New Years Eve in Tokyo

Kendra and I spent the night at her place after letting me get to know our new cat, Barney. (aka the Barnacle, aka Fatso) I liken my first experience sleeping in a Japanese house to camping in the fall – lots of layers, kinda cold when you wake up, but ultimately nice and crisp.

We got dressed and headed out in Kendra’s car to the local shabu-shabu place via the base, and I have to say that Atsugi is the nicest Navy base I’ve ever been on, with lots of trees, greenery, buildings that don’t look like homages to faceless bureaucracy and a really nice flight line. Post tour we headed through Yamato to Don-tei, the aforementioned shabu-shabu establishment.

Shabu-shabu is a communal type of cooking – we had a pot filled with boiling water that was cooked the noodles, veggies, tofu and thinly sliced beef that we ordered, along with a skimmer to get the meat foam that accumulates during cooking. This probably sounds a bit bland, but the sesame sauce that accompanied the food was phenomenal.

We headed back to Kendra’s place after the shabu-shabu, packed and walked to the train station for the hour trip to our hotel in Tokyo. The trains here are ubiquitous – you can get pretty much to anywhere from anywhere using the train system. This also tends to make car ownership a rarity here, which in turn encourages bike ownership. I’ve never seen so many bikes in one place ever, and they all have guards for both wheels and a chain guard, in addition to lights, baskets and step-through designs. Nice!

We dropped our bags off in the hotel and stepped out into the evening in search of food, only to discover that everything shuts down early on New Years Eve. We made our way back to the Zojo-ji temple, site of the New Years Eve ceremony, where Kendra had seen some vendors hawking Japanese festival food. We both had some yakisoba noodles to satiate our appetites and I had some squid balls. The squid balls were all hand made by a local guy in batches of 100 and were delicious – I’ve got to thank Kendra for daring me to eat them, plus five balls for 500 yen isn’t half bad.

After watching some rice being pounded into mochi for a bit we were both chilly from the below freezing temperatures and wind, but there was a hotel nearby, so off we went in search of warmth and a place to sit down. It turned out that lots of other people had the same idea, so there weren’t a great deal of horizontal surfaces free, but no worries – the karaoke rooms were open and a great deal of fun. (songs covered included Never Gonna Give You Up, Bust A Move, Faith, Don’t Stop Believing, Low, Sexual Healing, et al) We’d had a bit too much fun in the booth and were almost late to the ceremony at the temple, but again it wasn’t that far away.

The way the ceremony works is the monks of the temple bless the crowd followed by a short countdown to midnight, at which time everyone with a balloon lets it go, signifying their wish for the new year. What isn’t obvious is the long line for the balloons being given out by the monks. We actually talked with an Aussie couple who got to the front of the line for balloons only to find that you needed a stamp in order to get one once ou actually got to the front of the line. We made the decision early on not to worry about the balloons, making our night much warmer and more stress-free. Indeed, even though we got to the temple grounds about 10 minutes from midnight, we still had a great vantage point from which to see the countdown, Tokyo Tower and the balloon release. It was quite a sight – think of 5000+ transparent balloons released simultaneously into a crystal clear night punctuated with a brilliant full moon. When the group of balloons got far enough away, Kendra called my attention to them again and sure enough, I got a second treat, as the mass of airborne plastic was shimmering like stars in the moonlight.

The cold and wind didn’t let up and there were no places open nearby, so we retired to our hotel room for some much-needed sleep, but not before getting some corn bread (not cornbread) and Pinos at the local convenience store.