Japan Touring 2023 – Part 1/3
This is the first of a three-part series covering Carol’s and my trip to Japan. If you’ve ever been to Japan you can compare your experiences with ours. If you’ve never been to Japan you’ll have the chance to check out how we did it and see if a visit to Japan might be in your future. No matter what your experience with Japan has been or might be in the future I hope you enjoy the read.
THURSDAY
A long time ago, I discovered that if I wanted to visit faraway places, all I had to do was sit on an airplane just a little bit longer. When I am on a long plane ride, I simply eat, sleep, and watch movies. It doesn’t really matter to me if the flight is two hours long or twelve hours long. I’m the kind of person who can eat, sleep, and watch movies for a very long time.
I’ve heard people tell me that taking a flight from Chicago to St. Louis is easily done because it’s only a one-hour flight. Then they told me that flying from Chicago to Los Angeles, a four-hour flight time was more than they could possibly stand. Obviously, I don’t see it that way.
With this long-distance flight philosophy in my back pocket, I grabbed my young and beautiful wife and took her on a Mother’s Day celebration to Tokyo, Japan, and beyond. Why don’t you pour yourself a glass of sake and listen to how this trip went?
The flight time from Los Angeles to Haneda Airport in Tokyo, Japan would be 12 hours. I bought a couple of cheap airline tickets in coach class a few months ago.
I couldn’t recall if I paid extra for special seats in coach or not. A day or two before the trip, I discovered that not surprisingly to me I had not paid anything extra for our seats. This put both Carol and me in separate rows in the middle seats of a section of four seats across. Even for a laid-back guy like me that wasn’t good.
When I checked our bags I “sweet-talked” the gate agent into giving Carol and me seats together on the two-seat (2-4-2) side of the plane. I have many personal philosophies, but one of the most important is “If you don’t ask you don’t get”!
I have been to Japan a few times. I was in Tokyo just six months ago. Both Carol and I traveled to Tokyo just a few months before Covid came about. As you will come to find out I am a big fan of Japan and its people.
For this trip, we would be staying in Tokyo for seven nights, and then flying down to Fukuoka for three nights, and then back to Tokyo for one more night. From there, Carol would fly home to Los Angeles by herself. I would then head to another foreign destination for a week or so to pursue my hobby of trackchasing.
There were several “operational aspects” of this trip that we needed to remember and work with. What were some of those operational aspects?
There is very little English spoken or understood in Japan. Nevertheless, the Japanese are just about the nicest general population anywhere I have visited. Although they don’t speak or understand much English they will go out of their way to try to help you. Way out of their way.
In some other countries, you may be able to pick out a word or two in a foreign language and figure out what’s going on from there. With the Japanese language and alphabet, you won’t be able to do that at all.
We would rely on Google Translate in two different ways. If we were talking to someone personally, we could dictate a word in English and get that word translated into Japanese.
If we saw a sign in Japanese that we wanted to understand, we could use the camera feature on Google Translate. The app would instantly change the words from Japanese text to English. Pretty amazing, huh? What will they think of next?
One of the most important elements of international travel is having power. I’m talking about electrical power. When we make these long-distance adventures, we have iPhones, Apple watches, Bose headsets, iPads, MacBooks, and Apple AirPods to make our trip as enjoyable as possible. Were our trips much less enjoyable before all of this stuff became nearly required? It didn’t seem as if they were but I definitely would not want to go back to those days.
In most foreign countries we would need an electrical adapter. That is not the case in Japan. Japanese voltage is 100V. Most of the stuff I mentioned above has a voltage limit of 110 or 120. That being the case we can simply plug our equipment into an electrical outlet and everything works. You should know that I don’t know the first thing about voltage. I just know the numbers that I mentioned to you are accurate.
We will not be renting a car in Tokyo. We will be riding trains and subways. We will be renting a car in Fukuoka, Japan. In Japan, they drive on the left side of the road. Driving on the left side of the road with a right-side steering car with an indecipherable language will be a first for me. I like experiencing firsts.
