Winter Holidays #2

I should really write the rest of the holiday update before it is February and I really lose my drive...

New Years Eve was both exciting and disappointing at the same time. It was really interesting to pop out of Shibuya station into a sea of New Years revelers, the city all lit up with advertisements and NY decorations. But, it was disappointing because the club we went to was not really my cup of tea. I`m still not really sure what kind of music they were playing... drum and base? house? techno? maybe I`ll never know. It also took us 2 hours to get home. The train was packed with Japanese people but we had to get stuck on the only car with another set of foreigners. These gaijin happened to be really drunk New Zealanders who were yelling, carrying on and eventually ended up doing the Hakka on the train, much to the Japanese passengers chagrin.

On New Years day Amy and I got up bright and early after a very late night. We wanted to catch all the daytime activities around the city that are really special to NY day. We visited Meiji Shrine the biggest place of worship in downtown Tokyo?! It was packed with people, we had to wait in a line, but the good thing was that they entertained those waiting with a giant plasma TV suspended above the crowd. Although I wished it would play Seinfeld episodes, the programming was limited to views of the line in front of us and some sort of advertisements. Oh well. The newspaper said that on the first 3 days of the NY over 3 million people visited the shrine.

The rest of January 1st was spent wandering around the areas of Japan made famous by Gwen Stefani and rampant Japanese commercialism... Harajuku, Shibuya and Shinjuku. One of the cool things about the holiday season is that all of the stores have `lucky bags`. These are bags filled with random merchandise from the store each bag has a set price. The trick is you don`t know what is inside, so if you buy a 50 dollar bag you could get a really good deal or a bunch of useless crap. Hooray for gambling.

The final couple of days in Tokyo were spent seeing some other interesting sights such as the Imperial Palace grounds, Ginza shopping district and Yasukuni shrine. Yasukuni shrine is famous these days because it has sparked a great deal of tension between Japan and pretty much every other Asian nation, most notably China. Prime Minister Koizumi makes an annual visit to Yasukuni to pray for the war dead. Sounds noble enough, but it happens that there are innocent civilians enshrined alongside gentlemen convicted of class A war crimes. All western judgment aside it was a cool experience. There is a big museum outlining the history of Japanese conflict, beginning with the first unwelcome visits by Europeans and ending with WWII. Lots of info, and some pretty interesting reports about the Rape of Nanking and the invasion of China in general, both referred to simply as `incidents`. Oh well, as many a wise old bag has noted, history is written by the victors