Patrick Wayland's Blog

Listen to Jade Lady now on Amazon

Peter Kenyon adds a whole new dimension in this historical fiction mystery with his reading. Listen to Jade Lady now on Amazon.

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When Lance Roven, a programmer living in Hong Kong, is called back home to his grandfather’s deathbed, his grandfather asks Lance to handle the contents of a safe deposit box and then does something Lance can’t believe – he speaks Chinese. This sets Lance off on a trail of clues, following an old map to Taiwan where he meets Annie Lee, a museum researcher. Together, they work to uncover a secret buried for 60 years while racing against Chinese spies to find a treasure and forgotten WWII treaty that could reignite a civil war.

Bouchercon Convention 2018

Talking about my novel Deadman Bay at the meet the author breakfast at Bouchercon 2018 in Saint Petersburg, Florida.

Met a lot of lovers of mystery novels at one of the world’s largest crime fiction conventions, and learned a lot from the many panels talking about experiences from publishers and writers like Michael Connelly, Ian Rankin, and Lawrence Block.

Puppet Show for the Gods

An old blue truck arrives about four o’clock and parks in front of the tu di gong or village shrine. The shrine is one of ten thousand that populate every neighborhood in Taiwan. This one is located on the side of an auto repair shop’s parking lot. Like most shrines there is a furnace for burning ‘god money’, a sink for washing hands, an offering table, and some benches for sitting.

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A news board has posters tacked to it advertising the puppet show, but no one has showed up. The blue truck is placed directly in front of where the god statue sits in his cubby overlooking the offered food, which include oranges, apples, bananas, cookies, small packages of hard candy. The foods are selected based on what they represent. This association is derived from the sound of the foods name. For instance, ‘apple’ in Chinese, ping gwo, sounds like ‘peace’, ping an.

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A middle-aged couple begins setting up, opening the back of the truck to reveal the stage and hand-drawn side boards. There’s an ancient outdoor speaker attached to the front of the truck. About four-thirty music starts blaring out of this trashcan-sized funnel and the show begins.

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There is no one watching, but from the back of the truck the couple is moving around vigorously, grabbing various puppets, turning pages on the program, changing background screens. The recorded music and voices can be heard from half-a-mile away. The first half of the show consists of a few famous stories and continues until intermission, which is about six o’clock. It’s then that I walk behind the truck and start asking the couple questions. The husband walks away to smoke a cigarette and relax, but the wife still has energy after their aerobic workout to chat.

Her name is Shu-fang Xu, and she’s a lively person, speaking enthusiastically about what she does.  Shu-fang tells me they inherited the business from her father-in-law, who started puppeteering in 1967. This form of glove-puppet show has been popular in Taiwan and the China’s Fujian province since the mid-17th century. There is still a nationally-broadcasted TV show being produced with elaborate stories and sets that might be described as half Italian opera, half Japanese-style anime.

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The stories are mostly from history, but there’s a good heaping of legend and mythology tossed in. They have over a hundred different puppets in the truck. The characters include numerous Shao Lin kung fu heroes, Bao Gon the incorruptible judge, and the Monkey King from ‘Journey to the West’. The puppets are hand-made with elaborate clothing and detailed faces painted on. You can see they’re old, but well maintained.

Shu-fang says the public is welcomed to watch the show, but the show has been put on for the temple god, to celebrate his birthday. Twenty years earlier, the neighborhood children would gather and sit around to watch. But like so many things this form of entertainment has been superseded by six-second Youtube videos and Nintendo game systems and oh-I-can’t-even-name-what-kids-do-now.

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Technology has taken over, even in the puppet show. The music used to be from a three or four-person orchestra, the voices used to be from puppet masters. But now that’s all prerecorded. Shu-fang and her husband get paid 6000 Taiwan dollars ($200 US) per four-hour show. With an orchestra it would cost about 20,000 Taiwan dollars. Puppet masters are becoming rare. It’s not a great career choice and has become more an act of devotion than anything else. The shows are paid for by patrons of the shrine seeking favor from the neighborhood god.

