We took off on Monday at about 11.30 in the morning. They fed us, turned off all the lights and pretended it was a night flight. 12 hours, 2 movies, half a book and countless failed sleep attempts later, we arrived in Tokyo at 7.30am Tuesday morning, local time. Fresh as… someone who hadn’t slept at all but was then very ready. But we’d purposely arranged a tour to orient(ate) ourselves. And book the bullet trains that we are going to need. You need help. I need help. All I can get.

I don’t want sympathy. I really don’t. Japan, according to everyone’s ‘bucket list’ is number one. Everyone I spoke to in the last couple weeks anyway. And I’m here. And its very Japanese. Busy, chaotic, but in so many ways very organised. The tube trains have millions of passengers every day, yet you always get a seat. And they’re air conditioned. We arrived at the airport and spent 25 minutes in a taxi getting into town. On a freeway, completely empty and free-flowing. The first time we actually came to a stop was at our hotel. And that was in the morning ‘rush hour’ in which an estimated 20 million bods commute into the city. And on the streets, they are all there. Them and the 17 million who live in central Tokyo. But I counted them and reached 37 million very easily. Possibly more.

When we finally got to bed on Monday night, it was about 7. We crashed. And slept through til 8 the next morning. With just a few toilet stops and odd jet-lag moments. One of which, at about 4.30am, made me look at my phone. Spurs 1-nil down. Hmmmm. Do I want to try and find it on tv? If we had been 1-0 up maybe. But 1-0 down I went back to sleep.

We went to the fish market. What a place. Or a plaice? Though in fact you don’t get plaice there. Mainly tuna, crabs, shellfish, salmon and lots of odd bits and creatures that you just don’t recognise and would normally scream if you saw them alive or attached to the rest of what they came from.

This tuna, (bigger than Mel, in fact, so we didn’t hang around in case the man with the knife came back), shows to what extent the term ‘top to tail’ applies here. Basically, you can’t eat bones. Everything else is fair game. These fish sell for thousands of dollars. Because once you’ve put 2cm strips on a bed of sticky rice, that sells for $2. And in a four foot long, 18 inch wide (dead) fish, that’s a lot of sashimi. And eating sushi is what people really come for. They’ve moved the wholesale market, with the tuna auction, elsewhere but kept this bit just down the road for old times sake and for people to eat. You can’t eat a whole tuna from the other market unless you’re really hungry. Which, it would seem, the Japanese are. All the time. Every restaurant and cafe has queues outside, the good ones anyway. But you need to know what they sell inside, and that’s, apparently, a secret. Unless you know, or read Japanese. Amazing that obesity is not a problem here.

Then I woke up this morning to find that Liverpool had been beaten by Lionel Messi in Barcelona. The prospects of another ‘all England’ final are diminishing faster than the flesh of a fresh-caught tuna fish.

Fishy Thursday.

A xxxx