Day 1

I woke up with my alarm to catch breakfast. Quite an array: full English, continental and Japanese. I had all three. It was free.

The Japanese items at breakfast were boiled rice, rice porridge, grilled fish, seaweed sprinkles, fermented bean curd and miso soup. I played safe with just the miso soup and rice.

I was then very tired and it was also raining so I went back to bed. I woke up at 3.15pm to tour an exhibition of modern craftwork for the tea ceremony at the Tokyo Museum of Modern Art. It was interesting to see how sparsely the items were exhibited. I am inclined to see this as indicative of the Japanese appreciation of space. It might be they did not have very much to put on display.

There was a wide variety of styles to see but we were only allowed to take photos in one room.

Most things in Japan come in sets of 5 because the word for 4
means 'death' which is considered unlucky.

An incense container.

We were then whisked off to the British Embassy for a rather fine BBQ although we had to introduce ourselves to a room full of Japanese (in English), a feat made all the more daunting by a microphone that I felt made my voice sound rather high. 

The evening was hosted by the junior members of the British Japan Society who were very welcoming. Many of the girls were wearing kimonos and looked quite beautiful. Some of the members have offered to help us with our flat hunting which is extremely kind and no less helpful.

We then went to a smashing bar where all drinks (including cocktails) were only 315 yen which is about £2.40. Not bad given Tokyo's reputation and the fact we were in Shibuya, a very popular area.

Returning home I saw this in a shop:

Tomorrow we register at our language school. In return they give us a test on hiragana and katakana, the Japanese syllabic scripts. This is troubling because although I can read them I cannot produce them to order. I think it's too late to be sent home.

Arrival in Tokyo

It was concerning that the engine beside my window seemed to fail repeatedly just after take off. For a long time we did not climb and floated along limply at a few thousand feet.

I sought distraction in a programme listed as ‘experimental variety’ on the in-flight entertainment system. This Japanese game show featured a half dozen comedians locked in a restaurant. Their task was to guess the restaurant’s top 10 dishes with the catch that, each time they made a guess, the chosen dish would be cooked and they had to eat it before they could guess again.

In total they ate 25 dishes before they stumbled on the most popular 10. And that was the end of the programme. We had meanwhile gained altitude.

Here are the dishes they had eaten around half way through the challenge. The Japanese seem to do a mean line in generic brown sauce.

We whizzed through immigration and compulsory finger-printing and skipped onto a train to the centre of town. I needed a little rehydration which I obtained in the shape of this:

It was delicious.

We had to turn around quickly at the hotel because we were due to be met by the DAJF’s Tokyo representative who had decided to take us out for a pizza as an authentic welcome to Japan. It is hard to eat a pizza with chopsticks but I now know it can, in fact, be done.

Something I am not sure how to do is operate the loo in my hotel room. It has dials and squirters and when you sit down it starts to flush.