Flight:

Thu Mar 19 02:20 – 06:20
Spring Japan IJ0002
Shanghai Pudong T2 – Tokyo Narita T3

That was my itinerary for the plane ride, but in a fine display of my seasoned traveller wisdom, I had completely forgotten that the two cities were in a different timezone. I was expecting a four hour flight, and was surprised when the pilot said that we were commencing landing soon two hours and change in and they started giving out those Japan forms one needs to fill out to pass immigration at the Japanese port of entry (I had remembered about this a couple of times over the past couple of days but never did find time to do them.)

I was seated in seat 2C this time instead of one of the front row ones, and I was a bit miffed because I had people next to me, so both the center and window seat were taken, whereas the person in 1F was really lucky because the 1D and 1E seats aisle and middle, for that row were empty. This 2:20 am Spring Japan flight had no priority lane for checking in and bag drop, and no priority lane for boarding, and the gate agent checking me in didn’t even ask me what seat I wanted until I inquired if I could pick a seat before he said window or aisle, and there was no free bottle of water (or refreshment of any kind) for this, unlike when I went Spring Plus on the domestic China flight, so what the heck was the point of going Spring Plus on this China to Japan flight? Oh right, the 30 kg I guess. But still! My other alleged benefits!

Oh well. The flight wasn’t terrible, although I don’t know if I fell asleep or not or if I just closed my eyes and three hours just passed like that. We went wheels up at 2:30 am and went wheels down at 6:02 am Japan time, and we were off the plane slightly in advance of 6:20 am. Not that it mattered in the end because I think I had to stand around the baggage carousel for about 10 minutes before my bag arrived.

But wait, one thing of note did happen on the plane, and it’s that I made another new friend.

This was one of the pages of their in-flight catalogue, and I’ve been a bit of a sucker lately in buying these plushies when they’re on sale. I only buy one at a time though, even when more than one are on offer, so the one I ended up going for here was the Teddy Bear (Revival edition) at the bottom, for 1,400 yen.

There was one problem though. Payment. The plushie I bought from Peach Airlines on Day 1 was very simple, I just gave them my credit card and their point of sale system saved the info and processed it when we landed. I then mentioned when I flew Spring Airlines domestically within China on Day 35 that that one was weird and someone woul come find me during the landing procedure to process payment instead, and that’s what they did since I was right in front anyway. i just Weixin’d the thing as I landed. Is Weixin an English verb? Well it is now. I used WeChat Pay tap to pay, basically.

But this one. Even though they share the same parent company/name, they’re different entities to the point that their point of system isn’t even the same. They only accepted three forms of payment — Alipay, cold, hard Japanese Yen, or cold, hard Chinese Yen. That’s it. That’s very Japanese of them in terms of how behind the times they are on simple things like technology sometimes.

Although I had Alipay set up, I could not use that to pay this specific transaction since it required that I be a Chinese national who had already done their identity validation to use it. I know that WeChat only lets international users Weixin stuff — theres that verb again — within Mainland China (and HK requires a separat special app) but not internationally, and their very convenient tap to pay for basically anything stops working the moment you leave the borders. I think Alipay is probably the same thing, though I haven’t formally tried outside of this.

In addition, I had forgotten to take out my Japanese Yen envelope so it was still buried at the bottom of my backpack, which was up in the cabin overhead storage. The stewardess said that I could take it down to retrieve it if I wanted to, but I knew where that sucker was buried, and I definitely didn’t want to do it on the plane. However, I still had some loose Chinese banknotes from my last trip that were still tucked away in my sling bag because I just never used them this trip at all except to pay Kel a couple of times and that one artist in Haikou, so I pulled one of those 100 yuan notes out and brandished it at the air stewardess. She said that that was fine, but they would only be able to return the change in Japanese Yen, and inquired if I was fine with that. Of course I was, so the transaction went:

Original price: 1400 yen.
Converted price: 68 yuan.
Gave: 100 yuan.
Change: 680 yen.

