Waking up in a Japanese hotel is wayyyy better than waking up in my bed in New York. Even if it is 4:30 in the Japanese morning.

Today is the last day I’ll be spending in a single; from tonight I’ll be sharing a room with someone. It would be nice if that someone was a hot woman, but instead it’s L.A. Ad Guy, who’s flying in in the afternoon. We’re splitting a double.

Around 5am in Tokyo they turn the trains on, and shortly thereafter I hop the Yamanote-sen to Shinjuku (Tokyo’s Grand Central Station) to shoot some flicks of rush hour.

I know it seems crazy to be on vacation and get up early to go to a train station and take pictures of other people’s workday commutes, but it’s my goddamn vacation and I’ll spend it how I like.

Sometimes I wish I was a sociologist or an anthropologist. Other times I wish I was a badly-behaved, megalomaniacal and filthy stinking rich CEO. Neither fantasy ever makes it past the morning coffee.

This is what I wrote in my journal after first moving here in 1998:

...At Shinjuku station during rush hour, a train pulls in every 90 seconds, each train ten cars long, with 300 people per car. So each one is carrying around 3,000 passengers. It looks like a tidal wave made out of Japanese people has crashed over the station. The atmosphere is hurried, but somehow--I’ll never understand this as a New Yorker--very calm.

The trains run precisely on time. An 8:47 train leaves at 8:47. Occasionally, someone commits suicide at Shinjuku by jumping in front of a train. Cleaning up the body takes eight minutes, which sets the trains back. As a deterrent, the train company bills the family for the inconvenience.

If the train has been delayed for some reason, the train company hands out little white notes to everyone at the exit turnstiles. You turn the notes in when you get to the office; they are a printed notice apologetically explaining to your superiors why you were late....

Not much has changed, Shinjuku station is jammed like a nightclub. Inside the station proper I couldn’t get any really good shots of the density, because to shoot a crowd properly you need a long shot, and there’s no room to take a long shot when the bodies are pressed around you like fucking packing peanuts. I think if everyone in this building were to fart at the same time the whole building would go up in flames. You’d be thirty blocks away and you’d just hear this BOOOOOMMMM.

I did, however, manage to squeeze a couple off on the platform. (Photographs, not farts.)

Back inside the station I tried raising the camera above my head to shoot a portion of the crowd, figuring a narrow shot would be better than no shot at all, but they came out looking like crap. My camera’s field of focus is like a virgin’s vagina, frustratingly small.

I must’ve pulled the trigger twenty or thirty times, but for all that trouble I only got a couple decent shots. The rest were simply crap-tastic.

After rush hour(s) was over I raced back to the hotel to get my free breakfast. There are two restaurants servicing the hotel, Beck’s Coffee Shop and China Kei-Lin. The previous morning I’d gone to Beck’s but they had awful coffee and sandwiches that tasted like they were made in North Korea.

So on this morning I went to China Kei-Lin, even though the last thing I want to eat in Japan is Chinese food (I live near Chinatown back in NYC). But, surprise! They had a buffet-style western breakfast! It looked like this:

I vowed to take a picture before each and every seemingly delicious meal I’d eat in Japan. Then I started eating the eggs and forgot I’d ever made that vow, so that’s the first, last and only food picture I took on the entire trip. (Sorry, Cia. You food pornographer you.)

Around noon I got in touch with the rest of the crew at the other hotel and took them to see Harajuku (which is more mainstream hip, as opposed to Daikanyama’s hip hip). Me, Anthony, Marz, Miguel and E.J. walked up and down tree-lined Omotesando (Tokyo’s Champs-Elysees, they say). Again I’m not much for shopping but I futzed around with the camera some and stared at lots of ponytails while the fellas spread our weak American dollars around.

In Harajuku I was crushed, devastated, to see one of my favorite cafés had gone the way of all things. Café Aux Bacchanales, a replica Parisian sidewalk café--accurate right down to the bathroom fixtures and crappy service--was gone, gone, gone. Years ago I spent many a Sunday here at one of the outside tables filling notebooks, ashtrays and my stomach (not with all the same things, of course).

I brought friends here. I brought dates here. I brought friends’ dates here. I brought dates’ friends here. Oh, you get the picture. But what I don’t get is my café au lait. ‘Cause the goddamn place is closed like Alcatraz.

Afterwards we headed into Aoyama, which is upscale hip. I feel like every neighborhood in Tokyo is hip. Here’s the breakdown, from what I can remember:


Shinjuku - Sleazy hip
Shibuya - In-your-face hip, or maybe hip hop hip
Daikanyama - Hip hip (hooray)
Akihabara - microchip hip
Harajuku - tree-lined hip
Ginza - Glitzy and totally out-of-reach hip
Aoyama - Upscale and just-out-of-reach hip


Anyways Aoyama is where you can see Rei Kawakubo’s boutique and Idee and Rem Koolhaas’ wet dream project, the Prada store.

Ordinarily the only reason I’d go into Prada would be if I’d been shot in the torso and needed immediate assistance (but not if I was going to die--I don’t want to die in Prada), but in this case the architecture was interesting so we stepped inside to have a look.

It’s nice inside. Alienatingly nice. They don’t let you take pictures though.

Chiharu (the interpreter/project coordinator) called my cell. “Hey, you guys wanna go to Tsukiji tonight?”

Tsukiji’s the huge fish market in Tokyo, and if you go at like four in the morning you can see the fish auctions and eat the freshest sushi you will ever have in your life. It’s famous and everyone I know who’s lived in Japan has gone there, except me. I could never bring myself to get up at that hour, but this time I really wanted to. The fellas were down so we all agreed to meet up with Chiharu at their hotel around 2am.

In the evening L.A. Ad Man rolled into town and we linked up. Then the fellas talked me into seeing a movie called “Casshern.” I’m wary of seeing movies in Japan ‘cause they cost almost twenty dollars. But the fellas swore it was some cutting-edge anime-plus-C.G.-plus-live-action joint that I just had to see, so I agreed.

Well, this was without a doubt the worst movie and the biggest waste of two hours I’d ever spent in my entire life, even counting the time in college when I stared at a wall for two hours because I felt bad about blowing it with this girl. Anyways I ended up walking out early (at the two hour mark, the movie was still going) and afterwards the fellas offered to pitch in for my ticket.

“Ah, don’t worry about it,” I said. “It’s not like you guys wrote and directed it.” Then I went home to get some shuteye before the Tsukiji trip.