Week One - Getting there, and Tokyo, first impressions.
Week One Pictures .. Week Two Pictures I .. Week Two in Pictures II .. Week Three Pictures

(click on the thumnails for larger images)

 St Pancras station just after getting off the train from Derby. The bin seems a bit saturated. St Pancras is a great station - very old world in character.
Japanese money! At this point I actually started to feel like I was going somewhere. Check out the happy guy on the cash, eh?

Leaping ahead a day, I'm in Tokyo! The narrow streets already remind me of UK's country lanes. For some reason, people in Japan all drive SUVs as well.Strictly speaking this isn't Tokyo though, but it's extremely easy commuting distance - about 15 minutes on an express.
Robin! She's been has been in Japan for almost as long as I've been in the UK - five years at this point. Five years! Bloody hell.. I don't know about her, but I only meant to be here a year.

Well, this was in an art gallery Alice and I went to while Robin was at work. Note the art in the upper left corner of the picture. Thing is, there was this really interesting set of waterfalls in the gallery - even more interesting than the art, to be honest...
This place was great. Just outside the gallery (in the middle of Tokyo) we found this great little part. The stone lanterns are great, and you see them all over the place in Japan. The main problem is that every Japanese garden has millions of great shots in it - you don't want to stop shooting.

Another shot from the park. I honestly have no idea who this guy is, but he seems happy about things. There was a sign in front of him, but it was written in Japanese for some reason.
The torii outside the ever controversial shrine to the Japanese war dead. Controversial because it's a shrine to ALL the Japanese war dead, including those from various incursions into Korea and China, not to mention those involved in various atrocities in the second World War. This sort of includes some alleged war criminals.

And yes, that tree is very tilted. I thought about photoshopping it out, but didn't.

The shrine itself. Interesting, really. The Japanese concept of "saving face" seems to involve sometimes pretending that things didn't happen. So excluding a group from a war memorial would be an admission that they weren't nice, which would be a loss of face for the country. So instead everyone is included.
A stone lantern in the shrine, surrounded by cherry blossoms. The cherry blossoms are a very big deal in Japan. More on them later.
(shot by Alice)

The blossoms themselves, though these are the paler variety. The more vivid ones had largely disappeared by the time I arrived, but it was still pretty extraordinary. When a wind kicked up, the petals from these trees could almost make it seem as if it was snowing.
Lunch! It doesn't look like much, I'll grant you. Still, it's actually great stuff. It's like an omelet with two layers, and noodles between the layers. The omelet itself had various bits of seafood in it. Once rolled up, they put a sweet brown sauce on it, then sprinkle it with seaweed and fish flakes. Great stuff.

The Budokan! Home to a very large variety of martial arts classes and competitions. It's also much larger than this photo manages to make it look.
Some more cherry blossoms along the footpath that follows the river. Nice and relaxing. The cherry blossom blooms are so important to the Japanese that they have cherry blossom updates just like weather reports when the trees are blooming.

Possibly a better shot than the one above, which was a bit too dark. If I had been using a normal camera, I'd have tried more than one exposure, or played with the f-stops. As it is, I just pressed the button.
Now THIS is the sort of colour you hope to see in a cherry blossom tree. Avenues full of these things would be impressive. As I said earlier, the cherry blossoms are very important in Japan - subjects of poetry, paintings, and so on.


Couldn't even tell you what kind of tree this is - I just liked the shape.
This may well say "this way to toilets," but not knowing the language, I just thought it looked good. Especially with the grass growing around it - even the weeds are artistic in Japan. The building it was in front of was actually a battlement in the Imperial Gardens.

These cedars are great - they actually force them to grow this way via careful trimming and the use of bamboo platforms underneath each of the "floors" of the tree. The effect is great.
A guardhouse in the Imperial gardens. It took a lot of waiting to get this shot without hordes of tourists in shot. Bloody tourists!

Strictly speaking, the sign next to this claimed it was a dolphin. Japanese dolphins are evidently a lot bigger on "evil" than the dolphins we seem to get in the Western world.
Ah yes, the Kirin beer museum. In this picture, we have the incredibly tacky animated feature where the beer fairy is abducted by, well, some guy who screamed and danced about quite a bit. And yes, the guy in white is a beer delivery man.

Just one of many shots in Tokyo that involve many lights, and a number of very large television screens on buildings. These were the shorts of areas where Tokyo could rapidly overwhelm the senses. It's hard to believe that the Imperial gardens are in the same city as this.
A cool clock tower. The picture didn't entirely turn out, but I liked the shot anyway. The tower is lit, but lit subtly. Instead of glaring lights, the edges just seemed to glow.

More lights and action. I've never been to New York, but Tokyo has corners like this all over the place.
And so on...

Love hotels! Tokyo has loads of these things, and the odd thing is that they're entirely automated for check-ins, to save anyone being embarrassed. More disturbingly, the buildings have almost no windows - they're just featureless buildings. This seems really strange until you consider that the Japanese live with their parents until they're much, much older than typical Westerners. As a result, couples need someplace to go...
A surprisingly attractive alley. Robin assures me all the restaurants in these sorts of areas are great. I have to admit I only once felt ill in Japan, and I don't think it was food related.

The massive torii outside a shrine whose name eludes me at the moment. I headed here after a visit to a sword museum which didn't allow photography! Very disappointing. Still, this torii is huge.
Monks sweeping the courtyards. They used these very light brooms that could sweep leaves off of the gravel without disturbing the gravel itself. They also didn't seem to mind all the picture-taking. I suppose you must get used to it after a while.

What a great tree! Ok, jet lag is setting in, and the colour commentary is starting to fade a bit. Let's keep on trying...
Just a shot of the very detailed construction on the shrine. The attention paid to detail in these places is staggering. Everything is done down to the very last corner of a beam - no mess anywhere.

A house in the gardens of the shrine. The careful asymmetric placement of these shrubs produces some great views. Gardens in Japan bear little resemblance to the formal gardens of the UK. There are no straight lines, and placements could pass for random, except that they're all too good-looking to be random. There's a real art to this stuff.
As above...
On to week two!