Saturday and Sunday were the days of the conference. It was starting at 9:00 AM, so we had to be out the door and heading towards the 東横線 by about 8:00. Not that this was hard to manage: aside from our circadian rhythms being almost perfectly out of phase with the local time, Tokyo is in the wrong time zone: the sun was up at 4:30 AM, and Bryan’s office gets plenty of light. So we were awake pretty early.

Once at the station, I vaguely recalled that 桜木町 was the stop for the Pacifico, but to my consternation, the Toyoko-sen didn’t stop there anymore–instead it had a stop at みなとみらい. Which also sounded like the right area, based on my memory, but not what I expected. Off we went. Turns out that the Toyoko-sen’s route had in fact been diverted recently, and my guess was correct. As Tom explained over lunch (at a wacky little Chinese place), 東急 had built backwards from the new station, which is underground, up to the point where the new segment would intersect the old, and in one night after the trains stopped running, ripped up the section of old rail over the juncture, relaid it to connect to the new segment, made a couple of test runs, and continued with service as usual the next morning. Quite an audacious feat of engineering–something that was a recurring observation through this trip.

Gwen was not in on the conference, but would be attending the schmoozefest that night, so she came in to Yokohama with me and lit out on her own. She managed to find her way around well enough.

Sessions attended that day: the opening plenary “state of the industry” session, and on a new publishing venture launched by some of my fellow translators. I checked in on one about translation memory, but wound up leaving that to catch up with friends. Richard Sadowsky observed that when we had first gotten to know each other at a much earlier IJET–perhaps IJET-3 in 富士吉田(?), he had commented that he and I seemed to be the youngest translators there, but that was no longer true. He’s right: Richard has aged quite a bit since then.

Gwen made her way back to the conference site, and everyone shuffled downstairs to the dinner, a really lavish buffet with free beer and wine. Gwen and I were still kind of looped from jet lag, and made a relatively early departure.

Friday the weather had mercifully cleared (in fact, we didn’t really get rained on at all for the rest of the trip), and we relocated to Bryan’s office, which would be our base of operations for the rest of the trip.

There were some last-minute details about the conference that I had been meaning to check online–I wanted to refresh my memory of which train station to exit, for example. Though I had set up an account with a local ISP, GOL, I was unable to log on for some reason. Very infuriating.

I took Gwen to Harajuku. It’s my favorite part of town. We wandered around aimlessly. I was a bit disoriented by the changes in the neighborhood: where there had once been a couple of sidewalk cafes on 表参道 there were now gleaming retail showrooms. And the Aoyama Apartments, the first Western-style apartment building in Tokyo, were demolished. This wasn’t a surprise–the death knell had sounded on them a long time ago, but it was still a shame that a bit of Tokyo history was gone. For the most part, the backstreets (though they had no doubt seen many small businesses come and go) looked about the same. We walked past Jenny’s old apartment, and it still stood, though there was a little novelty shop wedged in front of it now. Nearby was an excellent stationery store that I remembered, with an incredible selection of postcards and desk-stuff on the ground floor, and a lot of art books downstairs.

We kind of wandered via a route that I’d never be able to reproduce through 千駄ヶ谷 up to 新宿. We wandered around there some more, taking in both the busy-but-civilized part and the sleazy 歌舞伎町 Quite a lot of walking that day.

I hadn’t been to Japan since 2000; Gwen had never been. But this year’s IJET conference was going to be in Yokohama, it was coming shortly after our marriage, so the trip would serve as a honeymoon, and, well, Lost in Translation just made me really nostalgic for Tokyo. And although the trip would be expensive, I really felt that I needed to try to drum up some business in Japan, since that’s where most of the J-E translation demand is. So we decided quite some time ago that we’d go. Gwen negotiated a lengthy vacation from her job. We got tickets at a pretty good rate through JTB (though flying on AA instead of JAL–a bit of a letdown).

We left on Wednesday the 19th and arrived in the evening of the 20th after an uneventful flight. A typhoon was in the area, and Tokyo was getting heavy rain. After a bit of misdirection, getting very wet in the process, we made our way to the 多摩旅館, an inn in 高田馬場 run by a fellow translator who I vaguely knew from my days in Japan; although we would be crashing at a friend’s place for most of the trip, we needed a place where we could sleep in to get over the initial shock of jet lag. That was pleasant, and there was an Indian restaurant I had never tried, Malabar, just a few doors away. It has been my ongoing project to eat at all the Indian restaurants in Tokyo, so after we checked in and got settled a bit, we had dinner there and ate quite well. I learned that Takadanobaba has become a haven for Burmese refugees, and there are a lot of hole-in-the-wall Burmese restaurants there where the menus are available only in Burmese–no Japanese, no English.