Japan: Royal Rockstar Ambassador

For Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Incheon

Liz gave me a ride to the Incheon airport in the morning. She waived the ride fee because I donated my Going Abroad book to her hostel library. We chatted about the landscape under construction that we were passing through. The South Korean government had planned for a lot of development around Incheon, but there wasn’t enough demand for housing there, so there was a lot of suspended construction dotting the landscape. Liz said the area used to be hilly and pretty to see, but was flattened for the airport and the surrounding development. I flew from Incheon, South Korea, to Narita, Japan.

Tokyo

I rode the Keisei train from Narita to Tokyo, then rode the Hibiya subway line from Ueno station to Iriya station. After being turned around for five minutes on the street, I finally located my hostel, Toco Tokyo Heritage Hostel. As I was putting my stuff into my locker I met Karlee (from Canada), who had just checked in as well and was going out for dinner with another girl, Charlie, whom she had just met too. We rode the subway to Ueno station and exited there and walked through a nearby neighborhood to the first yakitori we liked and sat down. While eating, we met a Japanese family eating next to us: Sao and Yoko Suzuki, and their son, Kato. We chatted a little with them and learned that Sao was part of the Japanese emperor’s family and had served as the Japanese ambassador to the United States a number of years ago, and had lived in a $2 million house in Newport Beach in California, and had been the drummer in a metal band called Loudness. Being slightly inebriated at the time, I took all of this at face value, but now I wonder whether some or all of it was true—what are the odds of meeting a royal rockstar ambassador? It didn’t really matter, because I was really excited at the time, and we invited them to join us for karaoke, and they agreed. We found a place nearby that had free drinks, and we all stayed there for hours drinking and singing. Eventually Yoko and Kato had to go, presumably to put him to bed, but Sao stayed with us until the end. It turned out to be really expensive, about 10,000 yen per person. This was my first introduction to the high expense of Japanese living in Tokyo. We all exchanged contact information and parted ways with Sao, then took a taxi home. The liquor had been much stronger than what I was used to in South Korea, so things got hazy from there. I woke up the next morning and my phone was lying exposed on the floor, and I was lying on top of the lock for my luggage locker on my bed, still in my clothes from the night before. It had been a good night.