During one of my morning walks, I discovered that gasoline was selling for about $4.52 U.S. per gallon. Right now, in the United States, the average gasoline price is about $3.54 per gallon. I do a lot of traveling. Gas prices are lower in the United States than in every country I can remember visiting in the past 10 years or so. This makes me wonder. Why are people in the U.S. so quick to criticize our gasoline prices when they are lower than almost all industrialized countries?
One of the best things since sliced bread is Google Maps. In Tokyo, we would use Google Maps to navigate our subway and train rides. This was one of the biggest conveniences of the entire trip.
In planning for this trip, I discovered a website called “getyourguide.com”. Get Your Guide is a travel agent that operates out of Germany. They have set up a nationwide network to partner with local guides and local tours.
If you check out www.getyourguide.com you can select cities all over the world and see what kinds of tours and attractions are available. You can then make your touring reservations using getyourguide.com at very competitive prices. I didn’t think I had ever used getyourguide.com in the past. But in checking my profile I discovered that I took a boat ride to Inchcolm Island in Scotland with GYG. We would use GetYourGuide for tickets and reservations almost on a daily basis while we were in Tokyo. I highly recommend this service.
FRIDAY
Clearing Japanese customs was easy but the line was long. I don’t know if I’ve ever been in a longer line of travelers trying to get into a country after an international plane ride. The saving grace was that the line moved swiftly. I wondered how that could happen considering that at the head of the line, people stopped and waited to be called forward by the border control agent. I think the phenomenon has something to do with the “bottleneck” theory.
I mentioned I was in Tokyo, just six months ago. On that visit, I landed at Haneda Airport. I stopped at a tourist information location at the airport. I worked with a young woman there, who spent nearly an hour opening an account for me in Japanese so that I could order tickets to a professional wrestling match. At that time, I took our picture together.
Today we stopped at the very same tourist information location. The woman I had met previously was no longer working there. I showed our picture from six months ago to the equally helpful woman working with us today. Her eyes lit up. She knew the woman I had worked with six months ago. She told us that my friend left her job because she “wanted to get pregnant”. I guess that wouldn’t be a very politically correct thing to say in the United States but it seems acceptable in Japan!
We were looking for some direction today to catch our hotel shuttle bus from the airport. Before we could do that today’s helper had me email her my photo taken six months ago. Then she sent the picture to the woman I had met previously. The next day I got a nice message back from “Yoko” telling us that “Natsumi” had remembered me and my wrestling ticket request and was wishing us the best trip ever. These Japanese are nice, friendly, and helpful folks!
On this trip, we would be using a hotel very near the airport to stage ourselves for the rest of the trip. If you’re coming to Japan and landing at Haneda, I would strongly recommend the Hotel JAL City property. They have a shuttle bus that takes guests directly from the airport to the hotel.
I should admit to you that I didn’t exactly plan on a “staging hotel”. I actually got my time zones messed up. I didn’t even have a hotel reserved for us on our first day of arrival! Carol was smart enough to point that out. I made a last-minute reservation near the airport. Her “catch” turned out to be an excellent…and required idea. I often tell her I married her for her beauty and not for her brains. I say that as a compliment! However, just between you and me, I married her for both her beauty and her brains.
By the way, the time zone difference between Tokyo and where we live in Southern California is 16 hours. Japan is 16 hours ahead of California. It’s easy to figure out what time it is back home if we need to do that. We just subtract four hours from the current time in Japan and flip the a.m. and p.m. As an example, 6 p.m. in Tokyo is 2 a.m. in Los Angeles!
They say to get used to a 16-hour time zone change it takes being in the new time zone one day for each one hour of time zone change. That’s crazy! I have three more trips planned in the 16 days following our two-week trip to Japan. I’m going to be messed up for a long time!
