I ♥ Japan’s Subway System
Look, you might think you live in a city with clean and efficient mass transit. You don’t. You can set your watch to Japan’s subway cars. If it says it will be there at 5:42 p.m., it won’t be there a minute earlier or later. That’s just one of the things to love about their mass transit: There are electronic signs on the platform saying exactly when the next train will be there. Cell phones must be silenced, and while just about every inch of the subway car is prime real estate for ads, it’s easy enough to ignore. As if all that wasn’t great enough, every station is its own little mall. Want hand rolls? Candy? Dumplings Yakitori? Sake? Weird edible dough birds? Just pick it up on your way out of the station, or pull up a seat at a small booth in some of the stores and they’ll rush to give you some hot tea. That’s what I did yesterday on the way to Ueno Park.
Shinjuku station, near my hotel, is no exception. At any minute of the day it’s overflowing with people spilling out in either direction. Still, assuming you know what trains you need, it’s pretty simple to find your way around. Getting lost is virtually impossible; everything is in both Japanese and English. And for some reason, when you’re in Japan, a doughnut first thing in the morning sounds like a great way to start your day. Hey, we don’t have green-tea doughnuts back home—I owe it to myself as a world traveler to experience this, even though it’s from a placed called Doughnut Plant New York City. It still seemed exotic, though: Have you ever heard of a square doughnut? Insanity. It was pretty flaky and manageably sweet, and, as a bonus, masked my mouth in what looked like mutagen ooze.
As I’m quickly learning, you can easily spend an afternoon in just one small part of Tokyo. Ueno Park unfolds multiple times over the horizon, every inch of it covered in lush greenery, a few shrines, pagodas, and, as Wikipedia correctly points out, lots of homeless people. (I saw one man taking a leak on some bushes, doing his part to make the park that much greener.) I explored for a solid hour, resting for a bit on Mount Suribachi, which was crawling with massive crows. All one crow had to do to shoo away a group of pigeons was just caw. These things are huge, I tell ya. How huge? Insert your own generic punch line, and they’re even bigger than that.
There are also a lot of statues here (including one of Saigō Takamori, the samurai whose dog memorably inspired a Futurama episode—he’s not known for much else) and in all just a general, pleasing stillness. In the park, at least. Ueno Park is just part of Taito City, a place buzzing with everything that comes with the standard city: traffic, shopping, its own Lourve, a T.G.I. Friday’s (thank heavens!), adorable pastry shops, and a porno theater helpfully titled “Adult Movies.”
I was jolted out my language isolation in Ueno Park suddenly when a man asked me if I knew where the zoo was. I pointed him in its general direction, which was probably the first time I spoke English all day, until, later I oddly bumped into Kyle and Sally. Tokyo is a pretty huge place, so, the odds of this happening are pretty remote. They were on their way into the park while I was on the way out to hop on the Ginza line over to Kappabashi, a.k.a. Kitchen Town, a street in Tokyo almost exclusively populated with stores to supply restaurants with cookware, restaurant furniture, and sampuru—the indispensable plastic food on display that entices you at seemingly every restaurant in Tokyo. If you’re starving, eat before coming here. It’s torture to be surrounded by seemingly edible food, only to find it’s hard as a rock and preserved in plastic.
All this fake food was making me hungry, so I headed back to Shinjuku and grabbed dinner at a noodle shop on a side road. There were scads of salarymen inside, in full three-piece suits slurping on noodles while wearing bibs. The air was punctuated by the sounds of slurping followed by satisfied aahs, and after I got my order of curried udon, I joined them. My bib was rendered a sloppy yellow mess without even trying by meal’s end. On the way back to my room, I treated myself to a green-tea stuffed frozen waffle at a nearby Family Mart. Its wrapping made it seem like it also had chocolate in it, but it was instead some sort of red honey—which was delicious, but not what I was expecting. But, hey, I had just eaten dinner in a bib, I couldn’t start getting picky now.
