Gazing on the Ginza

I am amazed to find myself in Tokyo, courtesy of a press junket sponsored by the Chinese and Japanese national tourism offices. It just fell into my lap, thanks to Joe Kula, travel editor of The Province newspaper in Vancouver. I took early retirement from the paper at the end of the year to see what might open up for me as I turned 60. And here I am, wrapped in a yukata (light cotton summer kimono) and gazing out of my 25th-floor Imperial Hotel room on the Ginza shopping and entertainment district.

I arrived last Friday in time to celebrate Shabbat with my daughter Lisa, who is living and working in Chiba outside of Tokyo. She supplied the candles, and I brought a little bottle of red wine from the plane along with two mini challah from Sabra in Vancouver. I had feared it might be a year or more before I saw Lisa again after we said goodbye in Kiev in May at the end of our adventure on the Klezmer Heritage Cruise. (See my stories from that trip below and our pictures here.)

In the time we've had together this past week, we've marvelled at Chiba's annual fireworks display, enjoyed a symphony of eggplant dishes with Lisa's colleagues and families at a potluck, cheered at a Chiba Lotte Marines baseball game with its unique "kegs on legs" beer sellers, dined with Lisa's mother and old friends, sampled many treats from sashimi to okonomiyaki, and escaped the heat and humidity at an air-conditioned screening of Transformers, where we seemed to be the only ones getting many of the jokes.