But 1400 / 68 * 32 = 658.8 yen. I just.. you know what, I don’t want to know how the calculations worked there. Anyway in the end I ended up with this bear, who was distressingly tiny and scrawny and I think Judge, the temporary working name for the Cry-Cry Horse I have, is busy judging him for his size instead of frowning at how many ducks I have now:

Have I mentioned how much I love the “sad” horse plushie? Mine is not sad at all and is instead very judgemental, usually regarding things that Tigey is doing. But yeah, the Spring Airlines plushie is also very concerned for how little and underweight the Spring Japan plushie seemed to be.

When our plane landed in Japan, we got to walk down the stairs and then into a covered ground level passage into the airport itself. Not the first time it’s happened to me, and heck, it’s not even the first time it’s happened to me in the rain, though where i was was already under a covered passage ceiling, so the rainy portion wasn’t very long at all.

We then walked up past a quarantine checkpoint that checks people’s temperatures as they go by and into the airport itself. I’m not quite sure what happens if you have a fever and they catch you though. I hope I never find out. Past that was baggage check, then immigration and customs, where the officer took one look at my passport and asked if I came into Japan every month or something. What no, I said, this was just where my return trip was from. The way he said it made me think of a chatbot hallucination, heh, though he was obviously not using one as we were interacting right in front of each other. He nodded and gave me the stamp of approval and off I went.

Soon I found myself back yet again in this Terminal 2-3 train ticket area, which to me is an extremely iconic place — and one that still makes me panic whenever I arrive here even though I’ve been here four times or so already.

It’s so confusing with two different lines (JR and Keisei) here, and with multiple train options and different variations of lines here, especially the damned Keisei line. And then, the kicker which adds stress on top of everything else, the ticket machines do not accept credit cards, except for the Keisei Skyliners ones, which are the fastest into Tokyo but also the most expensive by far. And hey, the ticket counters do not open until 8 am and it was only 7:15 am.

Well whatever. It turned out that there was actually a “direct” train from Narita Airport to where my hotel was, Keikyu-Kamata Station in Ota City, which was 10 minutes away from Haneda Airport itself, but a whopping hour and a half or so from Narita Airport. Gemini did “find” this route but was unsure if it would suddenly turn into a different express train in the last leg and make me miss my stop, so it asked me to check this once I was at a certain station just before my actual stop, whereas Google Maps itself listed the route with estimated times without any ambiguity.  I basically did what I did at the start of my trip when I was transitting between the two airports — I frontloaded the long travel onto the day I arrived by placing my hotel near my outgoing airport instead of my incoming one.

Also like before, I wanted to buy a paper ticket so that I would have a souvenir I could keep at the end of it all, but my Japanese yen was still at the bottom of my backpack. In addition, I also still had a Kokuyo Novita card book with my transit cards in it but it was buried somewhere in the 30 kg suitcase that I had, and I wanted to rescue that as well. So I moved my bags to an empty seat in a nearby corner of that holding area for confused international tourists pictured above, and rummaged around in both bags until I had retrieved both. Then I went to a ticket machine and bought the right ticket, though it gave me another anxious moment at first as it wouldn’t accept my 1,000 yen notes. I think this was because they were slightly wet due to my tears of frustration or something, but who knows for sure. In the end, the machine accepted my 5,000 yen note and spit out a bunch of change for it.

Apparently that specific “no transfer” train to my destination only came once per 40 minutes though, so I sat around for a bit and browsed through booklets and brochures, taking some for the road, before going down to the platform proper to wait for the train. I got on a train and secured a seat, then gave up my seat to an older man to cancel out my social debt from having been given a seat a couple days ago when I was about ten minutes away from my final stop.

This stop was Keikyu-Kamata Station, a stop in the Kamata area in Ota City, a southwestern ward in Tokyo. There are two train stations in the southern side of Kamata where my hotel was, the other being the one owned by the JR company, JR Kamata. JR Kamata is on the western edge of the Kamata district though, and Keikyu-Kamata, owned by Keikyu, is on the eastern edge, with the APA hotel that I am staying at right smack in the middle of the two, about a five minute brisk walk from either one. (There’s also Umeyashiki on the northeastern edge of Kamata, also part of the Keikyu line, but that one is across a river and further from the hotel.)