Mask-wearing is still a major “thing” in Japan. Just this past week the country relaxed the requirement that masks be worn on subways, and in most of the country. Nevertheless, the Japanese have always been stronger than normal mask wearers. I would estimate that 75% of the population still continues to wear masks indoors and outdoors. Virtually all service employees wear masks. I say whatever floats your boat.
We capped off our evening at a Japanese restaurant within a short walking distance of the hotel. Since our server didn’t speak English we simply pointed at the pictures on the menu. I don’t speak any foreign languages. Learning them never seemed worth the effort to me. Despite my laziness, I don’t suspect I will ever starve to death based upon my lack of language skills.
SATURDAY
When it was time to leave our staging hotel, we were able to grab a train (importantly, the train is not the subway) that took us from the JAL City Hotel to within a five-minute walk of our “semi-permanent” hotel, the AC Hotel Tokyo in the Ginza section of Tokyo. It was pretty simple, even with about 200 pounds of luggage, to ride one train from one airport hotel into the city.
Tokyo is known to be an expensive city. Nevertheless, with the exception of some downtown hotels we found just about everything to be reasonably priced.
Our AC Hotel, a Marriott Property, was selling for about $770/night. That’s a higher price point than we would normally spend on a hotel on these kinds of trips. This was the price for a somewhat standard two-bed room!
There was one very nice feature in our hotel room not found in most hotels room that I have ever seen. I’m talking about “Japanese-style” toilets. I’m talking about toilets with heated seats. I’m talking about toilets that squirt water in all directions to satisfy needs you didn’t even think you had. In two weeks of traveling in Japan, I didn’t see any OTHER type of toilet no matter if we were at a gas station, a restaurant, an airport, or wherever. I LOVE Japanese toilets!
Despite our hotel being a budget buster, I was able to come up with a combination of Marriott points and cash for more Marriott points to make things work. I had 100,000 Marriott points in my account. Then I discovered that with a 50% bonus offer, I could buy enough points to complete our six-night stay for just $1,000 additional. This might have been the sale of the century. For one thousand dollars plus my existing 100,000 Marriott points, I erased a nearly $5,000 hotel bill!
I hold elevated status in the Marriott frequent stay program of “titanium elite”. I actually have that status in perpetuity. The year I retired (2002) both Marriott and American Airlines grandfathered my current at the time frequent stay and frequent flyer status for life. How lucky was that! I know that some marketing genius came up with that idea one Wednesday afternoon in a corporate conference room. I’m glad they did!
At most Marriott properties, I can use my titanium elite status to basically get part ownership in the hotel property itself. This will normally include an upgraded room, complimentary breakfast, free Wi-Fi, free parking, a welcome gift, and sometimes even more.
Unfortunately, that was not the case with the AC Hotel Tokyo. I had read something along those lines in advance of reserving this hotel. As a titanium elite, staying for six nights at a very expensive property, they ended up giving us only one complimentary breakfast for two. That was it. Oh well. At least I got a smoking hot deal on our hotel price.
Our room was large by Japanese standards. We went with what they call two twin beds. Had we waited for a king bed we could not have checked in for another three hours. We had a view of a neighboring building, which means we had no view. Nevertheless, the hotel room was brand new, offered quite a bit of space, and had a superb location in the Ginza section of Tokyo. We would be in fine shape.
By the way, the Ginza section of Tokyo is one of the most prized locations in the city. It is home to all of the very upscale retailers. Restaurants are everywhere. If you come to Tokyo you will do very well to stay in the Ginza part of town.
One of the notable features of Tokyo is the large number of convenience stores. These stores are open 24 hours a day in most cases. That’s a nice advantage if you can’t sleep, but are dealing with a 16-hour time zone change. You might recall that was the premise of the Bill Murray movie, Lost in Translation, based in Tokyo.
We would be frequent visitors to these stores. The brand names of the most well-located stores are Family Mart, Lawson, and 7-Eleven. I’m in love with their cream puffs. I would have to go to the Illinois State Fair to get a better one. Then we discovered SPAM potato chips. We (probably just me) thought we had died and gone to heaven.
