Breakfast is included which is a bonus.

After we checked in and showered we headed to Akihabara, or Electric City, one of my favourite places in Tokyo. It is a busy and vibrant area, full of electronic shops, restaurants and Japanese girls dressed as cats. Every 5 minutes or so a Bandori truck with a brightly lit trailor advertising and playing the latest release by Japanese boy or girl bands drives past. Unfortunately we were too tired to fully appreciate the madness, so we ducked into a tiny restaurant called Spaghetti and ordered the Japanese interpretation of spaghetti Bolognese.Read more