Arriving at Keikyu-Kamata, I was glad to see that the rain had stopped and the path was nearly fully dry, so either the rain had stopped quite a while ago or the raincloud never really got this far south. The path to my hotel also took me through a nice, covered shoutengai called Asuto Shoutengai. Known as a shopping street, or shopping arcade, shoutengais are something I love very much aesthetically.

Whee! It didn’t get me there though, only halfway there, but that also meant that if it was raining too heavily I could go that way for at least partial coverage from the rain.

I also saw a funny sign on the floor on the way to the hotel:

I think doing two of the three is okay, but definitelly do not walk, smoke, and litter at the same time, that’s definitely prohibited!

It was about 10 am when I reached the hotel and dumped down my bags. Checkin was at 3 pm, so I was still about five long hours away from that. I decided to check out the neighbourhood and wandered a little east and then all the way north, after consulting with Gemini for a nearby place to eat at. It gave me a few options but the one I picked was a family restaurant up north because of the tempting proposition that I could burn some time there just chilling after I was finished eating as well. I took my time wandering north though, stopping into convenience stores to pillage their brochure racks and admiring the local architecture as I went.

I wish there were a way to properly archive the notices on local notice boards too, but an occasional random picture is the best I can do, I guess.

There were also these blooming trees outside the place that I ended up eating at, but they’re not quite the sakura flowers that Japan are famous for. They’re a variation called kawazu-zakura that bloom earlier and have a vibrant pink hue that their much more famous cousin does not. Still very pretty though.

The family restaurant I ended up eating at was called Jonathan‘s, not to be confused with either of my former school classmates from young. It was served by a Bellabot:

But sadly, the dish I ordered after asking Gemini what the most culturally/historically/regionally interesting thing on the menu was, Kagoshima Mochibuta Pork & Steamed Spring Vegetable Set Meal + Fatty Salmon Side Dish, was too complex for a robot to bring to me, so a member of the waiting staff ended up bringing my plates on a tray to my table instead. A *human*.

This was pretty good, though at 1,869 yen ($18.95) it practically broke the bank compared to meals in China. That price also came with something else important though, which was an unlimited ticket to the drink bar.

This was apparently the actual key to spending time at a family restaurant (within reason, as long as they aren’t too busy) because once I was done with my meal, I used the ordering tablet to summon a staff member to remove my tray and bowls — family restaurants tend to have tablets for ordering that have English translations too and there was a specific English submenu option to call someone to remove the tray in this one — and after that was done I had a clean, flat table to bring out my laptop, a power socket at the side of the table to charge it with, and the ability to go sample and get as many refills as I wanted from the drinks bar as I worked on my laptop:

I quite liked their Gold Kiwi Drink.

I had been given a seat at a single person table in a corner of the restaurant, and there were two other single tables by me that were eventually filled by another girl and a guy doing the exact same thing as well — meal, then puttering away on a laptop with drinks. Being a transition day and fresh from the airport, my sling bag was heavier than normal even though I had dropped off my two larger bags at the hotel, so I didn’t really want to go anywhere else. I knew if I did that I’d just end up picking up even more paper too, teehee.

I was at Jonathan‘s until around a bit before 2:30 pm, when I noticed there were people queued up for seats and one of my silent seatmate neighbours had left too. I think most of those waiting were actual families though and wouldn’t fit at single tables anyway, but there might have been a few lone spirits in there too. I paid for my meal the same way as I did in the other family restaurant I had eaten at back in Chitose, at a practically identical machine at the front that let me skip all the points card nonsense since the tablet would not and just took my phone’s NFC credit card. Then I wandered around some more, heading back south towards the Keikyu-Kamata Station:

Upon crossing the river, I also saw a barge with excavators in it doing something weird.

Apparently it had to do with a seismic stability project the city was working on or something though.

After a few more sidetracks, I ended up back at the APA hotel at about 3:30 pm, picked up my luggage and my keycard, and headed to my room.

