Image Album: photos / 2002-01-26 to 2002-01-29 -- Japan

Setsuko in my Yokohama Bay Sheraton hotel room, offering me a tape with the first couple episodes of the latest Tokiwa Takako drama, "Long Love Letter" (which thankfully started playing on one of the local international-programming UHF stations immediately thereafter, so I was able to continue following the series).

The Sheraton, BTW, was very nice and its employees spoke skillful English and used it by default with foreigners, rather than lazily trying Japanese first, as is usual. I had been satisfied with the hotel my company used to have us stay at, the Hotel Cosmo, but compared to the Sheraton that place was kind of a dump. Also, the fact that the Sheraton is connected directly to the train station by a short underground walk is very convenient — no lugging a pull-along suitcase through the streets of the Yokohama entertainment district.

The view out my hotel room window, taken with my wide-angle lens. That communications tower makes a good landmark for navigating the area of Yokohama around the JR station.

Another communications tower in the background, too. When I asked if the larger tower was for TV, cell phones, or what, I was told that it was for "normal" telephone service. Apparently in Japan "land line" telephone service is often not carried over a line at all (at least on the macro scale), but rather using point-to-point communications towers.

Perhaps the easiest mistake to make on the (otherwise relatively easy to use) Japanese rail system is to get on a train that's on the right line, but going in the wrong direction. If you don't know if the stop you need to get to is on the way to stop X, where X is generally announced and sometimes is written on the side of the train, you don't know whether to get on that train or not. If the particular train happens to have an easily-accessible map of the stops inside, you can try to lunge into the train real quick to check it out, and lunge back out if your destination isn't on the way to stop X (assuming you successfully ascertained what stop X is). I don't understand why they don't have this map displayed somewhere on the platform. Instead, they just have a timetable, which is useless to you if you can't read kanji.

In any case, on our way from Yokohama to Maihama (and the Tokyo Disney Resort), Setsuko and I screwed up and got on the right train in the wrong direction. We stupidly didn't notice this until we'd traveled fairly far into the countryside. We should have double-checked that line map on the train, but we thought there was no need because the platform where we got on the train was labeled in a confusing fashion that implied that both sides of the platform had trains going towards Tokyo.

We finally realized our mistake and hopped off the train in Kouzu, a little seaside town. It was quite a wait until the next train in the other direction was to arrive, so I spent the time taking some photos. This is the platform, and is fairly typical for a small, outdoor JR platform.

There's some neat theming inside Tokyo Disneyland's Country Bear Theater which I believe may be unique to this incarnation of it, and I tried to get some photos of it, but unfortunately I either didn't have my flash with me (since this was my last half-day before heading home and I hadn't had any reason to use the flash on my previous days at the parks) or I just didn't have time to whip it out before the show — I forget which. I was able to enhance this photo and a couple of the others by a small amount in Paint Shop Pro, but there's so much CCD noise that it's impossible to improve the general look much without hurting legibility of the text.

In any case, the display cases contain old memorabilia, such as the sheet music for Country Bear Band hits. I think this is a description of "The Ballad of Davy Crockett" from the bears' point-of-view.