Shu-fang shows me the book with the script. It’s one part that hasn’t been digitalized, but I worry about how long this form of puppet show can go on. At six-thirty the second half of the show begins. It will continue for two more hours. Occasionally someone from the area will stop by, give a couple bows of prayers, and light a few joss sticks. Usually it’s an old person. They might watch the show for a few minutes before continuing on their way.

A while later I leave and start walking up the street. I can still hear the horns and gongs and dramatic voices clearly from a block away. I hope at some point Shu-fang and her husband put on a show for children. It seems like a waste not to. And I hope their puppet shows continue, even if no one watches.

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The Shell Factory and Nature Park

When one sees Shell Factory and Nature Park’s midcentury-style signage along the old highway, one might mistake it for a cheesy, run-down tourist trap. But one would not be mistaken.

Located just north of Fort Myers, Florida, on US Route 41, Shell Factory is a hodgepodge of food stalls, history and animal exhibits, and shopping. Without rhyme or reason, the park’s only theme might be described as “Florida” – except that some of the displays have nothing to do with “Florida”, such as the Christmas store and African taxidermy collection.

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68,000-square-foot warehouse store

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Mother monkeys wearing glasses. Why?

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A pirate with African animals. Why?

The wife and I find a parking space in a large lot with about ten cars. We enter near a neglected putt-putt coarse overgrown with weeds.

There’s a small artificial lake on the right with turtles and koi. On the left is a line of unused paddle boats. It’s Saturday and the area looks deserted. Along the boardwalk are bubblegum machines with fish food. I put a quarter in one, turn the knob, and collect a palmful of pellets that smell like dogfood. I toss a pellet into the water, and watch a turtle turning to get it. A koi quickly emerges from the dark depths to swallow the food. The more I look around, the more turtles I see. There are hundreds of them.

We move off to the main area, where there’s a bar and restaurant, food stalls, and carnival games. Most of the visitors are in the bar, listening to live music from a three-man band covering pop rock tunes.

We cross a courtyard and enter the 68,000-square-foot warehouse store, where there’s the usual made-in-China tchotchkes – magnets, T-shirts, cups, picture frames, post cards, and toys. But then there’s a lot of what the place was named for – seashells.

There’s a museum of most every type of seashell in the world. Starfish, conch, horn snail, angel wing, cone, sand dollar. There are shelves of seashells one can purchase individually, or in a grab bag if one is lazy. There’s a golf cart and lady’s dress covered with sea shells. There’s a four-foot high model church made of seashells. There are seashell ashtrays, sea shell mugs, and seashell dishes.

Fleeing from the shells,  I run into the main shop to browse. I notice the store is massive, yet as I survey it, I count only eight or nine people browsing the long isles. The place is past its prime – why?

To truly understand Shell Factory’s current state, one must understand the history of US Route 41. Construction begun in 1926 on this north-south highway, which starts in Copper Harbor, Michigan, and trails down through Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Georgia. The highway enters Florida near Lake City and runs along the west coast to Naples. There it turns east and brushes by Everglades National Park in a stretch of road nicknamed “Alligator Alley”. (And those aren’t road bumps you’re hitting on “alligator Alley”)

In the 1950s and 1960s America perfected three vital things to who we are today: disposable income, reliable cars, and vacation time. Americans fell in love with driving, and driving far. Soon, US-41 was siphoning holidaymakers from all over the northeast United States and down to sunny, snow-free south Florida with its beaches and palm trees.

In the 1960’s the average highway speed was about 55MPH. Along with this relatively slow speed, there were traffic lights at every intersection. A family could take a week to go from Chicago to Miami. By the time their overloaded station wagon reached Florida, they were eager for some local wonders. In a desert of motels and gas stations, Shell Factory was an oasis for tourist thirsty to experience “Florida”.

Forty years ago, Shell Factory was a thriving park, raking carloads of tourist off the highway. But American’s weren’t satisfied with 55MPH. Soon came the stoplight-free freeway, and, unfortunately, the death of the American highway experience.

The particular freeway that murdered US-41 was Interstate 75. I-75 stretches from Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, to Miami, Florida. It is 1,786 miles of top-grade pavement. If you were to drive a car 70MPH – the average speed limit – from one end to the other of I-75, it would take you 25.5 hours. You can drive down the length of Florida in less than 7 hours.

