[Home]
[Up]
[Training]
[Club Competition]
[Calendar]
[Club Info]
[Photo Gallery]
[Articles & News]
[ORC Forum]
[Search]
[Links]

By: Karl-Heinrich Barsch

A lot more than you think, including the Tokyo Bay Half-Marathon of course, if you are lucky enough to go with Orlando Runners Club.  Your Japanese hosts won’t waste your time.  A special Urayasu City Bus is waiting for you at the airport to take you straight to the City Hall where the mayor and other city officials are waiting to welcome you and to supply you with a very handy blue parka that says “Urayasu City Tokyo Bay Marathon.”  You’ll need it, because in early February it’s cold in Japan. 

The mayor also gave us an interesting introduction to the history of this young Tokyo suburb of 150,000 that is partially built on land just recently claimed from the sea.  Like the Dutch and unlike us Americans, the Japanese seem to know how to build dikes that protect land below sea level from ocean tides.  (Tsunami is a Japanese word, you know.)

The special city bus whisked us to our hotel (VERY nice hotel, by the way) where we had two hours to shower and rest before meeting members of the URC (Urayasu Runners Club) in the hotel lobby.   More welcoming remarks, including some from the hotel manager, more gifts, and then our URC friends formed sub-committees around each of us, trying to find out what our interests were and what we would like to see and do both before and after the half-marathon.  In our case, a mere mention that we would also like to see the modern side of Tokyo brought to our table Mr. Hashimoto, who offered to be our guide.  As a key official of an urban development firm, he had been responsible for the planning and building of the landmark skyscrapers in the Shinjuku district that have since become the trademark of Tokyo’s skyline.  It seems that the URC has very accomplished professionals among its members.  Next we were invited to an Italian style dinner at the hotel restaurant. 

The next day, Friday, our friends Noriko and Masahito, who had stayed with us in Orlando a couple years ago, gave us a grand tour of Tokyo in their 500E Mercedes.  No professional tour guide could have shown us more in one day than they did.  We even got to sit in the bullet train to Hiroshima.  And we ate in a couple of wonderful restaurants, one of which served eel meat only.  One particular dish was eel liver, a rather chewy affair that one is supposed to eat before long runs and marathons. 

That Friday, February 3, happened to be the day of the Setsubun spring festival, which has to do with throwing around soybeans.  The Japanese people are very fond of soybeans, but the Japanese evil spirits don’t like them at all.  That’s why everybody throws soybeans at them on spring day to drive them out.  Our friends took us to the big Zojoji Temple in downtown Tokyo where the bean throwing ceremony was in full swing.  We melted into a throng of several thousand people who all shouted at the top of their lungs “oni wa soto, fuku wa uchi” (“evil sprits get out, good luck come in”) while, from the temple balustrade, priests, monks, TV celebrities and famous singers and sumo wrestlers threw small packets of roasted soybeans into the crowd. The people in the crowd opened them, threw half of the beans at imaginary devils and ate the other half.  Terttu and I ate all of ours.      

On Saturday morning we joined the URC runners for their “weekly 5K run”, but we found out that “5K” is here somewhat of an understatement.  You run to the park where you do group stretching, then you run around in the park for a while, then you stretch again, and then you run out of the park where the actual 5K course begins and takes you along the picturesque shore of the bay.  When you get back to the park you stretch again, after which a “cool-down run” is offered for those who haven’t had enough yet. 5K or 5K+, it was all very enjoyable in crisp and cool air.  Recreational running with friends doesn’t get any better than that.

Now, talking about stretching, it seems to me that our Japanese friends are all very good at it.  Could it be that the constant bowing from childhood on makes their backs more flexible than ours?  Besides, in Japan you constantly take off your shoes and put them back on, and you get down on the floor a lot more frequently then here in the US.  (Traditional dining rooms and restaurants have no chairs, just a tatami floor mat.) All of this is good flexibility exercise, I found. 

After that morning run we all moved out of the hotel and into our host families.   For Terttu and me it was Mr. and Mrs. Tokuda, he a “retired-but-not-tired” colonel and she a language teacher, both of them very charming and fluent in English.  They and their apartment seemed to come straight out of a Japanese picture book.  But we didn’t spend the day in their apartment.  Mr. Tokuda teamed up with our guide Mr. Hashimoto to take us by subway to the Shinjuku skyscraper region.  A truly fascinating in-depth tour given by the experts.  Great view of Tokyo from the 45^th floor restaurant.  Then by foot to the beautiful Meiji Jinju Shrine where we observed a traditional wedding, from there to the Takeshita Dori street, a lively hip-hop section of Tokyo where the un-tattooed four of us stuck out as the oldest people around, and from there to Tokyo’s Champs-Elysées, the very fashionable Omote-sando boulevard….  Back in the subway Mr. Hashimoto pulled out his step-counter and informed us proudly that we had walked more then 12 kilometers that day.  I added this to the 5K+ morning run and began to worry how my legs would hold up in the next day’s half-marathon.   

