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Yesterday my mother and I went to San Francisco to kidnap my sister from work for a one-week-late birthday lunch. We were all quite aware of the significance of the date as the anniversary of our landing, so we considered going for sushi, but due to practical considerations about how far we wanted to walk in the rain, we settled for something else.
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Flying west we were chasing after the sun and it was light for the whole trip. It was May 2 though when we landed at Haneda airport because of the international date line. Narita airport didn't exist then.
We were excited to be getting there just before Children's Day (May 5), which had previously been Boy's Festival, we had missed the Girl's/Doll Festival day in March. We had brought a book called "Children of Japan" describing the daily life of Japanese children - food, baths, typical allowances, school, sports, activities and festivals. I was miffed that at 8, I had missed out on all my chances to be the right age for the 7-5-3 festival, whereas JB still would get to turn 7.
Hotel Okura in Tokyo was rather new and eager for publicity, my mother's newspaper had received an invitation for someone to come and stay free for a week. My mother took them up on it, and that was the first place we stayed. It was a large modern hotel with Japanese and French restaraunts inside it and a currency exchange desk in the lobby.
The Okura arranged a lunch meeting for my mother with representatives of some English language newspapers in their teppan grill restaurant. Because this lunch was a business thing, my mother wanted us to stay in the room . It was to be the first (and I think only) time time that I was officially babysitting my sister.
Except JB quickly got anxious and refused to stay in the room, so soon we went down and joined them. At least one of the visiting journalists hated children, but we were allowed to stay anyways.
One of the women asked my mother for a business card, but she hadn't brought any. I volunteered that I still had one and I went back to the room to fetch it. They decided to let me keep my card because I had customized it, drawing a line through my mother's name and writing "Mama" when I had first gotten it, and later when I felt more grown-up, I had crossed out "Mama" and written "Mommy".
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Tokyo has AMUSEMENT PARK RIDES on the DEPARTMENT STORE ROOFS ! And at least at 1968 exchange rates (about 370 yen to a dollar), they were very cheap to ride. $5 worth of yen went a very long way. There were also carp booths up there, none of those wimpy goldfish in a bag games in Tokyo.
We visited the Mitsubishi building which had some exhibits with buttons that you could push, but about all I could figure out was they made some sort of machinery. We each got an inflatable toy. The kind you can push over and it pops back up. I call mine the "Mitsubishi Cowboy" because of his hat. My sister's was pink. He doesn't hold air quite so well anymore.
The Sony building however completely blew us away. There were a couple of stations where you could play with things and see yourself doing it on a monitor. I thought it was a sort of strange mirror, but then I noticed that it had started playing back what we had done a few minutes earlier. There were two booths connected by video phones. There was a staircase where each step played a different musical note.
*-*
In "Children of Japan" there was a picture of an amusement park with kids driving miniature cars. I always wanted to drive, so when we went to an amusement park that my mother described as being "like Disneyland", I wanted to drive the cars. The cars at this park turned out not to be miniature cars, but real cars with a stick shift and lots of tires strapped around them for padding. I drove it around the track with a man from the park shifting gears for me. It was really very unlike Disneyland.
We went up Tokyo tower. We took trains to visit a Monkey Park and the Deer Park in Nara. The monkeys were actually kind of scary. We went to several Buddhist temples including one where his little finger was 6 feet long. I bought a small blue book that said "Pocket Diary" on the cover. On some days I would write a sentence about what we did, and then draw a picture to go with it. Most of what I mention here is not written there, but in our memories.
Kobe & Kyoto are still to come ....
*-*
Flying west we were chasing after the sun and it was light for the whole trip. It was May 2 though when we landed at Haneda airport because of the international date line. Narita airport didn't exist then.
We were excited to be getting there just before Children's Day (May 5), which had previously been Boy's Festival, we had missed the Girl's/Doll Festival day in March. We had brought a book called "Children of Japan" describing the daily life of Japanese children - food, baths, typical allowances, school, sports, activities and festivals. I was miffed that at 8, I had missed out on all my chances to be the right age for the 7-5-3 festival, whereas JB still would get to turn 7.
Hotel Okura in Tokyo was rather new and eager for publicity, my mother's newspaper had received an invitation for someone to come and stay free for a week. My mother took them up on it, and that was the first place we stayed. It was a large modern hotel with Japanese and French restaraunts inside it and a currency exchange desk in the lobby.
The Okura arranged a lunch meeting for my mother with representatives of some English language newspapers in their teppan grill restaurant. Because this lunch was a business thing, my mother wanted us to stay in the room . It was to be the first (and I think only) time time that I was officially babysitting my sister.
Except JB quickly got anxious and refused to stay in the room, so soon we went down and joined them. At least one of the visiting journalists hated children, but we were allowed to stay anyways.
One of the women asked my mother for a business card, but she hadn't brought any. I volunteered that I still had one and I went back to the room to fetch it. They decided to let me keep my card because I had customized it, drawing a line through my mother's name and writing "Mama" when I had first gotten it, and later when I felt more grown-up, I had crossed out "Mama" and written "Mommy".
*-*
Tokyo has AMUSEMENT PARK RIDES on the DEPARTMENT STORE ROOFS ! And at least at 1968 exchange rates (about 370 yen to a dollar), they were very cheap to ride. $5 worth of yen went a very long way. There were also carp booths up there, none of those wimpy goldfish in a bag games in Tokyo.
We visited the Mitsubishi building which had some exhibits with buttons that you could push, but about all I could figure out was they made some sort of machinery. We each got an inflatable toy. The kind you can push over and it pops back up. I call mine the "Mitsubishi Cowboy" because of his hat. My sister's was pink. He doesn't hold air quite so well anymore.The Sony building however completely blew us away. There were a couple of stations where you could play with things and see yourself doing it on a monitor. I thought it was a sort of strange mirror, but then I noticed that it had started playing back what we had done a few minutes earlier. There were two booths connected by video phones. There was a staircase where each step played a different musical note.
*-*
In "Children of Japan" there was a picture of an amusement park with kids driving miniature cars. I always wanted to drive, so when we went to an amusement park that my mother described as being "like Disneyland", I wanted to drive the cars. The cars at this park turned out not to be miniature cars, but real cars with a stick shift and lots of tires strapped around them for padding. I drove it around the track with a man from the park shifting gears for me. It was really very unlike Disneyland.
We went up Tokyo tower. We took trains to visit a Monkey Park and the Deer Park in Nara. The monkeys were actually kind of scary. We went to several Buddhist temples including one where his little finger was 6 feet long. I bought a small blue book that said "Pocket Diary" on the cover. On some days I would write a sentence about what we did, and then draw a picture to go with it. Most of what I mention here is not written there, but in our memories.
Kobe & Kyoto are still to come ....