Walking is my aerobic choice of exercise. Last year I walked at least 4 miles each and every day for an entire year. This year I decided that I would cut back just a bit. My new goal is to walk four miles or more every day for six days out of seven.
When I exercise I want to compare apples with apples. In order to create that comparison, I have to do all of my walking in a 24-hour day using only the California time zone. That’s easy to do with my iPhone. Whenever I want to see how much I have walked during a “California day” I change the time zone on my phone to the Pacific time zone.
My “walking day” in Tokyo goes from 4 p.m. Tokyo time to 4 p.m. Tokyo time. That’s midnight to midnight in California. This actually works out very well. In order to do my four miles, I can do a little bit of walking after 4 p.m. in Tokyo. Then I can assess the situation and decide how much I might want to walk in the early morning just to see the sites. Finally, I can review what I have accomplished. If I still have a little more to go, in the early afternoon, I have until 4 p.m. to do it. Yes, it all works out nicely.
Carol was in the market for some distilled water to run one of her machines. We figured that once we got to Japan, we would find a place to replenish her distilled water supply. That was not nearly as easy as we thought it would be. A couple of months ago in Australia, we found what she was looking for in a local grocery store after doing some searching.
I must have punched in the words “distilled water” a dozen times into my Google Translate app asking people if they had it. We tried and tried to explain to a somewhat incredulous Japanese populace that we were looking for distilled water. This search made the idea of walking 4 miles a day a real piece of cake!
Finally, we ended up at a place called “Bic Camera”. Don’t be confused. This is not a camera store but a full-fledged multi-story electronics store. They didn’t have distilled water but did stock “purified” water. Purified water is not exactly distilled water, but it is somewhat close. It looks as if purified water is going to be the very best that we can do in our attempt to buy distilled water. We’ll see if this corrupts Carol’s machine or not. I certainly hope not. If it does, I will pay the price.
SUNDAY
It’s always nice to have one major activity on most days when you’re on vacation. This gives us something to focus on and look forward to. Carol and I both agreed it would be a good idea to pace ourselves. As you will come to find out we had a lot planned.
Our big event today would be a Japanese major league baseball game in the Tokyo Dome. The game featured the Tokyo Giants playing the Hiroshima Toyo Carp.
However, the morning would begin with breakfast. Normally, each day I stay at a Marriott hotel I get breakfast for free. On this six-night stay at the AC Hotel in Tokyo, they gave us free breakfast on only one morning.
Breakfast at the hotel was $30 per person. For the five days that we would have to pay for those breakfasts, our bill would come to $300 US. I never ever think of myself as being cheap. I would hate to have that label.
On the other hand, if I could, I would just as soon spend $300 on something that’s a little more tangible than a hotel breakfast. That being the case we walked out of the hotel’s front door and went next door to a Lawson convenience store. They sell all kinds of microwavable food. That would be our breakfast today. We needed to use Google Translate to get forks!
We chose items like spaghetti carbonara, chicken salad, cream puffs, orange juice, and coffee. Lawson’s offered a sumptuous buffet. Our bill was only $15 for the two of us. This strategy would create a $45 savings for each of the five breakfasts that the Marriott was not giving us creating a savings of $235. I sort of thought of our plan as being on vacation in a condo and bringing back groceries to eat there.
My objective is never to “save” $235 in situations like this. If the difference in my financial life when it’s time to lower the casket is $235…then I have not followed my own financial advice!
There’s a huge difference between the two “C” words, cheap and creative. I would immediately take that $235 that we didn’t pay for breakfast and “reinvest” the money in some tangible form of entertainment or souvenirs or something that I think is a greater value than a Marriott hotel breakfast.
One of the three reasons we came to Japan during this time frame was so that we could see a Japanese major-league baseball game at the famous Tokyo Dome. Today was going to be “baseball” day. The Hiroshima Toyo Carp were scheduled to play the Tokyo a.k.a. Yomiuri Giants at 2 p.m.