I find another room attached to the main store. It’s the taxidermy display, where dozens of stuffed animals stand or are hung behind a fence. Lions, impala, Zebra, boar, buffalo. My wife does not want to enter this room, telling me she has a bad feeling about it. Later, she tells me she did not know the animals were real.

Even though the wildlife is beyond my reach, there is a sign that reads: “Oils from our skin will damage these magnificent animals. Please do not touch.” The wildlife collection was donated in 2008 by a local who hunted the animals in Zimbabwe.

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The shell-covered golf cart with a flat tire

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A room with a lot of shells — NO! IT’S A SHELL MUSEUM!

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The tightly themed African taxidermy collection… and John Wayne… and a two-headed llama

The next room holds a pirate scene. One pirate sits next to a treasure chest, the next pirate is inside a cage, and the next one is a sexy pirate lady. There’s even a skeleton pirate just in case we left that off the list. A console with twelve buttons lets visitors listen to recorded stories about pirates – historic or made-up, who cares. I spend a minute listening to the first story, which is about the Shell Factory Hotel being haunted by the ghost of a pirate. Then it suggests I should stay in that room and check it out. On the wall is an array of pirate toys. One thing Shell Factory does well is pushing the merchandise.

A mother and her young son walk in while I’m in the room. They are speaking Spanish. I can’t understand what they are saying, but it appears the boy wants to leave the pirate room, while the mother wants him to stay and look around.

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Confused tourists in the pirate room

Next came an eerie room dedicated to the Kennedy assassination. A video plays a loop of some senator’s speech about the JFK Investigation, but the volume is too low to hear – thank goodness. Tactfully displayed below the TV, JFK memorabilia is on sale.

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No Florida theme park is complete without a JFK assassination room

Finally, there’s the Christmas store. No need to wait till December. Now you can get all that cutesy, gaudy merchandise all year round.

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Boss: “Selling Christmas stuff year round isn’t enough.” Employee: “I got it. Upside-down Christmas trees!”

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Wall painting near men’s restroom  

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Ostrich in cage hanging from ceiling. Why?

When we walked out of the Shell Factory and Nature Park, I felt I could no longer say it was a cheap tourist trap. Shell Factory goes beyond that and reaches another plane. It has turned the cheesy attraction volume up to eleven. It has made passé kitsch into something genuine, something historic. It is doing with spectacle what Disney and Las Vegas can never imitate because it takes too long, requires too much patience to find all that crap – and the marketing directors would never allow it. It has taken ideas that are so out-of-date glitzy that they have come back around to being unique, fresh, and, dare I say, cool.

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Shell Factory main sign damaged after hurricane Irma

Sleepless in Tokyo

 

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Three Bar Entrances on a Golden Gai Street

Tokyo people are known for being hard workers. They get to work early, before the boss arrives, and stay late, until after the boss leaves. This often means ten, eleven, twelve-hour days. Almost as a counterweight to this characteristic is how gregarious they are when it’s time to clock-out and they head for the bars. You can see how hard they play on the trains late at night. At eleven o’clock on most weekdays the mass transit system is packed, shoulder-to-shoulder, with office workers in their black suits and black dresses gripping handholds, sleepy, drunk, and a little more disheveled than when they started the day.

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Vending machine for cat scarves

There are pockets of festivity in the train station at midnight as the wife and I make our way to our destination. We pass a group of businessmen celebrating, tossing one of their coworkers into the air like a football team lifting their winning quarterback.

 

 

We take the Yamanote line to Shinjuku Station and then walk five minutes to the Golden Gai neighborhood. What is Golden Gai? A bar hoppers paradise, a home for lonely hearts, and a great place to spend an overnight layover from Narita Airport. Sort of the Japanese version of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, Golden Gai is the all-night “tiny bar street”, made up of 280 individual bars packed inside a few narrow lanes.

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A Golden Gai Alley

How do they pack that many bars into a city block? As you can imagine, each bar is pretty small. The average bar is the size of a thin bedroom with five or six stools facing a countertop, bartender, and shelves of liquor. The walls are usually decked out with Christmas lights, beer posters, and various chachkies.

The Japanese like intimate settings, and many come to Golden Gai for a drink and chat with their favorite bartender. It’s customary to buy your server a drink for long sessions. About half the bars charge tourist and US military personnel a cover to try to keep out the many loud, lightweight, young foreigners who treat the area like a Spring Break bash.

