The trouble is that I remember very little else about Tokyo that trip. My memories are all images of Kyoto and Osaka and Kobe, and the space-warp layout of Kanazawa city. Somehow Tokyo didn't impress me as an entity the way Kyoto did. That all changed when I lived there. Tokyo was the presence and Kyoto the movie setting. But even those first glimpses of Kyoto melt into the ones eighteen months later, and even a little into a weekend trip I took in... '92? '93? I forget.
I took pictures on that trip, loads and loads of them. They disappeared in my house while I was in Japan. For years the experience of those two weeks was the hallmark of 'Japan' that I hoped to find again. And now I barely remember it at all.
(In Tokyo I'd been advised to go visit Rikugien park in Komagome. I went out the wrong exit and found myself in a maze of little shops, very shitamachi. When I worked in Komagome I occasionally went to the other side of the station but never found the same little town I'd seen in 1989. Japan was like that-- never the same as it looked the first time.)
On the other hand, this day a mere two years later I moved down to Tokyo from Fukushima, and that I remember vividly, because it was all so much more fraught and grungy and unpleasant. Beautiful and evocative is for tourists. Inhabitants see quite a different place.