Wait!! Before you read any further please understand the following is NOT about a baseball game. Yes, we went to a baseball game. But the most fun part of the experience was observing the cultural differences in how Japan handles an activity, be it a baseball game or anything else. We were here for the ambiance and not necessarily a baseball game.
I bought our tickets online from the Giants website a couple of months ago. Just doing that was a challenge. The website was entirely in Japanese. When I printed out our tickets, every word on the page was in Japanese. I used the bar codes printed on our paper tickets to get us inside the stadium. This might sound like a simple process. Trust me. It wasn’t.
From our hotel, we used Google Maps to tell us which subway line was going to get us to the Tokyo Dome. Yes, that’s Carol wearing her Chunichi Dragons shirt I bought her from my very first baseball game in Japan a few years ago.
Just six months ago I had been at the dome watching some professional wrestling. That event was pretty much identical to what you would see at a WWE event. Just having been around the Tokyo Dome and the surroundings made today’s situation easier. Life is about learning curves. The more learning curves you have navigated in your life the easier life will be.
You’re going to hear me refer to the GetYourGuide website and travel agency frequently on this trip. I used GYG to buy six days’ worth of subway tickets in increments of three days for just $11 per person every three days. That meant we could ride all over Tokyo on the subway for less than four dollars per day. We rode the subway constantly. This was not only a good financial value but it made traveling on the subway much easier. Having just one card good for three days’ worth of subway riding was much better than having to buy a single ticket each time we rode the subway.
Japanese baseball is different in several ways from what you might encounter at a major-league baseball game in the United States. The game itself is pretty much played the same way, but comes with some huge “extras” that make a big game in Japan more exciting.
There are 12 teams divided into two divisions in the Japanese Baseball League. Five of those teams are located in and around Tokyo. Here’s a list of those teams.
| Team | City | Stadium | Capacity |
| Central League | |||
| Chunichi Dragons | Nagoya, Aichi | Vantelin Dome Nagoya | 40,500 |
| Hanshin Tigers | Nishinomiya, Hyōgo | Hanshin Koshien Stadium | 47,757 |
| Hiroshima Toyo Carp | Hiroshima, Hiroshima | Mazda Stadium | 32,000 |
| Tokyo Yakult Swallows | Shinjuku, Tokyo | Meiji Jingu Stadium | 37,933 |
| Yokohama DeNA BayStars | Yokohama, Kanagawa | Yokohama Stadium | 30,000 |
| Yomiuri Giants | Bunkyō, Tokyo | Tokyo Dome | 46,000 |
| Pacific League | |||
| Chiba Lotte Marines | Chiba, Chiba | ZOZO Marine Stadium | 30,000 |
| Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks | Fukuoka, Fukuoka | Fukuoka PayPay Dome | 40,000 |
| Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters | Kitahiroshima, Hokkaidō | ES CON Field Hokkaido | 35,000 |
| Orix Buffaloes | Osaka, Osaka | Kyocera Dome Osaka | 36,477 |
| Saitama Seibu Lions | Tokorozawa, Saitama | Belluna Dome | 33,921 |
| Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles | Sendai, Miyagi | Rakuten Mobile Park Miyagi | 30,508 |
The iconic Tokyo Dome was built in 1988. For baseball, it seats about 45,000 people. Today’s game was sold out. I’m glad I bought tickets in advance!
The Rolling Stones have played 28 dates in the dome. Michael Jackson performed here 25 times. Mike Tyson fought for the heavyweight championship twice in the Tokyo Dome losing to Buster Douglas (above), in one of the biggest sports upsets ever. Yes, the Tokyo Dome has a solid history of attracting big events.
We arrived at the dome early for the game. This gave us time to visit the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum which is inside the Tokyo Dome itself. There were a lot of interesting displays including uniforms of the top Japanese Beijing baseball teams.