Most of the bars have emptied out by 1:00AM Thursday. We find an empty place with a welcoming bartender, who says her name is “Eddie” (spelled Eri). Eddie speaks minimal English but understands “rum and coke”. She says she doesn’t own the bar – of course she works for someone who can afford slice of property in the middle of Tokyo. Eddie goes to sleep at 9:00AM and wakes up at 4:00PM and only works part-time.

A few minutes after starting on our drinks, a couple enters and take up seats. The woman asked where we’re from. Her name is Yuri and the man she is with, Yoh, is her boss. They are physicians who work the graveyard shift at a burn treatment center. Yuri is the more outgoing of the two, perhaps because she speaks English better or perhaps it’s that old tradition in Japan of subordinates being able to take control after work. While Yoh sits quietly by, Yuri tells us about her job, all the places she’s traveled, and how she likes studying languages. She’s obviously very talented and has a rare outgoing confidence.

One thing I notice is that we’re on our third drink after a time, while Yuri and Yoh are still nursing their first one. They know moderation. After an hour of casual conversation, Yuri and Yoh head out. About an hour later we leave to find a taxi.

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Trash bins full of proof that Tokyo people like to have a good time 

 

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Sashimi Breakfast

At 4:00AM we make our way to the Tsukiji fish market, an area of butcheries, cutleries, sushi and noodle stalls. Tsukiji is the world’s biggest fish market, it’s been around since the Edo Period, and it’s experiencing changing times. The city wants to move the market to a new location. Foreigners can no longer watch the live auctions, where Bluefin tuna are sold for tens of thousands of dollars. But most of the shops are still here and tourist still get up early to watch the activity and try a bowl of fresh sashimi.

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8:00AM Train Ride Back to Work 

Cambodia: Old and New

Forget everything you think you know about Cambodia. Vietnam War collateral, the “Killing Fields” genocide, a 3rd-world country of jungle and swamp. Cambodia is the place Captain Willard took a patrol boat upriver to hunt for the mad Colonel Kurtz in the 1979 movie Apocalypse Now. These were the images of the place I had in my head, but what I discovered was unexpected.

Most people know the country as the land where Angelina Jolie made the action flick Tomb Raider set around the ruins of Angkor Wat. And seeing the 1000-year old temples is one of the best reasons to visit Cambodia. The ruins located in Siem Reap pull in about a million visitors a year. You can spend a few days looking over stone carvings telling the tale of one of the world’s great civilizations and strolling through the ancient walls gripped by roots of “octopus” trees. Long ago reclaimed by the jungle, the time-worn structures look more like something of nature than something man-made.

For $30 the wife and I hire a car for the day to take us around. Everyone wants US cash. We could have hired a tuk-tuk, or motorcycle-powered carriage, but we need a/c. Even in September the thick jungle heat is like carrying around 30lbs of extra weight. Our drivers name is Trah and he starts telling us about Cambodian history as we head into a jungle with trees that towers over us.

Trah says there might have been 8 million people in the Khmer Empire at its peak. This is hard to imagine given how swampy the area is. But the Khmers were experts with water. The Angkor Wat temple has a giant moat or lake surrounding it. This looks like it was for defensive purposes, but it’s actually to keep the water-level stable so the temple doesn’t sink into the soft earth.

An “Octopus” Tree

After buying tourist tickets ($20 a person), Trah complains about the government. Somewhere in the capital there are protests underway against Cambodia’s prime minister. I had read about it in a newspaper in our hotel lobby. When Trah says the prime minister is corrupt, I laugh and say it sounds like every other country.

Trah parks the car across from a line of tent shops. We pass silk dresses and post cards and coconut bowls inlayed with mother of pearl. At the main temple entrance a guard asks to see our tickets. We spend a good two hours walking around the main complex.

As we’re leaving I ask Trah about himself. He says he’s thirty, married, has one son, owns one cow. The car he drives is rented. He says the reason he can’t afford his own car is because he doesn’t own land. He says there are many poor people that the taxes should be helping.

I think his attitude is interesting. I’ve seen poor countries, really poor with institutionalized poverty that’s all but inescapable. In these places the poor don’t talk like Trah, they don’t complain, they just try to get what they can.

