Elvis is alive — in Nagoya

That’s right, and not just one, but eight Elvises, all of whom I met in Nagoya’s Central Park last week, in an unlikely highlight of another unlikely visit to a new city. New to this peripatetic penman, anyway: I’d been to Japan a couple of times, not counting stopovers devoted to a quick bowl of steaming udon at Narita and Kansai, but never yet to Nagoya – and why on earth should I? It’s a question that’s hounded Nagoya, something of a middle child between its two more popular siblings, Tokyo to the northeast and Osaka to the southwest, for which two end stops it serves as a fairly (or unfairly) undistinguished transit point.

But I had a free ticket to Nagoya earned from another job, and only so much time to spare from a rapidly vanishing sem break; so off I flew by JAL last Saturday to Nagoya’s new Central Japan International Airport – Chubu to the world at large – for just two full days of sightseeing. Call it parachute tourism, which is usually and increasingly all that most of us working stiffs can afford if ever, or can squeeze into our prepaid, preplanned conference schedules.

As I’ve said before, I love plane food, especially (or make that only) when I’m flying on Asian airlines. Knowing what a cheapskate I am when it comes to dining out on a foreign currency, the plane food’s likely going to be my best meal for days. While Western carriers have scaled down their culinary offerings to pathetic sandwiches and flaky croissants, you can always expect a steaming rice or noodle dish from a regional airline, guaranteeing a good burp to go with the in-flight movie. My excitement begins with the otsumami – the foil-wrapped nuts and rice crackers that I always find a way to get an extra packet of – and culminates in the short-grain kokuho rice that dignifies anything it comes with. JAL did not disappoint. Its 767 also had individual monitors in economy class, and between the food and the movies, the four hours to Nagoya sped by quickly.

Nagoya’s new airport opened just last February, in time for the prefecture’s big event – the Aichi Expo 2005, designed to showcase Central Japan’s strengths and attractions. Like most modern airports, it’s huge, filled with light, and surprisingly fuss-free, without any long queues at security, and no one asking you to take your belt off at the X-ray portal.

I took the Meitetsu train to Nagoya Station in the heart of the city, a 40-minute ride that cost Y1,200 in the reserved section. After that it was a short walk across the street to my hotel. The Royal Park Inn Nagoya markets itself as a business hotel, midway in price and creature comforts between the Ritz and a ryokan (a traditional Japanese inn with communal baths), and it does a great job of doing what a good business hotel should do: provide clean and comfortable (if smallish) rooms with a TV, a hotpot, a trouser presser, a heated, state-of-the-art toilet seat, ice and a vending machine in the hallway, and best of all, a hearty buffet breakfast.

Although I never got to try it, its lobby was a wireless hotspot, allowing you to access your e-mail or surf the Net from your wi-fi-enabled laptop with a credit card. (In this connection, I’m going to devote next week’s column to what I’ll call digital travel – letting your fingers do the walking on the keyboard to plan ahead as much as you can for traveling to a foreign city. I’ll discuss websites and software programs that’ll take much of the pain – but none of the excitement – out of global gallivanting.) Another advantage of the Royal Park Inn’s location was its being right next to three convenience stores – Japan, let’s not forget, is convenience-store and vending-machine heaven – enabling me to sample a mind-boggling variety of ramen and rice crackers.

No one’s more finicky about the quality of their food than the Japanese, which practically guarantees that anything they serve you is bound to be good. The sights can only be half of the reason why you’d want to visit Japan. The other half we can subdivide between the food and the shopping (or, for most of us, make that the window-shopping). Since I’m no gourmet and didn’t try anything too exotic (read: anything beyond 300 yen), let me tell you instead about what I saw and how a couple of days in Nagoya might well be spent.

One of the first things I always look for in a new city is a map of the city itself and the transportation system – in this case, Nagoya’s extensive subway network. A walk back to the train station took me to an information counter which had just the thing I needed (for free, in English), including a listing of the city’s most interesting destinations and instructions on how to get there. To get around quickly and cheaply, nothing beats the subway, and in Nagoya you can buy a day pass for unlimited travel for 740 yen (about P350; figure one yen as almost 50 centavos).

It being a leisurely Sunday, I thought of going to the Atsuta Shrine, set in a park laced with centuries-old cypresses. But first, I had to scratch an itch, make a personal pilgrimage – to the Apple Store in Sakae, Nagoya’s shopping district. Next to Europe, Japan is Apple’s biggest customer outside the US, and the Sakae store was a carbon copy of Apple’s flagship store in Soho in New York, down to the glass staircase. I was there to gawk and to get in some free e-mail – it’s interesting how, despite or maybe because of its high-tech status, Japan didn’t have an Internet café at every street corner; in fact I never saw one in Nagoya, maybe because they had all the connections they needed at the office, at home, and on their 3G phones. Unable to afford anything in the Apple Store, I kept taking pictures of the goodies on display until the security guard – looking every inch more imposing than our police generals – shooed me away.