Since we had just saved $45 on our breakfast strategy, I immediately “reinvested” that money into a souvenir Tokyo Giants T-shirt. This made me feel as if I were getting the shirt for free! I will wear that shirt proudly many many times. Each time I do it will remind me, and others, of our trip to Japan. That shirt will provide much more benefit than breakfast in an upscale Marriott hotel.
I stand 6’3” tall. In the United States that puts me in the 97% percentile of people according to height. Japanese people are quite a bit smaller in general than Americans. During our entire time in Japan, I never saw a single person taller than me. Japanese souvenir baseball shirts seem to focus on smaller sizes as well. It wasn’t easy finding a XXL shirt for me but I did. And yes, I have my “Reader Rests” on my shirt and am wearing my size 15 Hey Dude shoes. I wouldn’t go to Japan or anywhere else without them.
You might say, “What about the American tourists you encountered during your trip? Surely you would have seen someone taller than you out of that group”. Nope. As a matter of fact, we encountered almost NO American tourists in Japan at all. Nearly zero. This is not unusual for us. We travel the world and I am always saying to Carol, “Why don’t we see any American tourists?” I really can’t understand why. We simply don’t see or hear Americans on these trips.
Just outside the Tokyo Dome, there was a huge tent. In this tent, there was a large display of souvenir shirts, towels, and more for today’s visiting team the Hiroshima Toyo Carp. Their primary team color is red. Nearly half of the fans at the game today were sporting Carp colors. That seemed odd since Hiroshima is more than 800 kilometers from Tokyo.
I really liked seeing such a huge souvenir display for the Carp at a Giants home game. If the Phillies were playing at Wrigley Field against the Cubs you would not see an entire tent of merchandise devoted to the Phillies. Of course, I tried to reinvest the breakfast money I hadn’t quite earned yet in a Hiroshima Toyo Carp shirt but, alas, couldn’t find my size.
The first thing we did once we were inside the stadium was hit the refreshment line. They definitely offered a little bit of everything. There were a lot of Japanese-style foods, but we went with the more traditional offerings.
We ended up with a hamburger, a relish hotdog, some cheeseballs, some form of a pretzel/nut packaged serving, a beer, and a grapefruit-style drink. I was able to use Apple Pay from my AppleWatch to pay for everything. Frankly, I don’t even remember what it cost but it was reasonable. Everything, except hotels, has been reasonable in price.
We did require just a little bit of help finding our seats because our tickets were printed in Japanese! The game was sold out with 45,000 fans in attendance. I don’t even remember what I paid for the tickets because it was so long ago that I bought them. I think it might’ve been around $50 a ticket but that’s just a guess. We like to sit behind home plate and high up when we go to our Angels baseball games in Anaheim. This gives us a panoramic view of the field. That’s where we sat today. We had a great view of the entire Tokyo Dome. By the way, the Tokyo Dome’s roof does not retract in case you were wondering.
I had been to one Japanese baseball game a few years ago in Nagoya. For that game, I saw the hometown Chunichi Dragons play. That was possibly my best-ever baseball sports fan experience. That’s coming from a guy who has seen three World Series games in three different stadia, the College Baseball World Series, the Women’s Softball World Series, and the Little League World Series, a game in every Major League Baseball park, a MLB All-Star game and literally hundreds of major league games. That game I saw in Nagoya ranks at or near the top of it all.
I had warned Carol in advance that there would be constant chanting throughout the entire game. The atmosphere would be much more “charged“ than at a major league baseball game back at home.
When we sat down, we noticed that nearly half the crowd was wearing the color red of the Carp. That surprised us because Hiroshima was so far from Tokyo. Giants’ fans were outfitted in their colors of black, gold, and white similar to the San Francisco Giants back home. Each team has its “official” cheering section in the outfield seats.
Those cheering sections had huge bass drums and ten-foot-tall flags. When their team was up the drum beat and flag waving was intense. The fans in the entire park sang their team’s chant. The place was really loud inside. Toward the end of the game, Carol was going crazy with the noise. She couldn’t believe that the fans could scream and yell and pound on that drum for an entire nine innings. I only smiled.