Cambodia is a constitutional democracy and I think it’s a healthy sign when people can complain about the government. Recently they started experimenting with capitalism and free markets. They’ve opened up with liberal regulations for investors. Looking around the streets, you see the results. The children playing around their family’s snack cart all look healthy. The roads are filled with new cars – Toyota, Ford, Lexus. There are construction cranes working. Yes, you see poor people, but you also see something else – a middle class. This makes me think that Cambodia is on its way up.

In Siem Reap, you can get a 4 or 5-star hotel for $80/night. At our hotel, there’s a pool and spa and free breakfast. The hotel has meeting rooms and I walk past one being used. Inside are about fifty well-dressed business people learning about FX, or foreign exchange trading – advanced banking.

Later, at the hotel bar we meet Chamrouk. He’s been working at the hotel for five years and recently switched over from working in the kitchen. He’s only been a bartender for two months and uses a notebook for making mixed drinks. Chamrouk says that 70% of Cambodians work in agriculture, which was where America was back in the 1840’s.

The bartender and his drink notes

I ask Chamrouk where most of the tourist come from. He says China, Korea, Japan, Australia. His hotel is doing well. They have a yearly employee party with giveaways. Chamrouk is happy to say he won some money at the last one.

The next day, while walking around, I buy a magnet off a young boy selling to the tourists. I negotiate a lower price and the young boy complains, stomping his feet and whining, playfully overacting in his salesmanship. If he was desperate for money, he would take my lower price, but he’s not.

The Mekong River flowing past Phnom Penh

Cambodia is not just some old idea of Indochina. There’s change in the air. The friendly people are not looking to just survive, they’re looking to thrive. The country feels like it’s in the process of shifting into a higher gear of economics and freedom, which makes it a great time to go there and see the history as well as get introduced to the people.

Blue Starfish and Magellan’s Cross

Hidden away in the Central Visayas region of the Philippines, about 300 miles from the warring southern province of Lanao Del Sur, is the beach resort gem of Cebu. The island is skirted by hotels and dive shops and bars catering to tourist from Australia, Korea, the US, and any other place where people don’t mind the long flight to Manila.

After the wife and I land, we’re quickly ushered into a cab and sent on our way. It’s a 20-minute ride around a barely paved road and through neighborhoods in battle against jungle. The jungle is winning. I see men with machetes, like soldiers with rifles, walking around hacking, always hacking at the vines and weeds and branches that regenerate overnight. After passing a fields with a large ox and half a dozen goats and half a dozen barefoot children, we enter our gated resort. It’s nice—very nice. It’s got its own section of the beach, a guard—who opens our taxi door—and a big swimming pool. Why do hotels next to the beach always have swimming pools?

It’s easy to settle in. After a single day, we discover that the food is good. A lot of satay, or skewered bits of meat drowned in sauce and barbecues. The drinks are cheap. The Philippines is home of San Miguel, which everyone knows – who hasn’t had a Negra Modelo when they’re 2-for-1 at Happy Hour? At the pool, I order a custom fruit drink from a cart. A girl drops watermelon, pineapple, orange, banana bits into a blender. Then she pours that into a cocktail glass garnished with a slice of orange and drink umbrella.

Cat chilling out on an old castle rampart in Cebu

During a stroll, we walk out along a cement jetty that marks the resort’s beach boundary and meet a fifty-year-old man who rents out boats. He’s rail-thin but muscular, his skin dark and sun-dried. He’s not allowed on the hotel property, so all he does is sit there all day and offer his services to any hotel guests that walk over. He gives me his name in broken English and I immediately forget it, so I just call him Johnny. But he remembers my name.

The next day when Johnny sees me across the beach, he calls out to me. “Patrick! Patrick! Patrick!” Beckoning me over. I wave and turn away. “Patrick! Patrick!” I move to hide behind a tree. “Patrick! Patrick! Patrick!” I move around the building to get away. At the pool, I sit under the shade of a coconut palm and order another fruit drink. I feel pampered and comfortable. But being comfortable makes me feel uncomfortable. I need to venture out beyond the imperial city walls of our resort.