The Urayasu Half-Marathon is a BIG affair.  We ORC guests arrived there in two taxis and were ushered to our own warm waiting room.  I can only think of Kenyans and Ethiopians who ever get such privileges.  During the pre-race ceremonies our four invited ORC runners shared the podium with other invited celebrity runners, with Mini and Mickey Mouse, the Mayor of Urayasu, and cheerleading girls from Meikai University who did their thing to Japanese rap music.  At one point two members of the URC raced up to the podium and saluted the mayor in a stiff-armed Heil-Hitler-type fascist salute, shouting at him that we all promised to do our best.  I was glad that this happened in Tokyo and not in Berlin, because there our two URC friends would have been handcuffed on the spot and led off to jail.

We had clear but cold and very windy weather during the Half-Marathon, and we could see Mount Fuji clearly during most of the race.  Terttu reported that at one time she was running along and looking at Mount Fuji when she noted a Japanese runner passing her AND BOWING TO HER WHILE RUNNING!  Talking about an authentic Japanese experience!  For us it was wonderful to meet friends both on the course and among the spectators, people who call out your name and cheer you on in a race that takes place half-way around the globe!  Thank you, URC friends!

But there were no spectators along the 4-mile stretch along the shoreline, only a very strong, ice-cold headwind.  I survived it, but barely.  It felt like the wind had totally emptied me so that I was now just a lifeless empty shroud.  Luckily our host Mr. Tokuda came along from behind and pulled me in.  There is supposedly a two and a half hour limit to the half-marathon, and I crossed the finish line at 2:33.  However the four official ORC guests, including my Faster Half, all did very decent times.  

The big URC party after the half-marathon was unforgettable.  Great friends and great food and drinks, and the two Orlando ladies dressed in kimonos, trying to walk in Japanese wooden shoes that were a few numbers too small.  David Virtus and his Japanese twin were a big hit when they both appeared in Sumu wrestlers’ diapers.

The next day, Monday February 6, was our last day in Japan.  And what a day it was!  A group of very knowledgeable URC members took us to Kamakura, the ancient Japanese capital by the seaside that abounds with temples and shrines. First stop was the Meigetsu-in temple in a wonderfully secluded mountain gorge.  Here we saw something I had never seen before: a monk runner in full gowns and at full speed.  He led a group of children on a race course through the temple gardens.  Of course the highlight of that day was our visit to the Daibutsu, the 40 feet tall bronze statue of the Amita Buddha.  I’m not much of a Buddhaphile, but I must say that this one was singularly beautiful and impressive.  If I had not known that it was cast in 1252, I would have guessed that it’s a product of early 20^th-century art nouveau!    

If there is one thing that impressed -and intimidated- me more than the 40-foot Buddha, it would have to be the strange Japanese high-tech toilets.   My first acquaintance with them was right after our arrival, in our hotel room.  As soon as you are seated, the super-soft air-cushioned toilet seat heats your posterior to sauna temperatures and an invisible fan comes on INSIDE the toilet bowl below you.  (One of our Orlando runners also reported that his host family’s toilet features a light inside the toilet bowl, which really seems a waste of electricity to me, since we don’t have eyes in our behind.)  Anyway, as you take your heated and ventilated seat, you may think for a moment that you have landed in the pilot’s seat of a Boeing 747, because next to you is a whole array of mysterious buttons and blinking lights at your disposal. 

I had been forewarned by previous ORC visitors to Japan to leave all these buttons alone. But on our second day in our hotel my curiosity got the better of me, and I pushed the most innocent-looking of the buttons to my side.   At first nothing happened, only a series of electric motor noises inside the toilet bowl.  But next I was shot from below by a very strong stream of hot water, laser–guided right into you-know-where.  I jumped up and now a fountain of hot water from the toilet bowl inundated the floor.  Thereafter a left all the high-tech toilet buttons alone. 

Well, almost.  At one time when I used the toilet of our host family, I was going to turn off the ceiling light as I left the facility.  So I pushed what looked like a regular light switch on the wall.  To my amazement, it didn’t turn off the lights but activated a loud alarm in the entire apartment.  As I emerged from the toilet, our hosts were in the hallway, wondering why I had pushed the ”toilet emergency button.”  And soon the Tokuda’s telephone started ringing: it was the City inquiring about my toilet emergency.  You have to wonder what would constitute a toilet emergency – no toilet paper?  Later I learned that after my toilet emergency experience Terttu was so scared to touch any light or other buttons both inside and outside the bathroom that for three days she always went to the bathroom in total darkness.        

I could go on with more toilet stories, but I leave that to our ex-president David Virtus, whose host family had a more fully automated toilet with a tricky-for-men self-closing lid that opens as you approach but closes as you withdraw. 

What else impressed and surprised us about Japan, other than their high-tech toilets?  Too many things to mention here.  It is a very clean and neat place where people are amazingly uniform, polite, and disciplined.  The organization of the train and metro system is a marvel.  (But you have to get used to all the Darth Faders who run around talking behind facemasks.)  In general, one has to admire how the Japanese manage to pack 40 million people into the greater Tokyo area and have all of them smoothly coming and going to work and enjoying a remarkable living standard on such a small space, without major glitches or disasters. 

I am sure that for the five of us who went there for the Urayasu Half-Marathon, the one aspect that stands out the most is the incredible hospitality of all our URC friends.  They shunned no effort to make our stay as enjoyable for us as possible, willingly sacrificing their time and their money.  And they succeeded.  Our trip to Japan was an experience that none of us can ever forget.  Doomo arigotoo gozaimasu!