(And now, to confuse you, the Prologue!

I’ve written this over the past two nights so tense is going to be a tad confusing.

This, I believe, I wrote on the train on Tuesday.)

Wake up at 8:00 or so. Get up, check my email and stuff, gather up my bedsheets and take ‘em down to the laundry to clean and dry. Finalize packing. My roommate enquires if I’m moving out. I say yeah, going to Kyoto, then heading back to England. Considering the most conversation we’ve ever had is an occasional “Hey” or “Morning”, it was kinda weird yet touching.

At 10:00 the Sakurahouse lady comes for the final inspection. I get points deducted for that time I broke my bedside table, but I get 17,000 yen from my deposit returned and two days worth of rent back, which is a nice bonus. I proceed to make an ass of myself by getting me and my wide rucksack stuck in the narrow corridor. She laughs.

To Tokyo Station, then, a place I have been precisely once before. On the train I have some difficulties with my bag and a kindly gentleman helps out. You wouldn’t get that in London.

At Tokyo Station I lug myself over to the Shinkansen platforms and wander around. There are plenty of trains, so it’s not like I would be late or anything. I check with the ticket man that my ticket is good for the ultra-fast Nozomi super-express trains. It is, which I’m glad for. The next option, Hikari, is only about 15 minutes slower but if you’re going on the Shinkansen, why not get the fastest one possible?

So I get to the station. It’s a 300 Series train.

(I swear that’s a scene out of Lost in Translation.)

And – I know it’s really nerdy – but I like trains. It’s something that appeals to the engineer in me. These incredibly fast technological marvels, darting over miles and miles of precisely designed track to far-flung destinations. Words like “infrastructure” and “locomotive” and “Osaka Loop Line”. And I like train journeys. You don’t need to do anything, just sit and watch the world go by.

Anyway, after a wait of about ten minutes, the doors open. The interior of the Shinkansen is not that interesting, designed like an airliner. I, of course, go for the seat right at the front.

So I wait about ten minutes, since the train leaves at 10:53. There’s a whirr, which I at first assume is the engine but turns out to be the doors closing. And then, in absolute silence, we’re off. Unlike the bumpy and noisy regular trains, it’s silky smooth. We reach the first stop, Shinagawa in about five minutes. In no time at all we’re in Yokohama, a whole other city. Now there’s one stop (Nagoya) until we reach Kyoto, which is a grand total of three stops, over a 450-odd km journey.

Mount Fuji just went past. If Tokyo were Norwich, I’d be in London by now.

One pleasing and surprising thing is how wide the carriages are. They’re five seats abreast: three on the left, two on the right, and between them a giant aisle. In regular trains when you walk down the aisle you get buffered and bounced between seats, but here there’s enough room to just walk normally. It’s nice.

12:36 – Nagoya. Since it feels like the entire Tokaido route is unbroken urbanism, it feels (and looks) like Tokyo.

19:01: Bleh, what a day. Arrived in Kyoto at 12:15, to find a city which looked like a grubbier version of Tokyo. Headed into the nearest restaurant and had some nice carbonara. Decided to find the tourist information place, only to discover that it had disappeared. Meanwhile, lugging my backpack around made me realise I should find somewhere to dump my stuff. Alas, if only I had the sense to book in advance. Five long, painful hours of trapsing round Kyoto looking for accommodation I find myself at a capsule hotel with my rucksack, laptop bag, and a seething, mostly undeserved hatred of Kyoto.

At least the capsule hotel’s nice. Capsule is a misnomer: the room is quite sizable and has a bathroom, TV, desk, and is really rather cool. No internet, unfortunately.

(Kyoto’s ion cannon defence system.)

23:29: Perhaps there is no better place to read a William Gibson novel (Idoru, in this case) than a Japanese capsule hotel.

Day Two

18:26: I decided to follow a walking tour in Lonely Planet which started very near to the capsule hotel. Went up a street of slightly-kitchy tourist shops to Kiyomizu-dera Temple, which was typically temple-y. I saw this British (?) guy get mobbed by schoolgirls. Hmmph. Never happened to me.

Kiyomizu-dera:

So I got slightly lost, but rediscovered the trail and came across a humungous stone Buddha that wasn’t mentioned in the Lonely Planet.

It’s a memorial for all the Japanese soldiers who died in WW2 in order to “maintain peace in Japan”. Luckily, this somewhat unsettling aspect is offset by a small memorial to all the Unknown Soldiers, from all countries, who died in Japanese-controlled territory during WW2.

On to … another temple (Kodai-ji), and having paid my 600 yen to get in I sat down and realised I was already bored of temples. I mean, I went to Nikko just last week, and once you’ve seen half a dozen temples you’ve seen them all.

So I gave the temple a tour, and it was very nice.

I went down this small alleyway:

and came out to see a rickshaw driver running past carrying a rickshaw with two giggling geishas in. I don’t think they were real geishas. I don’t think real geishas giggle. These four I saw when I was coming down the stairs out of the temple, and a bunch of people were taking photos. Reviewing my photos later, I noticed something.

I’m not entirely certain real geishas carry cameras.

But I was at a loss as to what to do for the afternoon. I considered going hiking, but my legs hurt and I didn’t know which bus to get. I travelled to a bike rental place with the intention of renting a bike for a few hours, but they was out of rental bikes. So, I thought I might as well head back to Kyoto Station. I did.

I sat down and ate a sandwich, and I flipped through Lonely Planet, and I thought: hey, why not go to Osaka? It was only 3pm, and the train takes a scant 30 minutes for 500 yen, and I’d be damned if I was going to visit another temple that day.

(to be continued)