A clash of cultures

As the sherif said in “Hud”, “What we have here is a failure to communicate.” We really didn’t understand how the Japanese handle day-to-day transactions. We tend to travel on our plastic, using credit cards for most purchases, with US dollar travelers cheques for back-up and a minimum amount of local currency. If we run short, we have our bank cards to withdraw additional cash. That doesn’t fly well here in Tokyo. Credit cards seem to be a real rarity and most places want to be paid in yen. We went to the bank to use the ATM and were told it wouldn’t work because the card was not from a Japanese bank. We did manage to cash some TC’s at the bank and later found an ATM at a 7/11 that would accept our card. So at least we have enough money to finish up our few days in Japan.
We went to the Tsukiji fish market on Tuesday morning around 8 o’clock, well after the initial frenzy but still a very active scene. It was organized chaos with people and machines (especially the ‘Mighty cars’) going every which way. I wonder how many accidents/collisions there are in the run of a normal week or month or year. It was great to wander around, trying to keep out of the way of the workers scrambling to complete their tasks.
After about 90 minutes we left the market and walked up to Ginza Street. Early morning traffic was still very light and none of the stores were yet open so Doreen did not get to browse merchandise that we couldn’t afford. We made our way through the Ginza district and headed off to the Imperial Palace grounds. We hadn’t arranged an audience with the Emperor (wrong time of year) so we had to be content with taking pictures of the Nijubashi Bridge, the guarded entranceway and the grounds of the East Garden.
After lunch, we took the train to Shinjuku and went searching for the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building. Foot traffic on the street has really picked up since this morning. The views from the observation deck were good but somewhat obscured by afternoon smog. Forget seeing all the way to Mount Fuji. We couldn’t even see Yokohama. Hey, the views of downtown Tokyo were great and it’s free. I’m really impressed by this city. It has a vibrancy I haven’t seen or felt elsewhere. Very different from Toronto or New York. Maybe it’s all the waving, colorful banners. I’m also blown away by their transit system with everything built in layers (up and down). At one point we went down three levels to reach our subway line and I don’t think we were at the bottom level then. Besides which, everything is so clean–the trains, the stations, even the streets.