The digital traveler

To make things more interesting, and knowing that I couldn’t cover everything in just two full days of touring, I took my recent visit to Nagoya as my own version of an "Extreme Challenge." And the challenge I gave myself was to see how far I could get around as digitally as possible – using mainly information and software found on and downloaded from the Internet, including maps, subway routes, sightseeing stops, shopping tips, etc.

The first time I visited Japan in 1983, I knew little about the place itself beyond what I’d seen in the movies and read in sword-and-sushi romances like Shogun. I had no maps, no sightseeing itinerary (I was there to play in the World Amateur Championship of go, the ancient Japanese board game; I finished last, of course – but that’s another story), no sense of where and what Osaka was in relation to the galaxy. It was probably just as well; over-preparation can take too much of the fun and wonder out of a trip. Sometimes the last thing you want is a list of "must-see’s" and "must-do’s" when all you need is to march out into the sunshine with open eyes and ears.

But this time around, with two days to spare and a point to make, I deliberately set out to find what resources were available to the digital traveler, beyond what most of us already know about booking hotel and airline reservations online.

First, an inventory of our digital resources: the Internet, a laptop, a mobile phone, an iPod, a digital camera, and a PDA (a Palm, iPaq, XDA, or some such device – my phone and PDA are combined in the Treo 650). Let’s not forget all the chargers, batteries, cables, and flash-memory cards that come with the hardware; in my case, knowing I’d be out for only so many days, I just made sure to bring fully-charged spare batteries.

(Speaking of iPods, here’s another tip for the digital traveler: if, like me, you’ve invested in high-end earphones or headphones for your iPod or mp3 player, keep them in your pocket or carry-on bag, and use them instead of the earphones the airlines hand out and sometimes charge for, as Contintental does, for $5 a pop; you do get to keep the earphones, but do you really need another one?).

I already knew where I was going to stay, but especially since I was arriving at night, I wanted to be sure how to get there from the airport, about an hour away. So the first thing I looked for through Google was the Chubu airport website, for a map of the terminal layout and links to train and bus connections to the city. Then I found the site of the Royal Park Inn Nagoya to get a good look at a picture of the hotel’s façade and to download a street map of the hotel’s location, indicating a walking route from the train and bus terminal.

To get to know as much as I could about Nagoya and establish my sightseeing priorities, I did another Google search for "Nagoya tourism." Sure enough, dozens of sites came up – the best of them being the InfoGuide at www.japaninfoguides.com, which has maps and pictures of key areas, and fairly comprehensive visitor information. I downloaded maps of the city center and the subway network, later marking out with a pen where I wanted to go.

For those of us with those electronic diaries-cum-checkbooks called Personal Digital Assistants or PDAs, there’s a company called Wcities (http://www.wcities.com/cityguide.html) that puts out city guides and maps for both Palm and PocketPC platforms – thus its slogan, "the world in your handheld." Not quite the whole world, yet; they did have a free city guide to Nagoya, but no maps at the moment.

There’s a couple of other Palm programs I’ve found very useful while traveling since the late 1990s: the freeware Currency (www.braunstein.de/pda/palm/currency/en/), which converts up to six user-selectable currencies simultaneously (and for which you can download daily foreign-exchange-rate updates), and the freeware Metro (www.freewarepalm.com/travel/metro.shtml), which maps out routes and itineraries for dozens of subway and metro rail systems around the world (yes, it has our MRT as well). After many calculations, it dawned on me that a yen was, duh, 50 centavos, a discovery that considerably simplified things.

But Metro proved to be a godsend in Nagoya. I’ve always believed that anyone who masters the subway (and holds a day pass) conquers the city, and the closed-circuit logic of subway networks takes much of the fear and figuring out of street-level meandering. (It helps that Japan is relatively crime-free; knowing where to go on the New York subway won’t make you feel any better about hanging out at midnight in certain stations.) With Metro – which is also regularly updated, and covers almost 250 cities around the world – you just need to punch in where you are (Sakae) and where you want to go (Osu-Kannon), and it’ll spit out "Shortest route: two stations, one connection, about nine minutes; at Sakae, take Higashiyama, direction Takabata; connect at Fushimi; take Tsurumai, direction Akaike, get off at Osu-Kannon."

Currency and Metro are free downloads for the Palm, but I over-invested in the BDicty Talking English-Japanese Dictionary Phrasebook for Palm OS from Beiks LLC (www.beiks.com). It didn’t come cheap at almost $20 (payable online), but paranoid me figured that I could end up spending a whole lot more if I couldn’t find the words for "Where’s the nearest 7-11, please? I’m too cheap to go to a real restaurant." (As it turned out, I needn’t have worried. The convenience store was just across my hotel – followed by another one, and another one.)