Cebu’s most famous landmark is the Basilica Minore del Santo Niño and Magellan’s Cross. A cross was erected by Portuguese and Spanish explorers, under the order or Ferdinand Magellan in 1521, and it is said to be inside the one on display in the chapel next to the basilica. We spend a while strolling around the church, crowded with tourist taking photos and worshipers lighting votive candles. We see many monuments dedicated to Magellan, one of the world’s greatest explorers, the first to sail around the world, who landed right here.

 

 

 

We stray farther into the city and are passed by numerous jeepneys. The colorful, over-decorated buses look more like Mardi Gras floats than public transportation. Finally, we spot a small restaurant, nothing but a cement shell of a house. I feel confident few tourists have gone into it, so we find seats inside and order. We eat rice steamed inside banana leaves and a fried chicken seasoned in garlic and salt. It’s simple, but fantastically delicious.

A jeepney 

Afterwards, we return to our hotel and I soon hear that familiar call. “Patrick! Patrick!” Johnny is relentless. “Patrick! Patrick!” I give up and walk over to the man. I pay him $20 US to rent one of his banca boats. The price is for the rest of the day and includes three crew members. We pay $5 extra for snorkeling gear. With two pontoons off the sides, the boat is very stable, but the motor is old and putters away. At times, it dies out and needs to be given a little kick to get going again.

The short ride across the bay brings us to an area of calm, glass-clear water about twenty feet deep. There’s brain corral on the floor below and plenty of tropical fish. But there’s also the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen. Blue starfish. They are blue like a crayon and everywhere. Johnny’s son dives down and brings one up for us to examine. It’s skin looks like plastic and it looks like a toy.

During the return ride, I ask Johnny about his family history. I’m wondering how many people might be descended from that great explorer, Magellan. Johnny says his people fought the Portuguese and won. He smiles proudly. His people killed Magellan. This stops me for a few moments, I hadn’t thought of that point of view. To the indigenous it was an invasion. By making this statement, Johnny was reminding me that there was an equally great force on the island. And by doing battle, the natives had elevated themselves and captured a part of the legendary history. Magellan’s death was glorious, a Hollywood ending, that—over time—added honor to all involved.

Magellan’s Hollywood Movie Death

Recognizing the captain, so many turned upon him that they knocked his helmet off his head twice… A native hurled a bamboo spear into the captain’s face, but the latter immediately killed him with his lance, which he left in the native’s body. Then, trying to lay hand on sword, he could draw it out but halfway, because he had been wounded in the arm with a bamboo spear. When the natives saw that, they all hurled themselves upon him. One of them wounded him on the left leg with a large cutlass, which resembles a scimitar, only being larger. That caused the captain to fall face downward, when immediately they rushed upon him with iron and bamboo spears and with their cutlasses, until they killed our mirror, our light, our comfort, and our true guide.(Wikipedia)

The last night in Cebu, we eat at the resort’s restaurant. It’s a big cabana with stone tile floors. There’s a small band playing music. It’s late in the season so we are only one of two couples eating there. After supper, the band starts playing Salsa music. I pull my wife out of her chair to dance. Immediately, two waiters rush over to pull the table out of our way. You know you’re in a good country when people are quick to make room for dancing.

A local band playing during dinner

The Jade Lady Reviewed by Bookish Asia

“…a well-written, engaging spy thriller.”

You can read the review here.

To go into some history about the book cover for Jade Lady… I had this vision about what I wanted for that cover and couldn’t find anything on the web — or didn’t want to buy anything. So I went to the Taipei main library. For several hours I looked through their map section and finally found a city map from 1950. I made a big color photocopy of that, scanned the paper into the computer, and then applied some graphic effects. But the cover is made from an authentic map from one of the time periods I tried to capture in the story.

Taipei Times reviews Deadman Bay

…it gets more and more gripping, so that by the end I was reluctant to put the book down.

In ‘Deadman Bay,’ a man gives up the prospect of a big city career and moves to a tropical island. But his idyllic life changes when he discovers a dead body, strangled with fishing line.

Taipei Times Book Review

 

 

 

Tokyo Big

Tokyo is massive, big, huge, the most populous city in the world. It would take Godzilla an entire year to step on every part of it. They need a new word to describe such a place. We have village, town, and city, but we need something new to describe a continent of cement and glass.

