13 - Lego & Beer

(Day 13- Saturday)

I hate to say it, but I slept a hundred times better in that guest house in Arashiyama than three in the bed at this hotel last night. My son punched me in the mouth and kicked me twice in the bits and this morning will no doubt pretend he knows nothing about it.

Taken in Shimbashi, Tokyo.

Today we've come from Machida up the Odakyu line to change via Yoyogi Uehara and Shimbashi to Odaiba to the Lego Discovery Centre. 

This way to the Tokyo Teleport Station

I wasn't kidding

There's a bigger Lego Land in Nagoya, but due to it seeming a bit expensive and us not having much time there, we opted for the smaller Lego Discovery Centre in Odaiba. Our kid loved it and we spent five long hours there surrounded by hundreds of hyper children and pale, tired parents, not to mention billions of lego bricks.

The beautiful Tokyo skyline at night, but look closer

Tokyo Tower

The best part I think that both my son and I liked was the automobile creation area, where you designed your vehicle and tested it on various ramps and races against other kids' (and Dads') creations. We spent ages there and made a few pals from many different countries.

A Lego Dragon

The second best thing was the 4D short Lego movie theatre. 3D glasses, fans in the ceiling to blow air at you, water splashing on you at appropriate moments - it was quite an experience! But I have to confess, after five hours of lego I was ready to never buy, play with or think about lego ever again.

A Lego Star Wars Death Star - just 86,300 yen! (£570.09)

In the evening I'd arranged to meet another long standing friend of mine from our 'Ripped' days in a bar called the Warrior Celt, in Ueno, which is hidden away upstairs amid the packed in shops and services of every description in the depths of downtown Tokyo. Depths is a good word for it, because you can really feel the pressure from the sheer density of bars, restaurants, pachinko parlours, karaoke bars, American clothes shops, convenience stores all crammed four high into tiny spaces beneath railway tracks.

The Warrior Celt, while serving good Guinness, is a smoking zone, which I hadn't been used to for many years since coming back to the UK, and when we arrived a group of about a dozen people from all over the world were involved in some kind of vociferous drinking game which in the small space made it very hard to talk, so we removed ourselves to a Brewdog in Roppongi. On the way to which we were propositioned by a guy who wanted to take us to a Strip Bar, which is something I wrote into my first novel 'Tokyomares'. I tried not to freak out too much though as just because I write about something (I rationalised while a little drunk) it doesn't mean it can't still happen in real life.

Once we finally found the Brew Dog we sat at one end of the bar and drank exorbitantly priced "British Pints" and caught up on the past six years, while down the bar I saw about five guys all sitting alone, on their cell phones, right next to each other. Among other things we discussed aquaponics (the growth of fruit and vegetables in water instead of soil) and much much more, which I have absolutely no memory of now whatsoever.

TVs on trains. But I see my conveyor belt ramen train carriage idea hasn't caught on yet

Navigating the Tokyo train and subway system is hard enough for the sober Japanese person from out of town, let alone the drunk foreigner on holiday, but I had a feeling I'd be all night once I got onto the circular Yamanote line and headed for my old favourite station - Shinjuku (which I have much experience navigating while drunk). There I switched onto the Odakyu line and headed south, thinking whatever drunk gaijin think about on the second last train home.

Read Day 14. 

Great Eastern Japan Earthquake Day 4

 We were due to get the Shinkansen out of Shin Yokohama but heeding a feeling in my gut I went down to check the Machida JR station early only to find that all the shutters were down and the station closed, with no employees anywhere to be found. Taped to the shutters was a typed notice in Japanese explaining the situation, but I could barely understand a word. I was too angry and disappointed. What I’d envisaged was coming true. We were being trapped in Tokyo.

The train lines were supposedly being closed due to rolling black outs to try and save power due to many of the nuclear power plants being shut down for safety fears.

I went home and explained things to my wife. Then I began watching the wind direction to check if there were any NW winds blowing radioactive dust in our direction. 

On the website Wiki Questions I asked what the best way to avoid inhaling radioactive dust particles was, and one guy said a face mask with wet tissue paper on the inside, so that’s what I used most of the time I went outside. But whether or not it was effective I don’t know. I think my chest may have started hurting due to inhaling fragments of wet tissue paper.

In Fukushima reactor building unit 3 exploded injuring eleven people. The president of the French nuclear safety authority said that Fukushima should be rated a 5 (accident with wider consequences) or even a 6 (serious accident) on the INES.

While some people were arguing about what rating to give it, other people were making themselves sick drinking mouthwash containing iodine mistakingly thinking this would protect them from thyroid cancer.

Day 5

Great Eastern Japan Earthquake Day 3

 I woke up feeling relatively optimistic, but when my wife told me of the events that happened overnight about the extension of the evacuation zone and the explosion, I couldn't face eating my cereal, actually feeling like I was going to be sick. I left for a while and tried to walk it off and rehydrate myself.

