Tokyo, briefly

Amy and the boys arrived here in Japan just in time for the "rainy season." This is the term for the long period of alternate days of torrential rain and humidity so thick you feel as though you'll have to remove your clothes with a power sander. We managed a trip to Tokyo last weekend -- all expenses paid at least for me as I presented at the "Inter-Asia Cultural Typhoon" (yes that was the title) conference. People here in Tokushima had warned me to avoid the more chaotic areas but as erstwhile New Yorkers I thought we'd have no problem negotiating Tokyo. I was wrong: we spent a good deal of the weekend holding up foot traffic by standing dumbfounded before the city's many Kanji subway maps (it ends up only the Yamanote loop line stations have maps in English). Still, we got to see I good deal and the city's organized disorder was itself a miracle to behold. The crosswalks alone are worth the price of admission: in Shinjuku (the de facto city center of late) they measure about 40 feet across and not without reason, in Shibuya (think the West Village cubed) they cross each other in crazy patterns in a huge polygonal plaza, as the lights turn red all at once and everyone somehow manages to get where they're going. Watching the dance of thousands of umbrellas as this occurs is better than any Super Bowl halftime show.

The signal moments of the weekend were the displays of honesty and generosity by the people here. My eldest dropped his electronic umbilical cord (a.k.a. Nintendo DS) on the subway and bummed about it for a couple of days until we passed a lost-and-found office in one of the stations and stopped in on a "hail Mary" whim ... within minutes they located it at another station, within an hour we had it back. On another occasion Charlie was crouched on a sidewalk in Rappongi Hills nursing a blister on his foot when a strange looking young man with a severe speech impediment stopped and, in broken Engrish, provided us with bandages and some kind of miraculous numbing salve he had on hand. He insisted on us keeping the bottle of medicine and it pretty much saved our day. Our boys are slowly but surely drawing lessons from all this ... at one point Danny offered the comment, "Pretty much everything is better here, except the escalators are the same."