Today was Mother’s Day. I don’t know if it was because of Mother’s Day, or possibly because of breast cancer awareness but the umpires were dressed in pink shirts. Most of the players swung pink bats.
I mentioned that going to a Japanese baseball game is a different experience than going to a major league baseball game. The most noteworthy item, other than the constant chanting, was something that I now remembered from my game in Nagoya, and was reminded of today.
These games have vendors going through the stands. That’s not unusual by itself. However, in Japan, ALL of the vendors are young women. I’m talking about literally hundreds of young Japanese women who are small, young, attractive, and probably weigh 95 pounds on average. These women swarm the stadium, running up and down the steps with huge coolers/containers on their backs. What’s in the container? Beer. These women are selling beer in almost every circumstance.
We were in a section that consisted of 10 rows of seats. These girls would actually run down the steps, turn around and face the crowd, do a Japanese bow of greeting and respect, and then look for people who wanted to get a beer. When they found a customer they scanned their credit card by tapping it on a handheld machine. Then with a nozzle attached to their backpack, they poured beers for their customers.
These women might have been the hardest-working people I’ve ever seen in my life. They ran up and down those stairs literally hundreds of times during eight innings. Yes, the games are played for nine innings but beer sales stop after eight innings.
There was literally a beer woman in our section every minute for three hours. I’m going to guess they would be in a section, depending upon whether they had any sales or not, for 30-45 seconds. Then they were off and selling in the next section. At any one time, I could easily see tens of young women selling within my view. When they passed each other in the aisles there was no acknowledgement. They were focused. These ladies had to be paid on commission. The entire thing was really quite amazing.
There was another activity that I’d never seen at any other baseball game. The Japanese people are a tidy, respectful group. The city is clean. The subways are clean. Their ballparks are clean. As a matter of fact, during the game, workers go through the stands with huge plastic trash bags collecting trash. I’ll bet you’ve never seen that at a baseball game!
They don’t have a national anthem performance at the beginning of these games. They don’t do a seventh-inning stretch. Most of the communication from the PA announcements is in Japanese as you might imagine. When a foul ball goes into the stands they blow a whistle and then follow that with a recorded PA announcement that screams “Watch Out” in English about five seconds after the ball has entered the stands!
Today’s game action was slow, to begin with. After six innings there had only been four hits. Then we were treated to a grand slam homer by the Carp and another home run by the Giants. The Carp ended up winning this one, 7-2.
Following the game, we hung around the Tokyo Dome City area. This is a huge shopping center/ amusement complex. We had dinner in a Spanish restaurant featuring the Spanish dish paella. Paella is basically rice and whatever protein you might add to it cooked in a cast-iron skillet.
Carol was still in search of distilled water. I hate to think how many steps we got in on this trip looking for that. We got a tip that a local discount store had the precious liquid. Off we went in search. We didn’t find distilled water but we did find all kinds of products and displays which made the adventure entertaining. These types of discount stores play very loud music and sometimes are playing multiple tunes in one location. This makes a pachinko parlor sound like a museum.
Once again, we used the subway to get back to the hotel from the Tokyo Dome. With Google Maps recommending which subway line to take and what exit to use to get above ground in the right place we arrived at Ginza Station with only a four or five-minute walk back to our hotel.
The Japanese love their phones just like people in most other countries do. Everyone is using their phone and likely wearing a mask. Even before Covid masks were a common sight in Japan.
Today had been a very full day. That’s how we tour. We had done a lot of walking, which is what we end up doing on most of our trips. I told you that the Tokyo Dome baseball game was one of the three things that brought us to Japan during this time frame.
Tomorrow we will experience the second reason we were in Tokyo in May. I think you will be surprised by this one!
Randy Lewis
Contrary to popular belief, I know exactly what I’m doing