While out in the streets it occurred to me how much I had fucked up. I had no health insurance, my family and I were inside a potentially life threatening situation, and I was ill. My head was pounding and I still felt the waves of nausea come and go. Even though I had a history of headaches and nausea under tired and stressful conditions, it occurred to me that I might already have radiation poisoning. This nightmare followed me on my walk for a few minutes. I was the only one drinking unfiltered tap water - my wife and son both used a filter system or boiled water. Could there have been a crack in the water pipes letting in some kind of radiation? The worry that this might be the case added to my stress levels. I looked around at the other people who all looked fine. This seemed to suggest that the illness I was feeling was caused by stress/tired/PC related eyestrain, but near the convenience store the inevitable happened. I was sick in the car-park round the back. Even while being sick a switch flicked in my mind - a kind of acceptance that things were not good. I accepted at least that I was being sick. So much for rehydration, but I did feel much better.

In the convenience store I was cogent enough to realise it would soon be White day and that I'd better get some chocolates for my wife now or never.

I made my way back home. Through the still dwindling head-ache and sickness I was able to say to my wife the words quietly that for some reason it was so difficult to say. 

"I think we should go."

My wife saw I was in bad shape and after booking a hotel in Osaka on the net (I couldn't face looking at the screen again) went out to the second hand store to try to pick up a buggy, and that I should rest. Weirdly, almost as soon as they left, my headache disappeared and I felt much better. Does stress really affect me that much? I got on my bicycle and headed unsteadily down to Machida station trying not to panic or look panicky. There was a long line at the JR Green Counter of other people with apparently the same idea perhaps, but I didn't get the sense of any major concern. For the most part it seemed like just another day. The Yokohama line was running fine. People seemed happy. I decided to try my hand at booking the tickets on the machine, which turned out to be surprisingly straightforward. I bought three reserved seat tickets for the Nozomi Shinkansen from Shin Yokohama tomorrow at 12:09 pm.

Feeling a good deal better I headed back home. I think I also canceled the Community centre rooms for our proposed movie shoot on the 14th, before heading up to the second hand shop to assist my wife in the buying of the buggy and the substantially more complicated task of removing our son from the toy section.

Meanwhile at Fukushima a partial meltdown was reported at Unit 3. The Japan Atomic Energy Agency rated the situation at Unit 1 as level 4 (an accident with local consequences) on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale. Chernobyl was  rated the highest at 7 (a major accident).

Day 4

Great Eastern Japan Earthquake Day 2

Kanagawa, Japan

 Saturday is kind of a haze for me to recall now. I remember that we were all just happy that we'd survived a major disaster and thought the worst was over. Aftershocks still rumbled through the apartment but they didn't cause any disruption. We kept the helmets, torch and radio close at hand. I heard about the reactor at Fukushima and imagined pretty much right away that it would cause problems, either by igniting panic in Tokyo, or else if the authorities were unable to get it under control soon that the radiation levels may get out of hand. I remember thinking that the worst case scenario could be another Chernobyl, with everyone in Tokyo either ordered to evacuate, causing a choke up on the trains, buses and roads out of the city, or stay indoors where we'd also be trapped, and the only way to escape such a situation would be to pre-empt it. I also pretty much decided straight away that the government would probably play down the disaster to avoid either panic or loss of face, and so I assumed that the situation was always slightly worse than they said it was. This had happened many times before, with NOVA for example, or FOI, the electronics company I taught English at, both pretending everything was peachy until it was far far too late and everything went pear-shaped. Plus there was always a time lag between when something harmful reaches the public and the government notices it and warns the public about it. I wanted to stay ahead of this time lag.

Unfortunately, due to watching too much internet the night before and not getting enough sleep, I had a bit of a headache and decided to take it easy for the day. I wasn't really in the mood for evasive action.

But I couldn't help be drawn back to watching things develop on the net. BBC was running a 24 hour news page on the strings of disasters, complete with video and twitter updates, but watching earthquake devastation on the news from an external viewpoint while actually still feeling aftershocks and still being inside the situation created a strong feeling of nausea and vertigo.

Slept with the family again, but due to my son still waking up every 90 minutes for milk didn't get much rest.

The Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant after the 2011
 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. Reactor 1 to 4 from right to left.

Unbeknownst to us a hydrogen explosion blew the roof off Fukushima Unit 1. The evacuation zone was extended to 20km around the plant and sea water was being used for emergency cooling, and the release of iodine 131 from a damaged reactor core led Japanese officials to distribute iodine pills to people living around the plant to avoid thyroid absorption.

Day 3.

(Photo from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster#/media/File:Fukushima_I_by_Digital_Globe.jpg under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)