I’ve stayed at several APA hotels before, including one to open up this trip, and knew exactly what I was getting into here, a cosy but small room with no frills whatsoever.

It was actually slightly bigger than I thought it would be, but it had a crappy view:

But that was fine, I wasn’t here to ogle at a view and I kept the sliding things over the window closed most of the time anyway, except when I wanted a bit of air-conditioning in the room, at which point I slipped open the external window a crack and left the window slider open a crack too. The room was actually quite comfortable overall, all things considered.

I took a shower and then indulged myself in a warm bath to burn off all the grime of the past 24+ hours, before I unpacked my things and settled down into bed. The pillows were flat and terrible, and there was no unlimited water refill that I had gotten used to from my CitiGO hotel in Shanghai, nor a cute robot butler bot to fawn over, but other than that I didn’t have a major complaint. I browsed the TV looking for something interesting, but about the only thing I found was that it had smart apps that I could use, so I put on Nomakk‘s YouTube channel without logging in as he happened to be streaming at the time, and watched him play Slay the Spire 2 with some envy as I worked on sorting my papers and updating my ledger. Less than a week to go before I can game again.

The next thing I knew, evening had bloomed and I was somewhat hungry again. I ventured out of the hotel at 7:30 pm, admiring Keikyu-Kamata Station in the evening:

checking out a couple of the other local restaurants that Gemini had suggested earlier, particularly a set of three that it said had invented and popularized (local) winged gyoza (hanetsuki gyoza). I went to one in the shoutengai to start but it was full to the brim, largely with big, round tables full of business people, and the lady there said they had no room for single patrons. Oh. Well then. Gemini suggested I try the restaurant annex/overflow basement branch of the actual original store, Nihao, next, as it was only three minutes from the station (and less than that from the original restaurant itself), and although it was a weird concept to me to have a second, larger branch so close to the first one, I did go to that annex, Nihao Bekkan, and managed to secure a seat in one of the single-person booths there!

After sending Gemini a copy of part of the menu that I wanted to pick from so that it could tell me a bit about the dishes, my dinner ended up being Kanagawa Prefecture Sanma-men (local) with a side of Ganzo Hanetsuki Yaki Gyoza.

The hanetsuki gyoza looked interesting enough to warrant its own close-up picture, hah. This meal was both really good and really filling though. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

My only other mission for the evening was to secure some drinks and something for breakfast for the next morning, so I popped into a Life supermarket that was attached to a nearby building clled Asuto With.

I had forgotten how much Japan discourages photos though, often with signs plastered on the outside of a building forbidding photos within the entire building altogether. I try to avoid these stores, but this was one of those places anyway, and while I still do ignore them and take photos on occasion, I only do it sparingly and didn’t take any of note in this case.

Suffice to say that I ended up spending much more time here than I intended, for two reasons — one was a bunch of flyers at the front that I ended up plucking for my ever-burgeoning collection, and the other was that tomorrow was Vernal Equinox Day, and Gemini suggested that I try looking for some seasonal treats to complement the occasion. This took forever to find the right kanji for and I was only partially successful in the end, but whatever! The top pastry here is an ohagi/botamochi, a sweet rice ball eaten to celebrate the spring/autumn, and the bottom one here is a sakuramochi domyoji, a general spring-time glutinous rice cake with bean paste filling and wrapped in an edible and salty sakura leaf.

Blogging is hard in Japan because there’s not only so much to do, but there’s also a lot of contextual labelling work to do for my archive once I reach the hotel because there’s so much paper I collect along the way that I will very rapidly forget where they were from if I don’t write it all down. The blog is slightly suffering from that, but that’s fine — there’s only a couple days left! While I was eager to leave China and go home after spending so much time there though, I’m feeling a bit of the opposite pull now and wish my time here in Tokyo was a bit longer because there’s so many things I could visit and do still. Despite this being my 4th trip involving a visit to Tokyo. That being said, Japan is too full of paper that I want to collect and scan, so unless I move here with my scanner and all, this is far too dangerous a place to remain in for long with my current obsession for ephemera!