Japan part 2

By now I had been in Japan for several weeks. I had spent plenty of time in large cities, mostly looking for garages. But I had noticed that a lot of Japanese cities look very samey. I suppose the same could be said for anywhere in the world to some extent, each country has a particular style and most cities will fall in line with that style. But in Japan it seemed to be particularly pronounced. Every city seemed to consist mostly of heavy traffic, high rise offices and flat, and a 7-eleven on every street corner with a pachinko parlour next door. That's not to say that there weren't any nice or unique parts to cities, it's just that they were very often small and undersold.

Tokyo seemed to follow this rule. For the most part it looks the same as <insert name of another Japanese city here>. The metropolitan area being home to 35 million people, the biggest city in the world, probably doesn't nothing to help the homogeneity. But the draw of Tokyo is that it is the best place to go to see the eccentricities of modern Japan.

So for a couple of days I just wandered around generally looking very lost.

Imperial palace gardens

The least convincing British pub in the entire world

Tokyo, along with many other Japanese cities, is built vertically. There are so many people in Japan and so little space that every scrap of land already has something built on it. So independent shops are usually built 5 or 6 stories high.

Shinjuku, largest TV screen in the world

Akihabara quickly turned in to my favourite place in the city. It is known as electric city and is full of arcades, gadgets, electronics. Pretty much everything. But the weirdest part about it is the maid cafes.

It shouldn't be too difficult to work out what a maid cafe is. Yes, it is exactly what is sounds like. Of course, we still had to go to one.

To be honest, not worth the expense. All it was was a normal cafe where everything costs twice as much as it should and where the waitresses dress up as French maids.

Yoyogi park

Shibuya crossing

After a couple of days I really needed to make a start on getting the bike out of Japan. Several weeks earlier I had emailed a couple of shipping agent in Tokyo but the number of responses I had gotten could be counted on zero hands. I decided the best thing to do was just get a list of offices, ride to each one and demand to speak to someone in person. It took a long time, but it actually worked. And by worked I mean I was able to get a response. That response was invariably 'no'.

Who would have thought it would be so difficult to find a shipping company who actually had a ship? Flying was out of the question because of the expense ($5000, maybe, if I was lucky) so shipping was really the only way. I did find someone who was willing to crate it up and ship to Bangkok but the price again was much too high. Eventually by pure chance I stumbled across the name of a shipping company which does RORO services to South East Asia. Unfortunately by this point I had spent so much time following dead ends that it was late on Friday and I couldn't make it to the company before the end of the day. I was nearly going insane by this point and had to escape Tokyo for the weekend. And what better way to unwind than in a bar staffed by monkeys.

So the monkey who brings the beers wasn't working that night, which was slightly disappointing, but the monkey who bring the hot towels was. So that was alright.

I had the place to myself, a bit odd for a Friday night, but what could be more Japanese than monkey working in a bar. It's all done properly, the government has been down to inspect the premises and make sure the monkeys aren't being mistreated (they're obviously not). They are now officially classed as 'employees'.

And then it was off to Nikko, not very far away. Nikko is home to a large collection of temples and shrines including the mausoleum of the first shogun.

Three wise monkeys

I was heading to a meet up with WTN-J, a group of bikers who have all spent various amount of time riding around the world. But it was a long way from Nikko across some very nice mountains.

The next morning my bike refused to start. The battery had been playing up for a week or two now but I had done a very good job of ignoring it. But that morning I had to recruit 4 or 5 other people to help push the bike up to the top of a hill so it could be rolled back down. I decided it was time to replace it. Help was offered, which was a good thing given my previous experiences at Japanese garages.

But after trying a couple of places the only option available was €200 for a battery that would cost £40 back home. I politely refused and left leaving myself no other option than to push start the bike every morning.

Now it was Sunday night. People would be back at work in the morning so I returned to Tokyo confident that I would have more success this time.

Yeah, right.