Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

The local train to the end of the JR line at Choshi is definitely an all-stops service. The first stop seemed to me to be as close to Chiba station as Montgomery Street station on BART is to Powell Street -- about two or three train lengths. Fortunately, the subsequent stops are a little bit more separated than that. Unlike the limiteds, Shinkansens, and suchlike that we've mostly been patronizing, this is clearly a high-capacity, low-frills service intended for lots of people standing, much like the local loop line trains in Tokyo. Seats are longitudinal (down the length of the train), not transverse (across the width), and there's lots of standing space and strap handles for standees. Today was quiet and everyone got a seat, and only about half the space in our car was filled.

It takes nearly two hours to get to Chiba, through some pretty semi-rural areas, punctuated by small towns, farms, and the seemingly inevitable pachinko palace. We weren't the only people digging in to our bento boxes as the train rolled through the Japanese countryside. It looks to me like people who can afford it must be moving out here and commuting to jobs in the Tokyo area, which is feasible given the good transport.

The only drawbacks to riding on this service is that in the commuter-type seating you don't have tray tables or anywhere to put things while you're eating, and also while the air conditioning on the train is good, with three doors per side, all of the cold air leaks out at each station stop and you have to start over again.

After eating my lunch, I watched the land roll by, dozing from time to time with the rocking of the train. Even Lisa, who doesn't sleep well at all on any form of transport sitting up, napped a little bit.

Having decided to leave the main tourist areas of Tokyo and instead look at the oddball stuff, we set off this morning about 10:30 to look for the Arakawa Tram Line.

( Natter about trains and trams )

Back in the hotel room after something like ten or eleven hours of trooping around Tokyo, we put together plans for tomorrow. In order to have any reasonable amount of time to explore the oddball little electric railway out at Choshi and not have to spend an inordinate amount of time on a commuter train getting there, we need to be on a 9:40 AM train out of Tokyo, plus allow enough time at Tokyo station to find a couple of JPY600 (large) lockers for our luggage. Looks like we'll be wringing lots more value from the rail passes tomorrow as we go from Tokyo to Chioshi to Tokyo to Narita, probably not getting to our hotel in which we're spending our last night in Japan until after 2130 or thereabouts.

[Photos referenced here are in my Flikr albums and have had no work done to them."]

This was our first full day in Tokyo, but in fact we haven't really made any plans to speak of, so we sort of decided to go see what we could do in the way of interesting transit and trains in the area. We rode the loop line up to Yurakucho to find the Tourism office shown on our map, but before we could go there, Lisa got distracted by an electronics store and ended up buying more camera memory. I slowed things down by noticing after she had bought it that purchases of more than JPY10000 could be made duty free, so we spent time fussing around with the paperwork to get that fixed before going to the Tourism office, which was mostly a bust other than to find a few English-language maps.

After that, we went to Shimbashi Station, examined the steam locomotive on display in the square to the east of the station, and walked over to Old Shimbashi Station, a reproduction on the spot of the original station by that name. Those of you who were at Worldcon who had JR passes with you may have noticed that there was a JR station down beyond the Landmark Tower. Japan's first rail line ran between that station and Shimbashi, some 29 km. The Shimbashi area has been turned into a bunch of office buildings on the site of the former rail yard, but they've preserved some of the old station excavated during construction, and re-located the line's Milepost 0 to its historical location, which is where we took the photos.

Turning from the old to the new, we rode the Yurikamome Line over to Odaiba and somewhat randomly got out to look at things. We ended up riding the big (115 m) Ferris wheel, but the most interesting thing may have been Toyota's Formula 1 exhibit. The driving simulator was for a touring car racer, so we skipped that, and unfortunately the exhibit where you can attempt to squeeze yourself into the seat of an F1 car for a photo opportunity was closed, but they had a lot of the parts of a current F1 race car on display with exhibits about how they work, including the vastly expensive steering wheel and the absurdly powerful-for-its-size engine.

After a late lunch at one of the many places in the Odaiba area, we rode the Yurikamome line back across to Takeshiba, where we walked to Hamamatsuchō, where we boarded the Tokyo Monorail out toward Haneda Airport. Not wanting to pay full fare twice for what was just an out-and-back excursion, and not wanting to risk falling into the clutches of Airport Security, we got out just before the Airport, went around to the other platform, took some pictures on Lisa's camera, and then rode back in, getting off at Tennōzu Isle station, which was around a kilometer or so from Shinegawa. This meant we only had to pay the minimum fare, as we entered and exited only one station apart.

Back at Shinegawa, we bought stuff for dinner in the room tonight and breakfast tomorrow morning, because we were too tired and footsore from all the walking to go out for dinner again.

It takes us a long time to get anything done here because, everything being new, we're gawking around like the tourists from the backwoods that we are. And we're already pretty tired, so I shouldn't expect to get much done. But I keep hearing voices telling me how much I'm missing. You could take a year trying to explore just Tokyo and not run out of things to do. We've got three days, so we're concentrating on the more oddball rail and transit-related things to do. Above-ground transit and monorails have an advantage in that you can see out while you're traveling.

Saturday's plans aren't particularly firm, but probably include going to the Tokyo Tower and visiting the famous Ginza shopping district for Lisa's benefit. I reckon I need to keep a running total to make sure we don't run over our $1600 duty-free allowance.