Not the usual TKL fare, but this article about traveling to Tokyo on the cheap (under $1,000 for one whole week, including airfare!) is cute.

Before you start decrying the excesses of the leisure class, allow me to add a few details: My lunch costs less than $6, the flowers are fake, the sashimi could be fresher and I’m eating with bureaucrats on lunch break in the dining hall of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building. Also, all of my tour guides are volunteers, meaning I pay only their expenses, which don’t amount to much.

And I guess I should disclose that my week-long trip to Tokyo cost less than $1,000, including round-trip airfare.

Oh, and I told one baldfaced lie. Tokyo is not the world’s most expensive city anymore.

It’s fallen all the way to No. 2.

According to the article, the most expensive now is Oslo! But, alas, Oslo does not engage the kind of romantic fantasy that Tokyo does for many Americans.

Just today while I was shopping at a Trader Joe’s, a young grocery clerk told me that he was studying Japanese and intended to go to Tokyo as soon as his schooling was done (I told my wife, “Another kid who saw ‘Shogun’ one time too many… like your brother”).

I don’t think many young romantics are pining to go to Oslo.

Everywhere, the people-watching fascinates. I saw jean-jacketed male hipsters carrying Louis Vuitton purses; Japanese Goth girls vamping around the teenage fashion street Takeshita Dori; sinister-looking tough-guys with auburn-dyed hair, square-toed boots and long black jackets. My favorite, though, was a dignified elderly woman in a pink kimono, a model of tradition who was text-messaging on her cellphone in a subway station.

That sounds like New York City… or Seattle.

When I lived in NYC, visitors often said to me that New York was too expensive. Nonsense, I would tell them. If you knew where to go, New York could be quite affordable (except housing — there was just no escape from that). I could find a fabulous Chinese restaurant to lunch for $5, including appetizer and soup. And this would be real Chinese food, not the monstrosity of “American Chinese” one finds everywhere.

Having had a very extended stay in Japan, I agree with the author of the article that Tokyo can be the same.

Two caveats, though. First, I find this mode of traveling increasingly less palatable as I age. I could fly steerage class, backpack, eat Ramen, ride public transportation (or worse, the dreaded Asian minivans) and look at temples when I was a younger man. In fact, I preferred it to traveling more luxuriously with my parents.

Now, I find myself more drawn to “leisure class” travel, in part because I have learned to accomodate my wife who is used to traveling in such a fashion since childhood.

Second, as far as Japanese urban areas go, I find the Kanto region (Tokyo-Yokohama) too sterile, too modern, too — gasp — Western. For first visitors to Japan, I instead recommend the Kansai region (Osaka-Kyoto-Nara), which is replete with ancient Japanese culture and history. It is also of special interest to those who study the link between ancient Korea and Japan.

For those more adventurous and romantic, there is Kagoshima in Satsuma, a sort of birthplace of the Meiji Restoration and the place of final resistance to it. It is here the famous Satsuma Rebellion led by Saigo Takamori took place (whose doomed exploits formed a very loose basis for the horrible Tom Cruise vehicle “The Last Samurai”**).

On the other end of Japan, there is Sapporo in Hokkaido, especially if you are into snow festivals and such (yes, this is Sapporo where the Sapporo Brewing company began, also during the Meiji period). Don’t expect to see much of the Ainu culture left though. The city was sort of “created” along “Western” lines (supposedly there were only seven inhabitants as late as mid-19th Century), and is one of the largest cities in Japan.

**If you really want to see a superior treatment of a slice of life of an ordinary Samurai around the time of Meiji Restoration (slightly before), I recommend instead “The Twilight Samurai” which is my favorite Japanese film of recent vintage.
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