Big Tokyo

The wife and I stayed at a hotel outside of Tokyo, on the other side of Tokyo Disney, on the east side of Tokyo Bay in the mostly business district of Chiba.  I had planned this because I needed to see a Japanese baseball game, and the Chiba Marine stadium was right next to our hotel. The city was merely a 40-minute train ride away and every time it stopped at Disneyland, we got to hear “It’s a Small World” play to remind the passengers that they were at the Tokyo Disney  – in case the Mickey Mouse wallpaper and Cinderella Castle don’t clue them in.

I was told to never take a taxi in Tokyo. I took a taxi.

The first day – planning to see a game that night – we stayed close to the hotel and went to the tiny town of Sakura. And here’s a secret, Sakura has a great museum with a vast complex covering prehistoric times to modern life.  You could spend 16 hours walking it, but we ran through it in 2 to get back. As we waited for a bus, I made an important discovery. Japan has huge cats. I’m not talking about tigers, I’m talking about regular Felis catus. Around the bus stop there were about 6 of these really fat cats, 30-pound monsters – I’ll call them sumo cats. They were feral but  not afraid of people. I was afraid to get close to them because of the look they gave me. You know that look you get when you walk into a Psychotic Angels’ biker bar and twenty guys with tattoos and scars on their faces turn to see who has dared walk through the door?  One of these sumo cats actually walked into the lane and laid down in the middle of the street. Cars drove around him – that’s how big he was.

Paintings at the National Museum in Sakura

The bus returned us to the train station, and were happily on our way back until we saw that we were lost. Following the Tokyo area train map is like trying to follow a single noodle on a plate of spaghetti if it was written in a foreign language.  There are 9 main lines containing 142 unique stations!  And most maps do not show English. It was getting late and it was almost time for the first pitch, so I needed to find another way to get back. Tokyo taxis are expensive.  I was told to never take a taxi in Tokyo. I took a taxi.

I had a credit card, of course, but didn’t think the taxi could accept it. With about $100 worth of yen in my pocket I watched the taxi meter tick up. $20, $30, $40… The stadium wasn’t in sight, and the higher the fare, the more my imagination worked. What happened to people who couldn’t pay their bills in Japan? Were they fed to the cats? How did one say in Japanese “Please drop us off on the side of this freeway overpass.” Luckily, we made it to the stadium and I had some cash leftover.

The Japanese sword museum contained no English.

The next day we took the train into the heart of Tokyo.  I had seen an advertisement about a sword museum and said to myself, and I quote, “Totally awesome!”  Inside the sword museum, there were a few dozen swords inside glass cases. They were of various sizes and curves, and most were without handles. Next to each sword was a card with its fascinating history, but unfortunately this fascinating history was all written in Japanese, so walking around the sword museum was like walking down the plumbing aisle of a hardware store. The Japanese sword museum contained no English. It was then that I realized that the Japanese don’t care about speaking English. We had seen this over and over. When we tried to rent bikes – no English. When we ordered food – no one knew English. But then why do the Japanese need to learn English when they have robots? Foreigners only learn English because they need to do business with the USA. Once you have robots, you are more advanced and no longer need America. What’s that – America’s got a new web app? Japan has robots. We got a new smart phone? Err, Japan’s got robots. Have you seen the new episode of The Walking Dead? Hello, Japan has robots!

Getting naked makes me feel uncomfortable, so I had to visit the public baths. Here’s how a public bath works in Japan. You enter a private area for men or women only, take off all your clothes, scrub yourself clean at a personal wash station, and finally enter a hot tub. If you’re a prudish American, you hold your towel over your privates while walking around and run away from anyone who approaches you in the hot tub like you’re playing a game of swimming pool Marco Polo. And keep your eyes down so you don’t accidentally see something you don’t want to see.

On our last day in Tokyo we walked around one central area, finding many things to see. We ate good fish, went up to a free skyscraper observatory and spotted Mount Fuji, and watched dancers practicing in the street. Tokyo really is too big to see in one visit. Along with millions of people are millions of sights. Just like sushi, you have to take it in one flavorful, bite-sized piece at a time.

Pachinko Parlor in Tokyo