indessed roscivs

The time of year we went to Japan was not exactly conducive to sightseeing. My boss, when telling us that he was sending us to Japan, said, “I’m going next month. No way I’m going to Japan when it’s this hot there!” Typical.

But I was happy to go (for free) at any time of year, so I took the opportunity and ran with it. The temperatures, comparatively, actually weren’t that bad. Well, when compared with where I grew up, anyway. The average high hovered in the low nineties, with humidity through the roof, whereas in my hometown the average high that same week was over a hundred with heat indexes of 110-ish. Oof! So I counted my blessings, despite being spoiled by the beautiful PNW temperatures. (I complain here when it hits the high seventies.)

Regardless, it was not fun being outside; I think nearly all the pictures with me in them have this sort of half-grimace, probably from the heat. So by Saturday, after a week of these grueling temperatures, we decided that for my day off, we wanted to go somewhere where air conditioning was close by. I would have loved to see some Japanese gardens or visited some ancient shrines, but I wouldn’t have been able to handle the outdoor temperatures for more than an hour. So instead, the plan was to go to Roppongi Hills, a mega-shopping-complex of towering buildings, glittering lights, and panoramic views. We had already gotten the idea from tofugu, a wacky little web site that I’d discovered while searching for fun things to do in Japan, which told us of the Mori Tower and a giant spider statue which seemed too good to pass up.

I figured out about halfway through the day that the kanji for “Roppongi” were all characters that I knew: 六本木. The first character is the number six, “roku”. The second character is “hon”, the counter for long, cylindrical objects, and the last character, “ki”, simply means “tree”. (The reasons why these don’t get put together to become “rokuhonki” are too complicated for me to go into at the moment. Suffice it to say, it’s Japanese.) Roppongi, therefore, simply means “six trees”. Suddenly the Roppongi Hills official logo (six circles, one each for the “o”s and “p”s, and two on top of each other forming a stylized “g”) made complete sense. Very clever, Black and Decker!

This entry was posted on Monday, September 3rd, 2007 at 10:41 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.