The Daily Parker

Yesterday I took the Shinkansen from Tokyo to Kyoto and back. The 476 km trip takes two hours and twenty minutes, averaging 200 km/h including stops.

The best we have in the U.S. over the same distance, the Acela from Boston to Philadelphia (511 km), takes just over five hours on a good day and more if it snows. Chicago to St. Louis (457 km) is scheduled for five and a half hours, but I haven't ever made the trip in under six.

The U.S. made different choices than Japan (or Europe: London to Newcastle, 483 km, takes 2 hours and 50 minutes), because our vast depopulated spaces made an automobile-based infrastructure deceptively appealing. Wouldn't it be incredible if the U.S. experienced some kind of economic situation where it made a lot of sense to start correcting that monumental error? Oh, right.

In any event, I left the Tokyo train station a little past 10 in the morning and got to see this by 2, which is really the point:

Exhibit 1, a very fast train:

Exhibit 2, autumn at Tenryu-ji, one of 17 UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Kyoto:

Exhibit 3, a juxtaposition of transportation technologies:

Explanation, to the extent required, follows tomorrow morning.

Every year, the Economist publishes the Big Mac Index, "a fun guide to whether currencies are at their “correct” level. It is based on the theory of purchasing-power parity (PPP), the notion that in the long run exchange rates should move towards the rate that would equalise the prices of a basket of goods and services around the world." The current spot price of a Big Mac in Tokyo today is ¥680: just under $9. Yes, NINE DOLLARS.

This fact might cushion the surprise I experienced this evening when I discovered that four small chicken skewers (yakitori), one medium bowl of rice, and a beer, cost $32.75, including tax. This wasn't at the Tokyo equivalent of Charlie Trotter's; this was at an anonymous izakaya near the Shinjuku train station.

Now, friends and enemies alike will tell you that I routinely spend that much at, say, my remote office. There's a tip, for starters, not to mention the occasional disnumeria after I've spent an afternoon there. Only, at Duke of Perth, that amount goes a little farther.

I've noticed other things beside the angina-inducing prices in this city. In no particular order:

• I stand out. I've traveled all over the world, and in no other city (except possibly Shanghai) do I stick out more obviously than I do here. I find no small irony in that here, people don't know whether I'm American or Albanian; but they know I speak English, they know I'm not from these parts, and they know I'm the most likely person in any crowd to act unpredictably. It's not just me; all European-looking people look out of place here. And we all smile wanly at each other on the streets. It's odd.
• Shibuya at night looks just like you'd imagine, sort of Piccadilly Circus, Times Square, and North Michigan Avenue smashed together and fed amphetamines. I'm glad I had the experience. People who know me will understand how happy I am to report that I have been to the most crowded, most chaotic, and most commercial place I have ever seen (i.e., the Shinjuku train station), on my way to the most crowded, most chaotic, and most commercial place the world has ever seen (i.e., Shibuya Crossing at 5pm). And this was Sunday night. Tomorrow, when both the train station and the shopping area are actually busy, I might avoid it. In fact, since my access to the rest of Japan depends on going through the busiest train station in the world, I may start fantasizing about renting a cabin in upper Manitoba for my next vacation.

Obligatory Shibuya-at-night photo:

• No one here speaks English, but it doesn't matter. I've encountered none but helpful, patient people for the last two days. The price of dinner tonight may have made my baby cheeses cry, but the wait staff really dug in and helped me find the right words in my little dictionary. They were also enormously impressed that I know how to use chopsticks, which puzzled me, because I haven't encountered too many Americans who can't. Perhaps they thought I was British?

None of these things really bothers me, by the way. Well, all right, the crowds in Shibuya did, but it's Tokyo, so there are crowds, so what? I mean, we don't have this back home:

Lonely Planet has by far the most helpful guidebooks in English. Their Tokyo City Guide recommends hopping on the Yamanote train to get an overview of the city. The train goes around central Tokyo in a little more than an hour; when combined with an all-day rail/subway pass (¥1580), it gives you a good overview of the place. Here's the inside (counterclockwise) train pulling into Tokyo Station:

From Shinjuku, I went around to Tokyo Station, and walked over to the Imperial Palace. You can't get near the place, really; there's even a moat around it, in case of siege engines. I did wander the outer garden, dodging bicycles and Japanese tourists, and finding an unusual (for me) number of people doing watercolors:

Back to Tokyo Station for lunch in one of the crowded food courts, where I sampled three different kiosks and only bit into one thing I didn't like. (I must remember to ascertain what part of the chicken is on the teppanyaki stick.)

I decided not to try these, however; $15.50 was just too expensive:

After lunch I continued on the Yamanote train to Shibuya, which everyone who's ever seen a photo of Tokyo has seen. I plan to head back there around sunset to (a) get photos of it at night and (b) eat dinner in one of its thousands of little restaurants. Stand-up sushi, maybe? Itadakimasu!

Someday, I may got on a total vacation, a trip during which I completely disconnect from all that matters in the world. This may be saudade[1], or possibly outright delusion. In any event, this week, I'm still reading the news before breakfast.

Here's Krugman this morning (last night? It's dinner time Saturday in Princeton):

[T}he notion that denying health care to the near-poor is a serious deficit-reduction policy, but raising taxes on the very rich is not, is not something you can justify at all on the basis of the actual numbers. Anyone who says different is practicing, well, class warfare.

More wealth in the middle classes means more wealth for everyone. This is what next November will be about.

Speaking of elections, the front page of today's Japan Times ("All the News Without Fear or Favor") mentions New Zealand Prime Minister John Key's re-election this weekend. New Zealand matters in Japan. Who knew? (No offense to New Zealand, which I very much hope to visit one day and I will certainly love with all my heart, but that brings to three the number of countries who do. The others, of course, are New Zealand and Kiribati.) Interestingly, the story does not appear on the paper's website.

