[The following special feature appears in Hidden Years #20, New Blood #27, and Blood of Ten Chiefs #16. Note that the 3 photographs (and corresponding captions) originally printed with this feature are not included in this archive. --MK]
Tokyo - Thursday, October 27.
Dear Journal, what am I to do? So many photos, so little space!
As I suspected, Thursday morning we were up and semi-functional at some ungodly hour like 5 A.M. The way I figured it, I'd be adjusted to the fifteen hour difference between Pough- keepsie end Tokyo just in time to head back and get messed over once again. Ah, the jet-set life.
Thursday was scheduled to be a full day, with some sight-seeing in the morning and early afternoon, and the Big Meeting with the cartoonists that evening. Wisely, our hosts had arranged relatively relaxing activities for the day!
We started at the Hama Rikyu Garden, a most lovely, quiet sanctuary of walkways and ponds, once used by the Shogunate for duck hunting. Later, it was part of the Imperial Detached Palace. On this day, it was a place to listen to breezes and birds, and try to get some sense that we were really halfway around the world. If I didn't think about it too much, we could've been in Central Park (the better parts).
From the Garden, which is located near the mouth of the Sumida River, we boarded a river commuter boat to take us up the river to the Asakusa, one of the many different shopping districts in Tokyo. The Sumida, since Tokyo's Edo period, has been the main thoroughfare for both people and freight. The commuter boats ply their way up and down the waterway, passing under Sumida's famous eleven bridges.
At the Asakusa stop we debarked, walked a little way through a passageway, emerged onto the street... and suddenly we were in the Tokyo I had imagined! Here were the multistory buildings encrusted with colorful signs and neon; here were the crowded vendors and shops, here were the brilliant paper lamps and vermilion shrines. It was almost as if the relaxing walk through the Hama Rikyu Garden had been our hosts' way of saying, "Charge your batteries now, because we're going on the big kids' ride after this!"
To a shopaholic like me the tragedy (a very minor one, to be sure) of this day was that we had many places to be at certain times, so while we got to see a lot of the Asakusa, we didn't get to browse. (And me with charge cards and freshly-converted yen just burning a hole in my wallet!) But it was enough of a taste - of street mall vendors, of wonderful smells coming from hundreds of little restaurants, of elegant shrines - for me to determine that at some point during our visit, we would pry our own quality (read: shopping!) time from the business of comics.
To be continued...