Old Tokyo

Today we woke up early to go to the Tokyo fish market. We arrived around 5 am to find that they are still not allowing tourists into the fish market due (for some reason) to the Tsunami. Although we did not get to see the Tuna auction, we did see quite a bit of fish, and we had sushi for breakfast. I know that all of you are thinking this means I had raw fish, I did not. I had some pretty good veggie sushi, including some with fermented soybeans. I ordered the sushi and the chef looks at me, and confirms that I do indeed want the soybeans. I said that I would try it. It actually wasn’t bad; quite sticky, but not bad. Afterward, the chef asked me how I liked it. When I said it was decent, he laughed and called me a celebrity, saying that even he did not like it. Others enjoyed such delicacies such as melt in your mouth fatty tuna and almost live prawn. It was quite an experience. 

After that experience, we had a business meeting with American Express. This was quite informative and gave us a chance to compare and contrast specifics of American and Japanese consumers. For example, most Japanese do not carry any sort of balance on their credit cards, and have a better sense of what they can and cannot afford. They also prefer “busy” websites. For example, almost nobody in Japan uses Google to search, because the clean homepage is not what they want. They prefer the Yahoo! homepage which is COVERED with news, ads and photos.  To me this was fascinating because almost everyone else in the world prefers the Google page. 

For the rest of the day we traveled to the Edo museum which covered Tokyo’s history up to current day, and I learned that the Rickshaw was a Japanese invention. After that we traveled to the “old Tokyo” and saw actual Rickshaws you could ride in for 3,000 yen (pretty expensive, around $40). There were many vendors and a temple where you could get your fortune. A few Japanese people asked to take my photograph, which was the first time this has happened. I thought it would have happened before now, because I stick out like a sore thumb, but most Japanese people are too polite to ask. We ended our night with some delicious Vietnamese food. Tomorrow we are headed to Mt. Fuji!