The Rynearsons in Japan 1

Technically, that's sort of the topic of this blog.  However, in this case it is being written about my (Lee's) parents making good on their threat to visit us here, which they did this November.  November, because it is just late enough for the plants to be asleep in New Hampshire, where their plant-related businesses reside, but still early enough here for our plants to be pretty much awake, and not covered in sleet.  November being a month when we have no special time off from work, we were able to give my parents some pointers and assistance in planning, but not to actually guide them around the country very much.  Thus, we have pictures and stories from us and them, and also from them exclusively.  We'll share some of both in the next few posts.  For the full set of pictures, see Flikr.

They flew into Tokyo on a Friday night, such that I could leave work after completing my class obligations and meet them in Tokyo Station.  I'd given them extremely detailed directions on exactly where to meet me in Tokyo Station (the information center closest to their arrival platform) and how to arrive at that point.  I was much relieved to find them there and not need to rely on plan B, wherein they would call my cellphone from a payphone of indeterminate location and tried to describe to me how they got there.  I found them less dazed and confused than I had anticipated after the roughly 30-hour transit, and we were off.

 This is about 0.5% of Tokyo Station - I recommend a map and compass

Ana had a faculty meeting that day and thus would not arrive in the city until around the time I was planning to have my parents asleep, and the task in the intervening time was to feed them their first not-airline-food meal in more than a day.  I had a Chinese place in mind in the subway station nearest the school's condo (subway stations have many, many restaurants, and stores, in Tokyo - many stations are the size of malls in the US) that I'd been eying on previous trips.  We stood outside it, examining the plastic food replicas and deciding what to order.  I knew what kinds of things were generally available and could read enough of the characters to have a pretty good idea of what we were asking for, and I wrote them down to be safe, but upon trying to get a table the staff waved us off saying that they were full, so we ended up going to the substantially less adventurous imitation-Italian place down the hall.  It was good enough, and my parents discovered the magic of  "ビル", or the fact that the Japanese word for beer is "biru" and that it is one of the few loan words that the Japanese have taken from English that they regularly understand when it is still pronounced by a native speaker.  After that, we went to the condo, put out the futon (plural like moose), were joined by Ana, and went to sleep.

Now when I have to review the kanji for cryptomeria (椙, incidentally) I think of these

The next morning we had to be up bright and early to make a train to Mito, home to one of the three most famous gardens in Japan, Kairaku'en.  Ana and I had been to the other two, so this would complete the trifecta for us.  My parents, being plant-and landscaping-centric people, had a lot of gardens to see on their trip and would be visiting all three of the most famous and good few more besides on during their visit.  Our prior experience with the Tokyo subway guiding us, we made the train easily and sat back for the trip.  This voyage showed both the city of Tokyo and some substantially rural areas out the windows of the train, and my parents speculated heavily about the Latin names of various plants they saw as they went by as they would do regularly for the rest of the trip.  I mention this especially because I'd recently learned several obscure characters for plant names, and complained along with some study partners about how pointless said characters were; my parents knew the names of the plants associated with those characters and pointed them out later on in this trip.  I afterward felt somewhat deprived of my good reason to complain about those characters.

What do you mean we need to be out the door less than eight hours after getting in?!

We arrived at Mito Station, which turned out to be a much larger station in a much larger city than I'd anticipated.  After caffeinating my coffee-deprived parents at a local McDonald's, we set out across the city to the garden, giving them an extended opportunity to see first-hand a representative Japanese city at ground-level that wasn't lengthened by more than one or two wrong turns.  One we got to Kairaku'en, we figured we were more on their turf, and ceded control of speed and direction to them.  Kairaku'en is famous as a plum-blossom garden, and thus must be stunning in February or March.  It's a little bare in November, but not disappointing.  We saw elements and styles that we'd not yet seen in Japanese gardens, and if we get the chance, we'll be back when it is in bloom.  There are acres of ancient plum trees.  We saw just about everything there was to see there, given the season, and got plum-flavored sorbet on the way out.  The other members of our party were skeptical, but I insisted and bought one for myself, whereupon they all tried it and immediately bought their own.

Entrance to Kairaku'en

Manicured trees

We had really nice weather

Interesting sunlight  through the conifers

Sorbet stand

We scampered back across the city to the train station, re-caffeinated them, and bought some fries to tide us over until our real lunch.  Mito is northeast of the city and there was a restaurant up there I'd been meaning to get around to going to - I figured my parents would have plenty of Japanese food later in the trip and that this was my chance to make the pilgrimage.  I'd read about it in the food blog of a foreigner in Tokyo who is a friend of my cousin (who lives in Tokyo six months a year) and he'd raved about it.  He also said it was small.  How small, we did not fully appreciate until we arrived.  I think we got there around 2PM, looking for lunch, which in most places is sort of a dead time of day.  Sunny Dinner, in some random not-very-important northeast Tokyo neighborhood, had an hour-long line.  We stuck it out, aiming to get four of the approximately eight seats inside.  It took courage and perseverance, but the reward was great, at least for the half of the party that cannot usually obtain outstanding burgers, which is pretty much the only thing they serve.  Other notes: I've never seen sodas that large served in Japan, and I'm pretty sure they must buy several smaller bottles of soda to pour into a glass to achieve that size, because the soda cost pretty much the same as the beers, which weren't small either.  At any rate, we found the place and we feasted, and my parents admitted to not having had burgers themselves in a year or so, and it was good.

It's about that big on the inside too

This is 50% of their tables, and there is a bar that might seat another six people...tasty burgers though

After the food, we were wiped, and retired to the condo for naps.  Post nap, we called up my cousin and met him at an izakaya (basically Japanese tapas restaurant) near his current apartment, for (what else) Japanese tapas.  There was sizzled chicken and sushi and tasty little kimchee blossoms and various fatty parts of animals, as the Japanese are wont to consume, and on the whole it was a nice, casual, low stress dinner.  After dinner, we took them to Akihabara, the electronics district, to get a real show of Tokyo neon and nerd-oscity but were disappointed to find them closing up shop at all of 10:30 at night.  What the hell, Akihabara?  What happened to playing Street Fighter 2 in the arcades until 1AM, then buying a laptop from a street vendor and taking it into a hostess bar where the hostesses wear cat ears above their French maid costumes to try it out until the sun comes up?  Do you always close down so early or was it just this once?  Sad state of affairs, if you ask me.  They're supposed to be setting the standards for the whole world up in there.  My parents professed being able to still sort of catch the vibe and managed to get some decent pictures despite it being dark.  Akihabara visited, we retired for the evening.

Tapas place

Akihabara, sadly low on neon