One of the things that gets me really excited when we travel is seeing different markets. I always tell people about how fun these experiences are, but most people don’t seem to get as excited as I do because they’re not into sampling new or different foods as much. I wasn’t always as open to trying new foods, but as I’ve gone into and through my twenties, I want to try as many things as possible. It’s a fun way to explore other cultures and learn what they value and what’s important to them.

Well, I certainly had that opportunity yesterday afternoon when we arrived in Kyoto and visited the 400-plus-year-old Nishiki Market. I had read about the vast variety of tsukemono (Japanese pickled vegetables) before, but I had no idea exactly how many different varieties there actually were until we got here. Pickled vegetables are served with virtually every semi-formal meal in Japan. There were entire stores devoted to pickled vegetables. I tried things as new to me as pickled squash, pickled eggplant, and even pickled soy beans mashed into a clear jelly-like paste wrapped around another variety of beans pickled in a completely different mixture. And to make the experience even more Japanese, if you’d like to buy these pickled delicacies as gifts, you can have them beautifully packaged in origami paper wrapping to resemble artful envelopes. I can’t imagine ever being handed a thin envelope wrapped in colorful paper as a gift, to then take out the thinnest possible tray of six types of Japanese pickles. It’s so much intricacy, care, and beauty put into something (well, pickles) that doesn’t at first glance seem that delicate or “beautiful” at all.

On our first night in Tokyo, we were wandering around the Akihabara area, full of bright lights and thousand-dollar rice cookers, when we came across a sex shop. So of course, we decided to go in and check it out. We might as well go see Japanese sex toys while we are here.

I think my slight fascination with the idea of Japanese porn and sex toys came about when at my last job, one of my colleagues received a formal warning from HR because of some “suspicious activity” he was found to be doing on his work computer. Apparently, a colleague with whom I was friendly who worked in IT told me that the internet complaints regarding the terrible speed were due to this guy streaming anime porn during work hours. First, they tracked down the streaming to his computer, then identified what he was streaming and which site it was from. It was pretty hilarious to me when I found out because then, I had no idea anime porn even existed; I was completely ignorant to it. I thought about how sexually repressed Asia, and especially Japan, is, and it made sense why people would be drawn to anime porn; it’s not real people having sex, but just a bunch of cartoons with big eyes and big boobs. How illicit could that be?

This sex shop had multiple levels. The first one was for women, the second level was for both sexes, and the third was exclusively for men. There were signs all over the second level saying that women were not allowed; “FORBIDDEN!” with female symbols were all over the stair well to the third level. Chris chuckled and said that since I was forbidden, I’d have to wait for him on the second level while he went upstairs. So while I waited for him, I watched my very first segment of Japanese anime porn on their television screen. Boy, was that an eye opener.

Even if I didn’t see anything on the screen and just heard the sounds, I’d definitely know I was listening to people having pretty intense and rowdy sex. But as I looked at the screen, all the usual things you see in anime were there: cartoon women with massive, buggy clear eyes, thin build, big, ball-like breasts, and long, flowing hair. The man and the woman were on some swinging contraption, screaming and moaning loudly, likely yelling at each other to go faster, and swinging back and forth. The one thing I noticed about the action was that every time there was a zoom-in shot of the penetration, it was completely pixelated out. It’s already fake, so why the need to pixelate it at all? This culture is so repressed that they had to reduce sex down to a cartoon, and even in a cartoon, I can’t see what’s really happening to cause all that ecstasy? It completely boggled my mind in multiple ways.

I probably made the longest restaurant list I’ve ever made for this Japan trip, but sadly, we have gone to only one listed place in our 2.5 days here so far. I suppose it’s actually not that sad considering that every meal has been very enjoyable and has exceeded expectations not just for quality but also for price.

Three years ago when I was in Singapore, I met a friend’s friend who was American and working for Delta while living in Tokyo. We spent quite a bit of time together for the few days he was in Singapore, and he told me that while of course, Tokyo was not a cheap place, he said he felt that most people’s depiction of how expensive it is wasn’t very accurate. He said that he paid less for his shared apartment, where he had his own bedroom and bathroom, than most of the people he knew living in Manhattan, and if you wanted to eat Japanese food in Tokyo, it could be had for quite cheap and in most cases, less than eight to ten U.S. dollars. Sure, you could spend $500 for dinner if you wanted (and there are quite a number of restaurants to do that at given that Tokyo has a large number of Michelin star restaurants), but you could also spend less than $5 for dinner at hundreds of places. Hotels are expensive in Tokyo, but they’re in the same ballpark as hotels in New York City.