Enough paying attention to the world. I'm off to explore.

[1] "The feeling of longing for someone that you love and is lost," according to Pamela Haag in a cute list of phrases describing love that don't translate directly into English.

I failed at both tasks last night. I didn't find sushi (at least, not for less than ¥1,000 per piece), so I had—wait for it—Lebanese. After dinner I came back to the hotel room and managed to read until about 8:30, before I could no longer remember the last sentence I read.

It's just 7am now, and I feel like I've had the best sleep in weeks. Good morning Japan:

After I get showered and caffeinated, I plan to wander around Tokyo randomly, and find sub-$12 sushi. Then I will read the instruction manual for the washroom, because this:

...is just too intimidating right now.

I've arrived in Tokyo, not sure if it's Friday night or Saturday night. This is a known hazard of flying across the International Date Line, one I get to experience in reverse in a few days.

For now, I'm just looking for sushi. Must...stay...awake...until...9...

I'm 10,500 m over the Yukon on a Japan Air Lines 777-300.[1] In the last couple of hours, I have started to understand, rather than just "know," that Japan is the most technologically advanced country in the world. I'm also wondering why my main carrier, American, can't learn how to do some of these things.

First, the plane is spotless inside and out. I mean, immaculate. I mean, if you wanted to give visitors a good feeling about your country, you would start by making your airplanes really attractive, right?

Next, unlike in American's fleet, the washrooms on this plane have a device to select how hot or cold to make the tap water, and another device that magically senses when you've put your hands under the spigot. Previously I'd only seen those two technologies—continuously-varying water temperatures and motion sensors—almost everywhere else. American Airlines planes, by contrast, have two buttons or levers, and you push the buttons or levers either alone or in combination to get about 10 seconds of water. In other words, the water shuts itself off regardless of how much soap you still have on your hands, and you only get three temperatures. I believe it's the same technology they've used since, I think, 1930.

Then we have the incredible service in business class.[2] For lunch, I eschewed the steak in wine sauce for a 9-item array of Japanese morsels including duck meatball, yuzu pepper chicken rolls, a soba (noodle) sushi roll, deep-simmered pork in shoyu, grilled Greenland halibut in miso sauce, steamed fluke with apple vinegar, two pieces of "Philadelphia" roll (smoked salmon around cream cheese), and steamed sea-bream with lotus root mousse. Throw in a small bottle of dry sake, some green tea, a bowl of rice, and an amuse bouche of shrimp in avocado sauce and marinated mushrooms, and a cup of English tea with milk for dessert, and I don't want to leave. (Except, you know, I'm in an aluminum tube high above the Canada-Alaska border, and there's another reason to stay.)

The service continues until 90 minutes before landing, or about 6 hours from now (we land in 7:40, according to the moving map). They have two pages of food and drink options passengers can order any time, plus a two-page wine list and a reasonably stocked open bar just past the bulkhead.

I can only imagine what's going on in first class. I believe I saw Charlie Trotter opening an entire restaurant up there, plus a sushi bar and, for the Americans, a charcoal grill.[3]

Finally, a little thing American and other carriers should consider: mirrors in the overhead bins (which have enough room for small elephants, I should mention). You can actually see, using the extremely high-technology reflective plastic at the back of the bin, what you can't see standing on the floor. How much does this cost, I wonder? Maybe $100 per airplane?

We are now passing the northern-most point on our trip. All the windows are closed so I don't know if the terminator is visible off the right. Off the left, we have snow-covered snow, on top of mountains.

I'm going to try napping now, though the tea I mentioned earlier—not to mention the coffee necessary to get me awake enough to find O'Hare—might make that impossible. We land just past 23:30 Chicago time, or 14:30 in Tokyo. I sense a horrible exhausted crash coming right around dinner...

[1] I'm going to sync this entry with the flight's track from FlightAware so you can use the location feature to see exactly where I posted this. Unfortunately, I'll have to copy the post to the live blog after I get to my hotel.

[2] Yes, business class: I paid with frequent-flyer miles! My entire round-trip to Tokyo cost me $53 in cash, and I'm not even using up all the miles I've earned so far this year. I also paid for the hotel room with points, except for the last day, for which they gave me a deal. Total cash for five nights in Tokyo: $200.

[3] I'm making that up, of course. The airline's website has the business- and first-class menus, if you want to drool more.

I've long advocated doing things when no one else seems to be doing them. In furtherance of this philosophy, I'm starting a vacation today. The two days following Thanksgiving are truly a delight at O'Hare (despite a bit of amateur hour at the security checkpoint when the woman in front of me emptied her entire purse into an x-ray bin), and on the highways around Chicago. Yesterday it took me an hour to get from my house to the intersection of the Kennedy and I-294, which is about 3 km from the O'Hare terminal I'm sitting in right now. This morning, from dropping Parker off at boarding to O'Hare took 28 minutes. I was through security ten minutes after that.

My next trip out of O'Hare will be two days before Christmas, however. So allow me to enjoy the relaxed, unhurried atmosphere today.

The new feature I mentioned this morning is done. Now, in addition to the "where was this posted" button on the footer, you will notice the entry's time zone. Each entry can have its own time zone—in addition to the site-wide default.

I still have to fix a couple of things related to this change, like the fact that the date headers ("Thursday 24 November 2011," just above this entry) are on UTC rather than local time. But going forward (and going backward if I ever get supremely bored), you can now see the local time wherever I was when I posted.

Incidentally, if you want to bring the tzinfo database to your .NET application, I have licensing terms.