Dieting after the Fish Market

(This entry is still the Fish Market Day , Part II. As a neophite, and someone concerned with keeping up with the writing as much as the bells and whistles of the blog, I have not delved into how to shuffle blog enteries around. They post according to the day and time you post them,logically enough.)

After breakfast, we boarded a tour bus to see the Diet Building which is the legislative building in Japan, analogous best to the House of Commons in England. The Diet members are either from the House of Representatives or the House of Counselors. This was fairly interesting, although you could not take any pictures inside. It reminded me of architecture in Vienna, and one of the things I want to look up in the material they gave us is its age. They have been giving us so much reading material that it is hard to read it, take notes on it, digest it or anything. (Not deliberately to make a pun about Diet and digestion or anything.)

It is as if our time is divided into two types of activities --- the official ones which in general are interesting, and the independent activities which we all rush to do sort of like sailors on liberty or something. There is so much to see here and we do spend a fair amount of our time inside.

Lunch was in a district in Tokyo called Asakusa, not be confused with the district our hotel is in which is Akasaka. The bus was parked in a narrow street just outside the entrance to a large Shinto shrine plus another Buddhist worship area. Our guide called the giant incense vat, similar to what they had in China outside the Buddhist shrines, the "Holy Smoke" which I thought was pretty funny. It was a rendezvous point later. We marched through a line of outdoor shops, stalls and kiosks, all covered with a retractable roof, to get to our restaurant. The group ate upstairs in a big tatami room and we were served an excellent tempura meal. Some of the people had never had tempura before and it was again a little sad to see how many people were really sort of afraid of the food and uncomfortable with the experience generally. I think that one of the themes that is coming up again and again for me personally is gratitude --one of the positive themes anyway. Here I was grateful for my past experiences and the gift of my relative physical fitness and strength.

Lunch was an officially sanctioned eat and run sort of deal, so as soon as I had chomped – my ability to use chopsticks and get up easily from a very low table at which I had been sitting on the floor were definite, er, assets here – I took off to browse through the shops and breathe in some Holy Smoke. The holy sites at the far end of them were really quite powerful spiritual places, and all of this commerce right at their doorsteps harkened the Moneychangers outside the Temple story in a way. I prayed in front of the Buddha, for the first of many times, for peace and compassion, and this was quite a moving experience. The Buddha and I go way back.

The afternoon’s lectures were a mixed bag. We are being powerpointed pretty regularly, and with the love many of our speakers have for quantification of everything, this makes a lot of sense. We get statistics with everything, and I can see adopting this style of looking at the world a little more, though I think I would miss my broad brush with which I am so fond of painting everything.

The two Diet members were from different parties – I took handwritten notes in my other book about them – and one was male and the other female. The gentlemen at one point seemed to imply that the cause of the Japanese economic decline and birthrate is due to the fact that women are in the workplace – at the face true enough, but it sure stirred the crowd up. The moderator commented that “The temperature in the room has just increased.” This got a polite chuckle from us.

It was literally a bit more difficult to listen to the second speaker from a large Banking Corporation, not because his topic was uninteresting --- more statistics and numbers on Japan’s economy—but because his delivery style was lacking in diction and rife with “umm,uhhhs” and the like. Oh well. I would have liked a power point of that because I wanted to look at the numbers even if I couldn’t actually understand his pronunciation of them.

After the daily costume change, I went out to eat with a woman who is also in the Komatsu group. We walked out to the area near our hotel, but first stopped in a pachinko parlor to give it another go. What a din!! Through gestures and whatnot –the attendants spoke no English even if I could have heard them, which I couldn’t—we figured out how to put a 1000yen note (=about $10) into the machine and turn the handle to release the balls. They fall into a tray and then are shot up into the machine by your turning the handle. Unlike my dad’s old machines, these are completely electronic and play songs and have a variety of themes including fish and seashells, anime characters, and other things. The women were playing the seashell ones, so we did too, although I wanted to play one with an anime character on it. There were also some that had mini TVs mounted to the side of the machines, so that if you were insufficiently stimulated by the machine itself, you could watch tv or the stock market. Incredible. Depending on your score, balls get replenished in the tray. If you get a whole bunch, the attendants will bring you baskets to store them in. On the machine, next to the score, which other than reading as a number I could not decipher,there is button to press to summon the attendants. Some people had 3 or 4 baskets of what must have been thousands upon thousands of balls in them. You can turn them in for prizes right there. There is also apparently a black market of prizes for sale someplace where people who’ve hoarded the prizes sell them. We played for about 7.67 minutes and promptly had our money eaten up, so no prizes for us. But it was something I wanted to do. It doesn’t look like I will be partying a great deal on this trip as I am finding myself hanging out with meditators and at least one open-minded non-proselytizing born again Christian, as my dinner companion later turned out to tell me she was. So, blowing 10yen in there didn’t seem too bad.

As frequently happens to me while traveling, I was starting to get concerned about where we should eat. Many of the restaurants had plastic food in the windows with price labels. This was not always as helpful as it sounds, as it was sometimes difficult to identify the food the plastic models were supposed to be representing, but it was far more useful than signs written strictly in Japanese. Neither Lynda nor I wanted to eat raw beef, maybe sushi, though, and neither of us wanted a lot of meat. We stopped in one hole in the wall place that looked cool, but it was all in Japanese, and no one there spoke any English. At the doorway, just an opening with a hanging in front of it, there was a vending machine that sold tickets for food items – everything a la carte, clearly – but we sure had no idea what these items were as the vending machine was all in Japanese. You bought the tickets, handed them to the counterman who gave them to the cook, and presumably you would then get your selections served to you; a sort of real-person automat, and a great concept, and a genuine sort of experience to have, but we just couldn’t read the Japanese. Damn. We shrugged and smiled in an exaggerated fashion, probably looking slightly idiotic, and left.

We found ourselves at an Udon cafeteria sort of place, a very small and very clean restaurant where they had a picture menu. The woman behind the counter knew a little English “No meat, normal udon” which is what I had – broth, noodles and veggies. Very good. This was where Lynda told me amongst other things, including some of her experiences in the Peace Corp, that she was a born again Christian, which I was slightly fascinated with, particularly as I did not seem for any reason to be offensive to her and she was not interested in preaching the gospel to me. It did explain why she knew who Mordecai was, though. And I was thinking she must be Jewish before that, and that was why she was so nice and open. I am having a ton of my misconceptions about all sorts of things taken apart here, and not all of them about Japan.