Crazy Farms

I’m surprised by how much farmland there is considering that Japan is supposed to be a super-dense country. While landing at the Narita Airport, you’re greeted with a billion tightly-compacted rice fields. Everywhere that there’s an unfarmable small hill, you see trees and grouped houses.

We took the “rapid line” train to Tokyo from the airport. When we activated our tourist-y “travel without charge on a ‘Japan Line’ train” tickets , we were verbosely informed that our tickets would not work on the automated ticket-scanning gates, and that we’d have to speak to go through a human-manned gate. I took this information to heart and immediately attempted to use an automated gate. Thinking is hard.

Trains are neat-o. The one we took was well-used - every seat was taken, even though it wasn’t a particularly busy time of the day.

We passed a lot more rice farms, and they were interesting to see at ground-level.

I learned that my phone camera is trash-tier, but that’s OK - it’s still possible to somewhat see through the blurriness and understand what each photo is.

Google Maps led us through a lot of alleyways to get to our hotel, but so far it seems like Tokyo is heavily based on foot-traffic: the small corridors aren’t just dark, underused areas behind big buildings - they’re clean, visible, and all have their own pedestrian-oriented shops and vending machines.

We visited Akihabara, because Google Maps led us up there for some ramen - we weren’t the only internationals that found the restaurant in question, though. It was packed (including a lineup) with people who seemed like they were other tourists who also picked the first “food place” that showed up in their phone’s suggestions.

I expected it to be more electronic/hardware oriented (perhaps I had a 90’s vision in mind?) when we walked through Akihabara, but rather it seems to have fully embraced the Anime-y culture of Japan that they seem to be known by globally. I should’ve taken some photos here, but I was hungry as h*ck.

I was nervous about restaurants not supporting a lack of Japanese, but we were able to get by with the ol’ point-at-an-image-of-food-and-nod trick.

Oh, and I did some research to confirm that no, despite my concerns, giving the thumbs up in Japan is not super rude - could’ve sworn it was this country that didn’t like it, but I guess I’m lucky since the thumbs-up is such a staple of my interaction habits.