Everything he told me was right. On our first night, I had a delicious pork katsu curry over rice with miso soup for less than $7 USD, and today, we had ramen for lunch for about $6 USD each. As I slurped my delicious tonkotsu broth, I thought about how we’d normally pay $12-20 for good quality ramen in New York City and felt a bit sulky. Everywhere you go here, there are so many overwhelming options for food. It’s like being in New York, except everyone here is extremely polite and well mannered, and all the writing is in Japanese. And there’s probably no high fructose corn syrup in every product here.

One of the most enjoyable parts of traveling to another part of the world is observing everyday people in that society and how they lead their lives – and then thinking about how it compares with life back home.

One thing that is so conspicuous in Tokyo is how everyone seems to follow the rules. On the subway stairs, there’s a sign and written guides on the steps for walking up the stairs on the left, down the stairs on the right. Everyone follows this. Everyone. The most amusing part of watching this was when there were too many people going up the stairs that they started lining up in a double-file line, but not a single person was walking down the right side. I thought in my New Yorker head, why isn’t anyone just walking up the right side of the stairway? It’s wide open! Gradually but very hesitantly, a few people meekly walked up the right side, and Chris and I joined them. “I don’t follow rules, baby,” Chris said. Yes, he’s certainly not Japanese.

I’ve been consumed in the last week with researching what to see, smell, and taste in Japan for our upcoming trip in July. I began by researching the history and sights of Hiroshima, then Kyoto, and now Tokyo and the surrounds. I suppose I left Tokyo to the end because I knew how overwhelming it would be. It’s a massive city with a population of over 36.9 million, which is almost double the population of New York City, the biggest city in the U.S. It’s famed for its high energy, fusion of the modern and the traditional, and endless eateries. Robot restaurants, rice cookers with 20 different settings, women with mile-long fake eyelashes, and matcha green tea-flavored everything abound.

Five years ago, Tokyo surpassed Paris for having the most number of Michelin-star rated restaurants in the world, which is pretty impressive given a lot of these restaurants are random no-ambiance sushi restaurants that don’t necessarily live up to the stereotypical image of the “ideal” in French culture. So when it comes to doing research on what and where to eat, it’s an endless list on every food blog and news site on what’s considered the best and what’s worth waiting for at multiple price points. To make matters more complicated, not all restaurants’ Romanized names are written on their store fronts, so I have to create a guide with both the Japanese name Romanized and the Japanese characters. And because of how large Japan is, we need to organize restaurants by location/neighborhood and food type.

I don’t think I’ve ever planned a trip where I was more overwhelmed by all the options that faced me. I guess I could have felt that way about cities like Shanghai and Paris, which have endless things to see and do, but for some reason, because I’ve been wanting to go to Tokyo for so long, especially after a failed planned trip when I was 21, that all the hype and energy has accumulated to a point where I want to make sure I see and do as much is humanly possible during my first trip there without not sleeping. 🙂

In the U.S., it generally costs more to buy fresh produce than it does to buy processed (yet filling) meals, such as a box of Kraft instant macaroni and cheese, a Cup-of-Noodle, or something else that is not particularly healthy for you. It’s part of the reason poor people tend to have worse diets and be more obese — they don’t have enough money to buy what’s good for them, so they go for what’s cheap and filling because they don’t want to starve to death.

In other countries, the costs tend to be more on par or even cheaper. I remember walking around food markets in many other places around the world and marveling over how cheap their produce was. Food in large grocery stores tended to be more expensive than at these markets. With skincare, as I am researching things to buy in Japan for our upcoming trip, skincare that is of a certain quality is relatively so cheap there compared to here. A bottle of equivalent quality cleansing oil that costs about $30 here costs $8-10 there. A $4 mascara in Tokyo would probably cost somewhere between $15-20 here.

The way I look at this is, perhaps if a society values something more and looks at it as vital, then maybe that’s why it’s more reachable in terms of affordability. If we absolutely must have fresh fruit and vegetables, it should be more affordable, right? The same should go for good skincare (sunblock, face creams). The more expensive they are, the more out of reach, and thus fewer people will buy them. If this is true, then I’d think the U.S. just doesn’t value good diet and health (via quality of skin and body through skincare regimen), which would be quite sad.