My short japanese trip started from downtown Tokyo, Ueno where my friend Seungchul lives at. He said this area is famous for lots of Korean people's living. One strange thing is I couldn't find many Korean stores around here. Only few of them could be found. Japan has biggest Korean immigrants in the world, but the unique history of immigration of Koreans makes its situation quite different from any other country. Korean peoples are spread all over Japan, now. This makes them hard to be found in Japan. We are not even distinguished from Japanese.
From when I arrived at Japan, it was rainy all day. The rainy night of Tokyo was clean but cold while I still remembered nice blue sky of Korea. Lots of people passed right hand side (Japan is left-passing country) and also lots of people smoked on the street. Heavy smokers and drunken people were crowded in the night of Tokyo. I and my friend went a traditional fish market in downtown Tokyo and we're merged into crowd over there. Fresh fish and shouting people were impressive scene on that.
Why do all the fish markets have red light? Is it good for freshness of their goods? You can also find english letters in their tag if you look at it carefully. Japan looks like more cultural diverse society than Korea. I could easily find foriegn people like westerns, Indians, Chineses and Koreans on any street of Tokyo. In other reason, this trip to Japan was not a real tour. I meant to see my grandpa but he was having trouble with his wife who's not my real grandma. The old lady was dying on bed at hospital and I couldn't have any happy feeling to travel Japan while it happened. I had to admit I couldn't help him since I couldn't even find a way back home in Japan. For that reason, I only slept one night at grandpa's home, Yokohama and returned to my friend Seungchul's house.
Near Seungchul's house, I got a chance to have the "famous" Japanese ramen. Although the restaurant was not so clean, taste of it was really good and quantity was satisfactory. I had prejudice to japanese restaurant that they always serve small food in expensive price but it's changed this time. If you want to criticize certain culture, you should dive into it deeply.The last course of this trip was Akihabara which has been famous for lots of electronics stores. Unfortunately, I got there too late and most of stores closed soon. I bought a little keychain with a functionality of discharging static electricity. Now, I regret I didn't buy more than one of it. ^^;;
During daytime Tokyo was full of bikes parked on passenger road. The actuall width of the road is enough to pass people but lots of bikes parked on one side of the road make passengers uncomfortable. In additional to this, bicycles also run through the passenger road, not the main road. It's impossible to talk with my friend while I was walking on the street since a bike rings behind me soon.Japan has the biggest car manufacture, Toyota, in the world, but the gas price in Japan is the highest all over the world. This makes paradox that the richest people in the world are not affordable to have a car and they have no choice but riding bike on the street.
