Now, the people I spoke to before I left Canada assured me that I would be bathed in internet in Japan. The wireless would fill the air like oxygen. I could practically tune in and download terabytes of information using only my brain. This is just not true.

My experience, and the experience of several of my fellow travelers staying in quite swanky hotels, has been that wireless is not ubiquitous (unlike heated toilet seats, which are) and that even wired connections can sometimes be hard to come by.

My stalwart little travel laptop is a good machine, but its hardwired ethernet port has been sadly broken for some time, so I was at a loss as to what to do in a hotel room with no wireless. I specifically booked in at the Keio because their website promised wireless, but apparently that only comes in smoking rooms in the main tower and I’m in non-smoking in the south tower (or some such nonsense) so it was wired internet or nothing.

Anyhow, Wadman and Gorman came up with the excellent plan of buying me a USB ethernet adapter, so we went to a local electronics shop and searched through the 5 floors worth of tech heaven (the vertical integration here in Tokyo is incredible – I’ve never seen so many escalators in my life!) for something to suit my needs. In the end, I went old-school and bought a PCMCIA slot cardbus adapter, to keep my USB slots free for headset and card reader use.

You know the other thing that I found a bit disappointing? The tea ceremony. Man, after so much hype I really thought it would be better than this…