What’s worse than having a Frenchman design your capital city (L’Enfant – Washington, D.C.)? Having a paranoid 15th century Shogun design your capital city. If you have ever driven through DC, you know the frustration of being on a street that suddenly changes its name or appears to go away while you continue straight.
Well, that is nothing compared to Tokyo, which is built on the idea of a series of circles. That way, there is no direct route for attack. All maps in Japan come with the warning that not all streets are marked. To get from the closest main road to our apartment building, you turn right onto the third street, which is actually the forth one. The cab drivers seem to be able to distinguish that that one street is one meter narrower than the other three, and subsequently not worth noting.
Years ago there was a game show skit on SNL where all the questions required you to know how many doughnut shops you pass to get to a certain place. Pachinko Parlors are the doughnuts shops of Japan. The gaudiest, loudest and busiest building on any street is the Pachinko Parlor. If a slot machine had sex with a pinball machine, their offspring would be the pachinko machine. Pachinko is widely rumored to be the number one pastime in Japanese. Every time I go through the park I wonder how many of the homeless are there because they lost everything at a pachinko parlor.
I give Pam a report every evening on how many Pachinko parlors I passed that day to get somewhere. For example to get to the Hub, a restaurant that serves fish and chips, you go through the park, past the train station, turn right at OIOI City, go past two Pachinko Parlors and the Hub is on the left. To get to our daughter’s school you go to the grocery store, turn left, pass two pachinko parlors and turn right at the third one, go up the hill and there is the school. In the States, Pam would know Sachan and I had had a long day when I would tell Pam at the end of the day that Sachan almost ended up on E-bay. Now, on such days, I tell Pam I thought about trading Sacahn for pachinko balls.
Those days remain the exception. Most days are filled with keen observations such as the other day when Samantha announced, “I had a growth spurt!”
Because of this I was informed that I would have to go and get her a pair of shoes. Pam had seen children’s shoes in a store in the Ginza Shopping District. I do not like to shop. And shoe shopping is by far the worst of all kinds of shopping and should be classified as cruel and unusual punishment. I have hated and despised and feared shoe shopping since getting trapped with Pam and her friend Jenny in Potomac Mills years ago. They, being the evil women that they are, lured me in with kind words and puppy dog eyes pleading for someone to drive. They tried on two or three sizes of every shoe in every shoe store in the entire mall. A piece of bamboo shoved under my fingernail with each debate and critique of a shoe’s style and color would have been less painful.
And so a great fear filled my heart, a fear far greater than I have ever known, when Pam said, “YOU have to go to Ginza, and get her shoes.” Ginza is one of the largest shopping districts in Tokyo. Imagine a three square kilometer area of high rise stores, each putting your closest outlet mall to shame in size and variety. Pam did have the grace to say, go to this one store, to this one floor to this one section and you will find children’s shoes. (I would like to point out that Pam has trouble remembering how to walk down the street and find the duck pond, but can remember where shoes are – the female brain is a scary thing!)
So it was that I set out on my first outing, alone in the bowels of Tokyo’s biggest shopping district. Sachan and I waited till after the rush hour, figured out how much our subway tickets would be, bought them, made the transfer and came out in the right place. We passed three Pachinko parlors, crossed five streets, and entered the store Pam told me to enter. We went to the second floor, just like Pam said. We went to the back right corner, just like Pam said. We turned right, and there, just like Pam said was a small selection of children’s shoes. Samantha found a pair she liked; they fit and we purchased them. Most importantly, it only took ten minutes. That’s how to shop for shoes!
The pride started to well up in my heart and we decided to celebrate our grand accomplishment. There was a bakery on the same floor. Most bakeries here have their items out on shelves. You pick up a tray and tongs and pick your own pastry/roll and then go pay. Well, Sachan and I quickly spied the grandest and most revered of all baked goods – doughnuts! So we got two doughnuts to celebrate. I warned Sachan that the doughnut was a cake doughnut and might be a little hard. She then uttered this sentence making me both proud and homesick, “You mean it won’t be soft like a Krispy Kreme doughnut?” Ah, the important things in life, realizing that there are doughnuts, and then there are Krispy Kremes.
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