I took another trip to Odaiba yesterday. I think the Yurikamome trains are my favorite so far in Japan—they run through a beautiful raised track along Tokyo Bay, past some amazing architecture, the huge Odaiba Ferris wheel and the Rainbow Bridge before looping around and crossing the bridge. I went back to the wonderful Indian restaurant along the bay, and accumulated an embarrassing amount of Hello Kitty paraphernalia (I guess any amount is embarrassing, really) in the fake Samurai village one floor below the restaurants.
After lunch and shopping, I finally made it to Oedo Onsen Monogatari, the onsen in Odaiba along Tokyo Bay. The onsen was huge but way too crowded—I had to wait in line to take a shower before I could get into the baths. There were about eight different kinds of baths in the onsen, including one with real onsen water, supposedly extracted from far beneath Tokyo Bay, a gold bath, a silk bath, a Jacuzzi with jets extremely well-placed to massage the arches of your feet, a couple outdoor pools and a few outdoor barrel-baths, as well as two different kinds of saunas. The entrance fee includes rental of a yukata (like a kimono but light-weight) so I wandered around a mock Edo-period village inside the onsen building before and after soaking in the baths. The village was a little hokey, not that I didn’t pick up plenty of souvenirs. Actually the locker key attached to a bracelet also had a barcode on it, so instead of having to carry money around, they scan your barcode whenever you buy food or souvenirs. It’s quite an ingenious idea really, because it makes it very easy to buy things and near impossible to keep track of how much you’re spending until you have to pay up at the very end. Also you can’t get to the locker area where your shoes are being held hostage until you’ve paid up. I was happy to find a manja toy (manja are ubiquitous onsen food from what I understand, a kind of dumpling with vegetables inside), and some delicious mochi balls with cocoa powder and cream on the inside. After wandering around the village barefoot for awhile (like I said, my shoes were being held in a locker out front), I went to the foot baths. They provided a happi coat to put over my yukata but it was still freezing. The water was warm, and the bottoms of the footbaths were covered with small stones designed to hit pressure points in the bottom of your foot but they were actually quite painful (and I wasn’t the only one who thought so—some of the Japanese were also complaining). Unfortunately it was too dark to see where the stones were and avoid them, although some of the stones were placed in rows across the pool so I was able to grapevine my way forward and without tumbling into the footbath with my camera.
I was just about ready to give up on the footbath and make a run for the building across the freezing footpaths when one of my friends spotted the building with the “doctor fish”—the cleaning fish. You pay an extra fee for a set amount of time with the doctor fish and a person leads you into the footbath area and directs you to sit down on a mat and stick your feet into the footbath. As soon as I stuck my feet in, dozens of doctor fish swam up to feast on the apparently large quantity of dead skin cells on my feet. It didn’t hurt at all, but it tickled a lot. I noticed there were only a few doctor fish tending to the feet of the Japanese woman near me. I suspect she must take better care of her feet, because the fish were all over my feet and my friends’ feet. And when my time with the doctor fish was over, I could tell they weren’t anywhere near done with me. My feet definitely felt softer afterwards, although there are still plenty of calluses (well the doctor fish aren’t miracle workers after all). I got some great video of the doctor fish, but I don’t know how to post it here, so I’ll just put a picture in the photo section. Anyway, it’s not every day you see a symbiotic relationship happening on your feet, so the doctor fish alone were well worth the trip.
It snowed today and accumulated for the first time. We didn’t get much snow before it turned to rain and washed away most of the accumulation. Today was maybe the coldest yet—I could definitely see my breath in the bathrooms and of course there’s only ice-cold water to wash up so I can’t ever feel my fingers on the way back to my relatively-warm desk.
I’ve been trying to go somewhere different every weekend, so this past weekend I went to Shinjuku and Ikebukuro. Shinjuku’s Kabuki-chō is mostly a red-light district from what I can gather, but there’s a pretty nice spa right in the middle of it. There are three indoor pools, a hot pool, a cold pool and a Jacuzzi style pool with bubbles, as well as three saunas (only one of which was cool enough for me to stay inside for any length of time) and massages. The really cool part is that the spa is on the ninth floor of the building and there’s one hot outdoor pool that’s shockingly serene considering it’s in the middle of Shinjuku. The pool is screened off so people in neighboring high-rises don’t get an eyeful, but I could still see some skyscrapers while I soaked. It was cool because it felt like an onsen, but with a cityscape instead of the usual tranquil landscape view. And, since the spa is open 24 hours and is much cheaper than a hotel room, now I know where to go when I miss the last train home.
After the spa, I went to a pretty shrine, Hanazono-jinja, also in the heart of Kabuki-chō. The shrine was all lit up at night and weirdly quiet considering it sits in the shadow of skyscrapers on all sides. I left a single yen offering and rang the big ceremonial bells—you’re supposed to leave the offering and pull the big ropes attached to the bells while you pray. After the shrine, I went to a hole-in-the-wall French restaurant for a very-pricey meal that was still worth every yen. I had French-onion soup, the most amazing potatoes gratin, zucchini in a wonderful cream sauce, and topped it off with crème brûlée.
The next day I went to Ikebukuro, which isn’t quite as fashionable and shiny as Shinjuku (but close). There’s a sort of city-within-a-city, called Sunshine City, where I found a neat planetarium, a zoo and an aquarium. I always feel funny visiting zoos because I worry about how the animals are treated. There were a couple of sea lions in a tank that looked a little small, but then again, the Japanese have very different standards for judging a space too small to be livable. My apartment seemed inhumanely small on those first few nights too. On the plus side, I got a great video of a seal doing math. The trainer would put numbers on a board (like 5+4=) and the seal would look at each symbol very carefully then bounce down a row of numbers, pick out the right one and take it back to the trainer in exchange for fish. I was pretty impressed. Unfortunately, the show didn’t seem that popular, except with a few very small children, either because it didn’t seem to be a scheduled show or because it’s so cold outside. But luckily the seal still gets fish for doing math whether there’s a big audience or not. The aquarium was nice (although not as nice as the Chicago aquarium), but very crowded of course. After the aquarium, I went to a kind of food amusement park, where I was able to find vegetarian gyoza (like potstickers) filled with kimchi and topped with melted cheese. Undoubtedly not traditional, but delicious nonetheless. I’ve been disappointed over the last few months that I rarely eat Japanese food because it’s so hard to find vegetarian versions. I’ve been surprised at how pervasive meat is in Japanese restaurants when historically Japanese considered eating animals like cows to be exotic and not a little strange. But even the vegetable gyoza at the grocery store turned out to contain a little bit of meat when I asked. Anyway, I was overjoyed to find a vegetarian Japanese dish, no matter how untraditional the interpretation. I think I just need to search more for vegetarian Japanese food, and after all, if I can’t find it in Tokyo, I probably can’t find it in Japan.
