Today I met with Nobue-chan (she suggested using -chan rather than -san, since it is less formal…) and her friend Tamaru-san (…but I’m still not confident enough about its use to figure out when it might be offensive, so I’m sticking to -san here) for lunch in Ginza. We met at the Ginza Lion, which is a real statue of a lion, not just a chain of coffee shops, and appeared to resemble those around Trafalgar Square.
We went to a strange little back-street restaurant Tamaru-san knew in a converted warehouse of some kind (there was speculation it might have been storage for either a liquor or pawn shop, but I don’t know enough about the architecture here to be able to tell). It was a traditional Japanese place, with all the taking off shoes and sitting on the floor, which is quite nice but I did feel a bit self-conciously foreign there. That said, I can deal with these places if I’m with people who know how to read the menu – this one appeared to be a simple menu of four or five different kinds of stew. I had beef. In many ways it is similar to stew as we have at home, but the vegetables in it are different and it comes with rice rather than including potato (mine had a single sculpted piece of potato for show).
The little pots of relishes and things were a bit odd, though the salad one was OK, corgette, carrot and radish. (raw corgette is actually quite nice, whose idea was it to cook them?). I tried to explain European radishes but fear I failed somewhat – radish here comes as something around a foot long with the diameter of, perhaps, a medium sized apple, you get a slice of it chopped into four. I think the others were a cooked radish with sesame and some kind of seaweed, neither of which really took my fancy.
Tasty food.
After lunch we went for a walk around Ginza, with the ultimate aim of going to an exhibition of medical …something, I didn’t quite understand what that was. On the way we were talking about Christmas. Apparently it arrived seriously in the fifties and is seen entirely as a commercial exercise. Christmas cake here comes with strawberries, so they were both looking forward to that. We started talking about other festivals but I got distracted by an illuminated nodding wire reindeer before I could find out any more about Valentines day (I’ll have to ask about that another time…)
On our way to the exhibition we spotted a precession going on (or is that a procession?), so decided to take a detour to look at that. It seemed to be a Samurai march taking gifts (taxes?) to the Shogun. There were a series of Samurai bearing different implements, none of which I fully understood, there were some swords, some wigs on sticks, some boxes on sticks (treasure boxes), some cones on sticks, some family kanji on sticks, and a person in a box on a stick (a cargo?).
When the samurai had passed the police opened up the barriers to let people cross the road before the next bit of the precession came through. Next were some dancers, but no-one was paying them much attention – I didn’t either, except to notice that their music box was actually just a little portable tape player wired up to a great big speaker on wheels, and that is exactly what it sounded like.
Then there was a sky blue inflatable elephant emblazoned with the slogan “We support HABITAT”, which lead to a rather awkard explanation of the interior design chain to my companions.
Back to the international centre to try to find the medical exhibition only to discover that theres more queue than exhibition so we head off to the Maranouchi building (having gotten ourselves lost around the exhibition centre). On the way to Tokyo station we passed both a tramp-sleeping-space (I think it was supposed to be fountains but it was ideally suited with little one-person-sized spaces where the water should flow) and a model train set being rushed from the station in some kind of n-gauge emergency.
Into the Maranouchi building and the main lobby is full of some more Shogunate paraphernalia, something celebrating 400 years of something, but I didn’t understand enough to figure out what. Ornate old things that back home wouldn’t be put within touching distance of the great unwashed were only slightly barriered off, and, of course, noone was touching.
After a cozy elevator ride we had a good view from the top of the building, and could look down on the heads of the dancers in the precession below. We also spotted the Merrill Lynch building, Tokyo Tower, (probably) the Rainbow bridge and lots and lots of airconditioner outlets.
Back down for a coffee and quick play in the Bloomberg room before departing. The room has a huge LED display in the centre which is touch sensitive (I think its actually proximity sensitive), on which you can play games, read the news, make silly noises. The place had been taken over by kids wanting to play the keep-the-ball-in-the-air game, but I got a quick go on the music game.
Home now and I’ve figured out how to make my airconditioner give me hot air too, it was starting to get a bit chilly and I was a little worried that the flashing red light meant it didn’t work, but if you leave it for long enough it stops flashing and starts heating.
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