Day 200 - Ikoma to Narita, Japan - 22nd February, 2005

Today we traveled back to the airport at Narita where I have booked another night in the Holiday Inn with the wonderful toothpick arrangements. (Now we know why they do it - it brings back the customers).

On the way we hop off (not really hopping with 4 huge cases and 6 pieces of hand luggage) in Tokyo. We pass Mt. Fuji on the way and are quite disappointed to see that from where we are on the train, it is surrounded by industrial sites. It is probably better from the other side. Not quite what it looks like in the brochures anyway.

Tokyo itself is pretty much like any other major city except that it seems not to be concentrated in one spot. Most cities have a city centre or financial district that is clearly marked out by the skyline. In Tokyo the skyscrapers seem to be dispersed hither and thither. We managed to get up one of the office towers that had an observation room at the top. I think we were about 60 floors up. We could only see in one direction but it seemed to go on for ever with no distinct picture emerging of the location of the centre. Since we arrived in Tokyo station we assumed we must be pretty near the centre.

Julie's observation was how quiet it was in Tokyo. There (as I have reported before) seems to be no heavy trucks on the roads and the buses and cars are quiet. We could easily speak to each other in the streets, something that you don't seem to be able to do in London. Also at the pedestrian crossings the traffic signals emitted a soft birdsong as the cue to walk. Much more pleasant than a loud beeping.

The other thing that you notice (and you notice this all over Japan) is that there are no old buildings. We were informed that large parts of Japan were bombed during the war. Whilst you can appreciate that this is what happened in Frankfurt and other cities in Germany, I really couldn't buy the idea that Tokyo was flattened so I looked it up in Google. In one raid alone on March 9th, 1945, 330 bombers destroyed 16 square miles of the city and 100,000 people were estimated to have died. I was amazed at these figures. Compare this to the total of 600,000 killed by the allies in bombing raids over Germany and a total of 45,000 killed in one night in Hamburg. Some estimate that 500,000 were killed in Japan during the second world war by regular bombing and a further 400,000 by the nuclear bombs.

I don't think we in the west are aware of facts like these, assuming always that the worst was done to Germany.

So, Tokyo was flattened during the second world war. The only oldish building we saw (and we didn't see much) was the rear facade of central station. This looked to be 1930s in style and construction but I could be way off.

In support of the observation that there aren't any old buildings in Japan, we recently read an article in a UK paper that went some way to explain the reason. In Japan anything that is old (recently old) is not good. Houses actually depreciate as they get older. Blocks of flats get pulled down around 25 to 30 years after they are built because they are "old". There is a collective psyche that determines that old things need to be replaced. Cars are scrapped after 5 years and house and flats after 30. It is a mind set of the nation.

After we had spent 2 hours in Tokyo we made our way to Narita which is an hour by train from Tokyo and where the airport is. I wanted to check out the toothpicks again.