The Tokyo Green Tea Party

Madness in contrast. Black and white, hot and cold, peace, war, control freakery, anarchy. Welcome to Tokyo!

Rice for breakfast (a nation of students - clearly). Then headlong into the Tokyo rush hour. But not, not yet anyway, and something I had also noticed last night. There are bits of Tokyo, especially here in the north of the city, that are relatively sedate. No busier than The Grove in Ilkley, and far less busy than Leeds or Huddersfield. Especially true in the Temple grounds. The hotel is on the edge of a seemingly important temple. Inhabited largely by monks, tourists, and cats, its main contributions to the cacophony of the Tokyo soundtrack are coins being hurled at shrines, the temple bell, and the Churchill-esque camera poses of the Japanese tourists (PEEECE!)

Now you can have your rush hour, and the hilarity of the Tokyo metro system. Way cheaper, way cleaner, and way more on time than the Tube, but nonetheless incomprehensible, ("Wait, this character for that station looks a little like the one in the guide book...") When combined with the disconcerting site of the man in white gloves who pushes people on to packed departing trains, and catches them as the door opens on arriving trains, the Tokyo subway is an excellent way of parting with 160 yen, and spending half an hour.

Wandering around Tokyo, one of the most noticeable changes is the air conditioning. Nearly every office worker, and shop workers in the big stores wears a suit, not ideally clothed for the muggy weather. Air conditioning gets cranked up full blast (God knows how much that costs!) and makes walking past shop doors like a thermal barcode.

The bemusing moment of the day award goes to the entrance to the Imperial Gardens, something that's completely free, and yet you have to get a ticket. A small piece of plastic you pick up from the man at the entrance, and then give in to him again when you leave. (Why do you need this plastic?) I think it's all part of a national mentality of semi-control freakery and redundancy. Demonstrated also in the huge police overstaffing of everything. At least five coppers are assigned to every road works, each one equipped with a luminescent baton to wave traffic around the hazardous maze of warning signs they've erected to point people away from the one open manhole. So prolific is the police presence that they don't have squad cars, they have squad buses. No wonder crime is so low in Japan.