Lawrence Goes to Japan - Prologue

Irrashaimase! For those of you that know me I've been talking about going back to the motherland forever. I had a desire to see what real Japanese people are like. With my steady diet of anime, manga, movies, and strange variety Japanese television programming, as far as I knew, every Japanese person fought robots, wore a school girl outfits, and stole panties for fun. If this were the way it truly was in Japan, I still had to go and see it in person because that would be AWESOME.


Yes AWESOME!

A little background about myself. I am Japanese and black. My mother hails from the island of Okinawa, and my father comes from New Orleans, Louisiana. My mum did not teach me Japanese as a child, but I took many years of it at cal (atdp), lowell, and ccsf. Unfortunately, I only feel that I have the ability to communicate fairly well with small children in Japan. I have been to Japan before but I was only 3, so it doesn't really count. heh

So why have I not been to Japan? Well I can of course blame my parents for a good chunk of my life for not taking me there, but after I reached 18 I found that I was always working and spending all of my money on the expensive hobby known as cars. A friend of mine was heading over to Tokyo, and asked if I would be interested. This year I had actually attempted to save some money to go somewhere for vacation, so it seemed like as good a time as any to head to Nihon. It turned out, that after nearly 10 years of working and consumerism, I had amassed almost 40,000 points on my credit card. Which after a quick check with my credit card company, equaled a free round trip ticket to Japan. Yataa! My friend Brad was also interested in going and he doesn't really "work" for a living so his schedule was always open haha. (Yes he kinda works for blogtronix.com)

Our plan was simple. Stay about a week or so in Japan, and try and just get lost in the culture so to speak. The last week or so in November we spent time figuring out what we were going to try and do in Japan. It was decided that this would be a mostly Tokyo trip. With only a week to spend in Japan it seemed like it would be a pain in the butt to travel all over the island the size of California. So after noting down a few key places to visit like Akihabara, Harajuku, Shinjuku, Daiba, Ginza and a few others, we were ready to book the hotel.

Booking the hotel was simple enough. I also happened to have about 25,000 american express points, so I used their online hotel travel system to look for suitable hotels. I had a few requirements for living accommodations:

A) We had to have internet.

B) We had to have a tv with Japanese television.

C) We should try to stay as near to the center of Tokyo as possible.

After a bit of searching we came up with the Hotel Sunroute Plaza in Shinjuku. Its a 3 star hotel.



It had free internet, a tv, and queen sized beds.



So it would be perfect! Most of our details were set, so we were ready to go. We were due to leave for japan on Dec 7th. Ikuzo!