Twenty-two hours and several nude scenes later...

I made it. I am currently sitting in a box room at a nevertheless very friendly backpackers' place, New Koyo.

My travels began at 4.20 am - see me cheerfully posing by the car in which I was chauffeur driven to the airport. Things don't end quite so grandly - no post-travel photo is being published.

Check in went without mishaps (I was not searched for drugs for once...) although one lady did hold up the queue by trying to take several pots of yoghurt through the "no-liquids" zone. It made me wonder though, at what point does something stop being liquid enough to count? Yoghurt is fairly gloopy but if you had ice cubes....?

Aboard my flight, I heard two Japanese girls next to me converse in English with the air hostess. Being eager and keen, I spotted an interview opportunity which was sadly not carried through for two reasons:
1) I heard you're not supposed to blow your nose in public in Japan and just sniff....but my nose refuses to obey so I had to do some swift furtive actions. I suddenly noticed that one of the girls had moved away completely and the other was asleep with her eye mask on...over her mouth. Am I paranoid?!!
2) I chose to watch "Babel" as it was recommended as a film for good shots of Tokyo. It also had a mute-deaf sex-crazed nympho Japanese schoolgirl who spent a large proportion of the film graphically exposing her nether regions...I don't think this particularly made a good impression to the two potential interviewees. To dig the hole deeper, the second film I chose to watch also had particularly prolonged sex scenes that made me squirm in embarrassment as my subconscious projected disapproving eyes onto the back of my scalp.

But to move on to Japan itself - the glimpses I got from the window of the Narita Airport to Ueno connection have been superb. It's so green! Far much more than I imagined, although I appreciate it's August. The next thing that struck me were the overall ramshackled style of the clusters of dwellings. No space is wasted. Buildings lean together and stretch apart in ways that don't look physically possible. Even if the gap is about foot wide between one house and the next, you can guarantee that they'll be some green plant bursting it's way upwards and making its presence felt.

Surveying the crazily packed structures and their elegant curved roofs, and even the maze of thick wires connecting them, I fell instantly in love. It also possibly had something to do with the sleepy Buddha lying outside a graveyard. For me, it's real life anime. I know it's early days but watch out for my emerging inner Japanophile....

However, it's nap time for me now and I'll update after my undecided adventures of this afternoon.