It's the land that counts, not the building on it. Walk through any section of downtown Tokyo, practically, and you can find badly battered-looking little houses -- often with the family business on the ground floor -- nestled between the skyscrapers and shopping gallerias, occupied by families who've hung onto their land for generations.

17,000Y per month when the exchange rate was 300Y to the buck didn't buy a very tony neighborhood.

If it's just me, never mind, I can find my way from the second link. Yay! Fun ear stuff for my commute.

Have a great time.

I was there in December of 2002. Shocked to discover that there were *oranges* growing there. Have the pictures.

Fortunately I'm so busy at work that I'm too tired to be worried much about site selection. Though through the efforts of a friend of mine to introduce all her friends to one another before she leaves town I discovered Ticket to Ride is a bitchin'' board game.

It gave me such culture shock that going to Germany for a Junior Year Abroad after that was like coming home. At least I could sound out the signage, I always told people.

Beer vending machines with built-in games of chance (hit the button at the right time, get a free beer) were terribly outré for this Hoosier boy fresh off the farm. But what really freaked my gourd was seeing a bright blue gas pipe in a big inverted U shape over a little bitty field in the middle of nowhere. Japan doesn't have eminent domain, you see, and the gas pipe company couldn't get piping rights to that guy's field. So they went over it...

--Posted from a shop display computer in Akihabara

[/derail]

It'll probably end up being built as an apartment block.

I knew someone who used to collect photograph of the strange architectural artefacts that came from this constant tearing apart/rebuilding. Stairs that remained but weren't connected to anything anymore, doors on the nth floor of building that led to nowhere (for Roger Rabbit fan I guess), small bridges no more connected to anything.
Too bad I've lost the CD she gave me of her work.

Still, that's something to look for while you're there.

I'm finding it very difficult to imagine a level of Tor promotion on ML that would bother me. I've always thought that y'all overcompensated in not doing enough casual promotion of your books, podcasts, whatever. So please: more!

In Japan, I was continually struck with how people were overwhelmingly polite and gracious, but would be happy for me just to conduct my business and go away as soon as possible. I was very impressed with the people there, but it seemed like a culture that I'd have a very hard time adjusting to.

As for the "more awesome" level: the first time I went, everything seemed somehow cooler because it was so completely foreign. Not in the intimidating or the insulting "look at the strange people!" way, but in the exciting sense that despite all the familiar aspects of being in a city, the people here had a completely different way of doing things.

My most recent trip was disappointing in that just over the span of two years, Tokyo already seemed more western and Americanized. There are entire blocks of Shibuya where all the signage is in English (GAP and Apple stores), and there are areas of San Francisco that seem even more foreign and authentic.

I'm sure the house we lived in when I was a kid is long long gone; just during the couple years we lived in Shinjuku, it seemed like half of Naito-machi was torn down and rebuilt with high-rise apartment blocks.

You weren't in a neighborhood public bath, were you?

My apartment had no hot water or shower. I had to go across the street to a bathhouse if I wanted to wash, paying my 100Y or whatever the fee was.

I have never gotten so many strange looks in my life as I did the times I went in there, which I did fairly often. Everyone was polite; I was just peered at from the corners of people's eyes. The proprietor kinda got used to me, but his other customers, not so much.

I suppose I should have mentioned that before everyone descended on Yokohama for the convention... sorry about that.

To make up for that, let me recommend taking the train up to the Ebisu station and checking out What The Dickens!, one of Tokyo's bizarre pseudo-British pubs. It's worth the ride. Please, trust me on this. Even if the music and the bar scene is not your style, Ebisu is a pretty nice little suburb. Reminds me of my own neighborhood here in SFO. (Make sure you plan how to get back to Yokohama and you don't miss the last train. The taxi ride is expensive.)

All the Culture Shock books I've read have been brilliant. --Well, except the Denmark one; that kept rubbing me the wrong way, as if the guy writing it didn't really respect the country as much as he thought he did; but it may only have been that I was reading it for a different purpose than I read the other ones for so had my reading protocols tangled up.

Of course, one more stop north of Ebisu on the Yamanote Line is Shibuya (home of the Blade-Runner-esque Hachiko Square and possibly the world's busiest Starbucks) and one more stop brings you to Harajuku, and two more after THAT brings you to Shinjuku (home of the world's busiest railway station),,,

I doubt it. I suspect the glitch is at our end.

My SIL and BIL lived in Hokkaido for three years, they were in the JET program. The BIL would say things like "Some days I feel like I'm living in the most civilized and technologically advanced country on the planet".

Oh, hell, I was really hoping that video on the cell phone thing wouldn't work out; like maybe people would be upset that the screen was too small and just not buy into it. Driving while talking on a cell phone is bad enough; imagine the mess the streets will be when drivers are watching their phones instead of listening to them.

They don't have to: GPS navigation systems are wildly popular here, and yes, they double as TV sets/DVD players. I've certainly seen taxi drivers watching TV while waiting in taxi ranks and even seen the occasional MOVING vehicle with the TV on.

(Slightly apropos aside: a few years ago, I saw a TV commercial for a car GPS system which depicted a gloomy family, parked in their car across from a closed amusement park as the rain pours down. What to do? The mother, brightly, holds up a DVD, and they watch -- "Star Trek: The Next Generation".)

Eerie.

He's more himself now.

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* Whether these two are linked is left as an exercise for the reader.

It's probably why I've always preferred showers; bathing in water which contains whatever I've just washed off me doesn't make a lot of sense. YMMV.

I sometimes try to implement these customs at home now, but find that I'm too stingy about water to take both a shower and a bath. For the best, since we're at record-breaking drought levels around here.

Bruce Cohen @ 35 -- I don't know, but my guess would be that the video-watching commuters are on trains rather than driving themselves. (Then again, there is a large contingent of people angry about the iPhone's touch screen because "How am I supposed to text while driving?!?" To which my answer would be "You're not." Good thing I don't sell them.)