(Continued from Journal 2011: Day 4, Return to Takaosan)

Yeah, the Shonan Shinjuku line to Kamakura and/or Ofuna isn’t running again today. AND the Enoden wasn’t running. Return trip to Enoshima was ruled out for today. There’s always tomorrow, right?

It was time to get on the Yamanote line for Hamamatsucho station.  I read it was running, mostly.  The amount of people outside the station and around the intersection seemed fairly normal for a weekday about 10am.  No problem, right? Right?

We get to the platform.  If my jaw hitting the floor could make a sound, it would have made it.  There was barely room to squeeze by all the people waiting on the green-striped trains.  One pulled up to the platform, packed, and I mean packed.  All those pictures you see of the platform workers pushing people into the doors?  Yeah, they were doing it.

A quick conversation went something like this.  “Are we sure we want to do this?” “Well, we’re here, and the trains are at least running…. so… yeah, I guess.”

Usually walking to the end of the platform away from the stairs proves to get you into a car with slightly less people on it, but not today.  The line to get on wasn’t nearly as bad, but once we got on, it was sardine-central.  I really felt bad for the kids at this point, since all they could see was the back of the person directly (and I mean directly) in front of them.  We all turned into theoretical particles, as new people would get on, people would get off, and eventually we got more-or-less shoved into a seat.  I guess that’s something.

Watching the normal crowd deal with this was interesting.  You could tell most of them were more than slightly annoyed by this, but they knew there was nothing at all they could do about it.  Most of them were dressed for work, and were obviously late, and annoyed by that as well.  All we could do was hang on to the kids and shrug and smile… at least we don’t have to deal with this on a daily basis.  But they can say they got to experience rush hour on the Yamanote!  I would have gotten photos of this ordeal, but it was a challenge just to not run into people, let alone try and fish the camera out of its bag and shoot over the top of everyone.

For some reason the stops along the way were much longer than usual as well.  I guess since there weren’t as many trains running they could take their time and try to shove more people in.  But thankfully, we arrived at Hamamatsucho in one piece, if a little thinner, and maybe a little more claustrophobic.

First stop, Shibarikyu park.  Since we really didn’t get a chance to take in Hamarikyu the other day, we figured we’d take a leisurely stroll around this park.  If nothing else it’d be nice contrast to the last fifteen minutes on that train.  And we were not disappointed.

The plums here were in bloom as well, and we were basically the only ones there.  Another foreign family arrived shortly after we did, but took the alternate route around the park.  There were a couple of (probably) regulars there feeding the birds and such.

It’s a smallish park, even by Tokyo standards.  Hamarikyu and for sure Yoyogi and Shinjuku’s are much larger, but it works out well.  You could see the now-bent top of Tokyo Tower just over the buildings.  The shinkansen (I think) was running on the tracks adjacent, which was a very good sight to see.

Once we made the rounds there, it was time to cross the street to, where else, Pokemon Center Tokyo. For whatever reason, the kids are Pokemon junkies, so this was an absolute requirement on this trip.  We’d visited the last time, but we had to do it again.  They’d moved some stuff around inside, but it was essentially the same.  I was actually surprised that the kids didn’t try to come out of there with more.  We’d brought more stuff home last time!  But, we sort of mentioned that, yeah, the trains would probably be the same going home and you probably didn’t want to be carrying tons of stuff… and it all has to make it back home somehow…. I guess it sunk in.

So once complete, we took a deep breath, said “let’s do this” and headed back to the station.  Yeah, it was the same.  Maybe a little worse this time.  For being close to 3pm especially.  But what are you going to do, right?

Lunch/Dinner was at a Tonkatsu place in the Mark City mall.  There were still a lot of places that just weren’t open, and frankly we didn’t feel like futzing around trying to find something.  So there it is.  It wasn’t bad, really pretty good considering what passes for tonkatsu back home.

From there we took a walk around an alternate route home.  I’d hoped to catch a glimpse of one of the new “no glasses” 3D televisions from Toshiba, but guess what?  The electronics store had all of the TV’s, and pretty much everything else switched off to conserve electricity.  It was like, “hey! electronics store! lets go… check it… out…. (pause)  what? (pause, think) Oh, yeah.”  Kind of a letdown, but one of those things I hadn’t considered.

Later that evening, we trekked back to the station to try and find the counter to exchange our orders for our rail passes.  The only counter we found was closed, when it shouldn’t have been.  Of course if we’d been looking in the right place (big eyeroll) we would have found it.  But that’s a tale for tomorrow.

Next:  The Day of Nothing.

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