The Return to Tokyo (and other places)

I got the chance to go back to Japan a few weeks back (July 5 - 11). I was last in Japan in October of 1997. Wow time has flown by. Strangely, it didn't seem too different over there, it was still all different like it was before..... Oh, but the kids were still riding around on their bikes talking on their cell phones.... I guess one difference is that I was continually looking for a Internet signal for my laptop. When I got home from my mission, I kept on seeing "web addresses" on TV commercials and I had no idea what they were talking about. Before I left for my mission to Japan, my dad had an old "green screen" Sanyo computer. Boy did things change while I was gone for two years.

On to some pictures:


So I had never ridden on a 747-400 "heavy" before, so I decided to book some tickets on Japan Airlines (JAL) and take it for a ride. On some of the older version they actually had economy seats in the upper deck, but not on the version I flew on. So, it was basically just felt the same as any other plane, but I'm sure we looked pretty cool taking off. The plane looks cool, at least I think so.





When I flew over to Japan for my mission, I was a loner, yep no one else was going to my mission at the same time and so I headed out alone. My flight was delayed for like 3 hours and my mission president had decided to come pick me up by himself so he could just do some of the interviews in the car on the way home from the airport. Well bless his hear, my flight was delayed so long and since I'm sure that he didn't get very much sleep while president, when I got off the plane I walked out of customs to a throng of people. There were so many people holding up signs and since I was an foreigner, they all start shouting. I couldn't see any mission president anywhere. I had to go either left or right, but had no idea where to go. I chose left and just happened to see a very tired American with a suit on and he was sitting down.... and a sleep. I tapped him on the shoulder and he jumped up. He was a bit embarrassed for falling asleep, but it was all good -- he needed the sleep!

My trip over this time was much less dramatic, perhaps because I had already been there. I just kept on waiting for that same place where all of the people were yelling and holding up signs, but it was a bit anti climatic when I got there because it was really quiet. There must not have been many flights coming in right then. Oh well, there were plenty of other things that brought back a flood of memories!

One of those memories were "Danchi's", this is the Japanese word for big apartment complexes. Though I think that Danchi refers more to lower income apartment complexes -- but we called everything Danchi's when I was over there. You could literally spend a whole day knocking on doors in some of the ones in Tokyo. Some days we would ride our bikes out there and take our lunches. We would stay all day long and just go from Danchi to Danchi. Wow, we would get our exercise! So here is a picture of a Danchi. We would start at the top and work our way down, hoping that the JW's hadn't just been there.....

The cool thing (not for us missionaries because we never had one in our apartments) was that a lot of the doors have video cameras so when they can't come to the door, or don't want to come, they can just answer the door from the kitchen area and see who it is. We call them "kekko" boxes. Kekko means: no thanks or I am fine.

A Danchi (brown building):

When I went over there this time I flew into Narita (one of Tokyo's airport), which you would think was close to Tokyo. I was actually 2 hours via train from Tokyo. I jumped on a train and rode into Shinjuku station, which is one of the big stations in the Tokyo area. I had never been to this station, I'm not sure if it wasn't in my mission or if I just never went there. I am pretty sure that it wasn't in my mission. This train station is the perfect size for the "where's the Gaijin" game. Gaijin means foreigner. So one of us a missionaries would stand stationary in one place and the other would walk back a little ways. One missionary would take a picture of the other, standing in a sea of Japanese people. It was much like "where's Waldo".

Here is a view of Shinjuku from my hotel room (the Tokyo Tower is in a couple of the pictures):

Somewhere on this blog there should be a link to a guitar player that I saw in Shinjuku, he was pretty good. There were a lot of bands around playing music.

So from Shinjuku I headed on up to Matsumoto (about 3 hours by train -- no bullet train though!), which is in Nagano ken. "ken" is a prefecture, the Nagano Olympics where held near Nagano city in Nagano ken. Matsumoto is about an hour from the Nagano ski areas. I didn't get to go there, but I hear the skiing and mountain biking is pretty good. Matsumoto sits at the base of the Japanese Alps. Also, I hear that there are some pretty cool Japanese style cabins you can stay in while hiking in the area. I borrowed this picture off one of the Matsumoto websites -- great site! (http://welcome.city.matsumoto.nagano.jp/contents12+index.htm)

Maybe we will get to see it in person sometime!

Here are some pictures I took of the Matsumoto area:

Here is the local mountain climbing shop "green grass":






I got a chance to find the local LDS church. I was hoping to make it to church on Sunday, but it didn't work out. This church was much nicer (from what I could see) than most of the churches I ever saw over in Japan.


So the Japanese office setup is very different from things here in the States. I took a few pictures of a typical area. There are no cubicle, that would take up too much space (I guess). For a society that is typically pretty private, their office environment doesn't really offer that. Interesting. Here a few pictures:






Well, that is all for now. I now know why I only blog every once in a while. It takes a lot of time and the blogger interface is not my favorite. Maybe I will post some other pictures later.