So off I went to the department stores for more masochism, to be awed by the quality of the goods on the one hand and depressed by their prices on the other. I have a yen (and that’s just about all I had, ha-ha) for jackets and blazers, the better to drape my prosperous tummy, and the only ones I could see had price tags of about Y50,000 on them – one or two too many zeroes for this ukay-ukay habitué. Matsuzakaya (remember when we had a Matsuzakaya here in Cubao in the ‘60s, above New Frontier grocery?) had a floor devoted to "promotions" – what to us are sales – but with the baseline prices so high to begin with, I knew I was going to do little more than look. I was attracted by a tan blazer – until I came closer and realized that it (and nearly all the other items on the floor) was emblazoned with a pocket patch of a familiar, long-eared face, suitably captioned: "Bugs Bunny – That cool-headed rabbit’s so funny!"

Miniskirts and knee-high boots are de rigueur these days for Japanese women below 30, preferably topped by something frilly or furry. It isn’t even mix and match, but mix and no-match, although the in-your-face eclecticism soon acquires a numbing uniformity of its own. As a country caught more tightly in the nexus between East and West than us (I sometimes wonder if we ever had an East), Japan can stun, intrigue, and charm the casual visitor with its stark – sometimes bizarre – contrasts. All along the shopping street of Otsu-dori, for example, "Stranger in Paradise" was being piped out onto the street in an unearthly, theremin-esque soprano.

I found my way to the Atsuta Shrine, which houses one of Japan’s three imperial treasures, the Kusanagi (grasscutter) sword, Japan’s Excalibur. Though said to be a replica of the mythical weapon that slew an eight-headed snake, the massive sword has been in this shrine for over 1,300 years. I paid Y300 to view more swords in an adjacent museum; I’ve never fired a gun in my life, but I’m a big fan of weapons of individual destruction, and you can’t get more personal than a sword.

For all the menace suggested by all that ancient weaponry, the daily news was surprisingly placid. Poring through the English edition of the Yomiuri Shimbun over breakfast the next morning, I found that the national crime roundup for the previous day was highlighted by "Shots fired from air gun," which was exactly just that – someone had tried shooting someone else in Kamagaya using an air rifle. Contrast that with "3 Christian schoolgirls beheaded in Indonesia." (Thankfully, there was no news from the Philippines that morning.) A glance at the travel ads also established that a round-trip ticket to Los Angeles cost Y22,500; to Bangkok, Y29,800; to Manila, Y39,800.

My next stop was Nagoya Castle, originally built in 1612 by Tokugawa Iyeyasu. Much of the castle was rebuilt in 1959, the original having been almost completely destroyed by American bombers in 1945, but even the restored castle – which contains real period artifacts saved from the conflagration – is well worth the Y500 admission.

It was on my way to this rendezvous with feudal Japan that I ran into the eight pompadoured, black-leather-uniformed Elvises rocking and rolling in Central Park; I thought they might have been buskers, such as you run into in London’s Covent Garden or Tube stations, but I couldn’t see a collection plate anywhere.

If we have our Greenhills and Bangkok has its Chatuchak, then Nagoya has Osu-Kannon, which has a warren of shops under a covered walk selling everything from traditional sweets to cowboy leather to vintage watches. Osu-Kannon is famous for its temple – my original reason for getting off at that stop – but the sacred soon gives way to the secular when you follow the steady stream of people filing past the temple to the marketplace just beyond it. Here, finally, was Nagoya’s own ukay-ukay section (one store sold used clothes by the gram, a yen for every gram). Unfortunately (or otherwise), I proved too bulky for any of the merchandise on display.

No foreign sojourn is ever complete for me without a visit to the stationery shops, and Japan’s Maruzen proved a cornucopia of pens and papers – again, alas, well beyond my present reach; I took a last long and longing look at the lacquered maki-e Pilots and the breathtakingly exquisite, swordlike Waterman Sérénité pen, and let go.

It’s too bad I couldn’t find the time to visit the Sewerage Science Museum (I kid you not – there is one, and yes, the frustrated engineer in me is interested in what you might call gutter culture); I also missed the Toyota Auto Museum and the Noritake Garden, but I have a feeling I haven’t seen the last of Nagoya. As my hotel guidebook sagely advised the visiting gaijin, "If you see Godzilla, run." Other than that, Nagoya should be taken step by leisurely step. My toes may be tender, but my smile sure is sweet. (And many thanks to the JAL staff in the Philippines – most especially to Salie, Pia, and Jina – for helping me out with the arrangements.)

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Send e-mail to Butch Dalisay at penmanila@yahoo.com.