My Treo 650 is a wonderful gadget that’s a quad-band phone, a Palm PDA, a still and video camera, an mp3 player, a file storage system, an Internet browser, an e-mail getter and sender, and a voice recorder all in one. The problem is, it doesn’t work as a phone in Japan. The cellular phone system in Japan uses different technologies – Personal Digital Cellular, CDMA, and WCDMA – none of them compatible with our GSM system and hardware (nor with each other, for that matter). Thankfully, my Globe plan allowed me to borrow (for free, but of course the user pays for all calls) a Japan-friendly phone, a Nokia 6650, for the duration of my trip. The candybar GSM/WCDMA 6650 isn’t the latest and greatest of cell phones, but it did the job of keeping me in touch by voice and text, passing me on to the Vodafone JP and NTT DoCoMo networks. I hadn’t used a Nokia in a while, so just to be safe, I downloaded a .pdf copy of the User’s Guide for the Nokia 6650 from the Nokia website before I left.

I’d expected Japan to be wireless and Internet heaven, but surprisingly it wasn’t, at least not in my little corner of Nagoya. As I noted last week, it could’ve been just because everyone had Internet access at home, in the office, and on his or her 3G (read: state-of-the-art) mobile phone. The Royal Park Inn’s lobby was a wi-fi hotspot, but you had to be signed on to the global Boingo network to use it, and I passed on the service. Instead, I sought out the local Apple Store not just for its wares, but also for the free Internet access that every Apple Store offers with every computer on display. The only hitch was that I couldn’t figure out how to produce the @ sign on the Japanese keyboard – until I copied the @ from the error message and pasted it onto the username box.

In my last hour on the night street in Nagoya I stumbled into Bic Camera on the other side of JR Central, and I’m glad I didn’t find it sooner, or my credit cards would have been all tapped out. It was, simply put, the biggest electronics emporium I’ve ever been to – maybe not quite like Tokyo’s fabled Akibahara (one of my few remaining Meccas) – but with five huge floors of electronic goodies, it was plenty to cover in sixty minutes.

In the end, all I got was a cheap neoprene slipcase for my laptop, a leather pouch for my digital camera, and a multipurpose lanyard for tiny gadgets yet to be acquired. I was lucky, in other words, to escape any major damage where those digits really count.

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Last week’s piece on Nagoya provoked this inspired response from Freddie Santos:

I have dealt with the Japanese for many years, since I was an artistic consultant for Sony in the Philippines from 1986 to when Sony Japan bought it back 10 years later. I have visited it many times, nearly each time lengthily, and with, thank God, other people footing the bill. They are an amazing people and it is, indeed, an awesome land.

I must disagree, though, with your comment about Japan being at the nexus of East and West. We are that. You can tell the two elements apart and living together here.

Japan, I find, is the perfect "Weast." They take an idea and then assume it entirely and the result is neither East nor West, it is Japanese.

Nowhere in Europe, not even in London, does one see the styles worn by trendy Japanese.

Even mentally, I find that whether or not they admit it, the Japanese see the world as Japan and everyone else. They join organizations because geographically, they should, but somehow I feel they feel they don’t really need to.

They’ve Japanized baseball and spaghetti in a way we never have been able to and whatever Western element they may find interesting enough to try, they will work at it till it’s theirs entirely. Any cold noodles served anywhere else?

Take the seeing-eye mechanism used for glass doors. It makes sense with glass doors and anywhere in the world – it’s used for glass doors. Except in Japan. It’s used for glass doors, bamboo panels, rice paper screens, and flower boxes.

Hong Kong and London tailors may be the masters of making suits, but only the Japanese will pad the shoulders to two-feet width – or have 80 percent of the business pedestrians wear it in gray. Did you ever see a brown suit on a Japanese street?

Argyle perfected socks but they’ve never manufactured it en masse featuring 10 toes. In their wildest dreams, New Yorkers have never worn hair like the Japanese do – and, speaking of New York, for all its expertise in skyscrapers and its penchant for retaining European facades, what stood out as its simplest and most imposing skyscrapers? The World Trade Center, designed by Japanese, which, at its height, never looked Western, seven city blocks in Zen.

Only the Japanese will click a hundred shots of a single golf swing, show female breasts on any magazine but never pubic hair, design appalling sex orgies for video and then airbrush them, equate trains with bullets and have door greeters not just at the store front but at every door in the store.

What other country can be so devastated by war and then pay off every single one of its foreign debts within 40 years after such destruction?

Above all, Japan’s commitment to quality is so encompassing that whether you pay 100 yen for a sweet roll in the subway or a thousand yen for a similar sweet roll in a resto, the taste is fabulous either way. Anywhere else, it’s "you get what you pay for." A land of no excuses.

There is so much to be learned from such a people, of which the greatest, I find, is the attitude of being un-awed by Western ways. For that matter, by Westerners. In that regard, Japan will never belong to any hemisphere. It belongs only, uniquely, to itself.

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