Day 14, to Tokyo

Today I’m returning to the real city. It was a Sunday and nice weather as well, so everyone was out in the streets and the parks. Ironically, today had been a perfect day to visit lake Chusen-ji. I walked around in Ueno park (which was close to my ryokan), and Yoyogi park, which required a short trip with the Yamanote line, Tokyo’s famous circle train.

I had already been in both parks last spring, only this time they were greener. Not much else had changed. Ueno is still more the ‘family’-park with here and there a magician or some musicians, but more of the easy-jazz band type. Yoyogi park is more for the young people, which is kind of logical with its proximity to the ultra hip shopping cities Shibuya and Harajuku. In this park you can still find the cos-play kids, the rock’n’rollers, the rock bands and the skaters. As far as I could see, they were still the same people that I saw in March, and one year from now they can probably still be found there.

I don’t really have much more to write about today. Maybe funny to mention is that on my way to Ueno park, I walked through the ‘motorcycle neighbourhood’. I remember seeing it mentioned on a map once, but never thought it would be this large. In this neighbourhood, everything is about motorcycles. There are shops where they sell motors and scooters (and half of them are on display on the middle of the sidewalk), garages, shops for accessories, motor rider clubs and bars, etc. And this continues for several hundred meters. The background nicely fits to all this; a 7 lane road with elevated expressway. The kind of people that you see here are also typical motorcycle fanatics.

In that sense, stereotypes are often quite accurate in Japan. Or to put it in another way: maybe the people themselves make sure that stereotypes fit, in order to distinguish themselves from other groups. This seems (insofar a foreigner like me can see this) a general principle in Japan; the way you look determines who you are. For example, almost every job has its own uniform, which results in a useful color coding on weekdays. Actually, the only exception to this is the Sunday, which makes it a special day here.

I hadn’t made any pictures today yet, so for fun I made a few photos at night with the night-mode of my camera. They depict the expressway, as seen from a pedestrian bridge. Tomorrow I will go for some real sightseeing in Kamakura, an old capital of Japan.