Tokyo

We stayed in Tokyo for five nights. Since we arrived late on Saturday night, and after a long flight we could only really manage a sandwich at the hotel bar before crashing for a solid 13 hours.

Sunday was our first chance to actually explore. We focussed on places near Asakusa, which is where we are staying. Our first impression of Tokyo architecture was the Tokyo Sky Tree and the Asahi Brewery Headquarters. Apparently the golden structure is meant to “represent the burning heart of Asahi beer”, but the locals call it The Golden Turd.

We went up to Senso-Ji temple after that. Senso-Ji was founded after two brothers, apparently, found a statue of a bodhisattva in the nearby river (Sumida-gawa), and one of the local elders decided this warranted a temple. The statue has never been on display, so make of that what you will. But the temple is lovely anyway.

We walked through Ueno park then went to Akhibara (the “electronics district”), which is the home of otaku culture. We picked one of the 14-floor stores fairly at random and went to the top floor, where we found all sorts of treats including a room of roughly 40 men playing Pokemon-style card games, and a magazine of pictures of women swimming underwater that may or may not have been porn.

The next day we went over to the west wide of town, which is where the crazy Tokyo from films is. We started off sedately with meiji jingu, another shrine. This one is shinto, had lots of wood, and was generally quite beautiful. We wandered round the park and the gardens for a while before heading down to Harajuku and Takeshita street. This street is kind of famous for being filled with teens. It was kind of crazy, it seemed to be an even mixture of sweets/candies and goths, as well as a few random extras such as the shop which sold both sneakers and frozen yoghurts. Later on we ticked off another box on the tourist checklist by joining the crowds at Shibuya Crossing and then got lost for an hour or so in Tokyu Hands.

Tuesday we went to the Imperial Palaces. Quite a lot of this was closed off, because the emperor actually still lives there, but there were some nice gardens for us to wander around. We managed to find some vegetarian ramen in the basement of Tokyo Rail Station (a destination in its own right). We headed over to Shinjuku after that. This is on the west side of town as well and is more classic Tokyo. We had planned on walking in a park and then going up the Metropolitan Building for views, but unfortunately both were closed. We did, however, manage to see the Robot Restaurant which was pretty crazy.

On our final day in Tokyo we went back to Shinjuku to make up for some of the stuff we missed. We went to the park we missed, then walked past the 2020 Olympics site, before going down to Roppongi Hills for art and early evening views of Tokyo:

Our hotel, despite being fairly cheap, had some nice onsen (communal, gender-segregated baths), which we visited a bunch of times.

Finding vegetarian food has been a bit of a struggle. The highlight for me was okonomiyake (you sit at a table with a hot plate, and pour your own mixture on it to make thick savoury pancakes). We ate good ramen a couple of times as well. At some point we’re probably going to have to give up and eat meat, but I think we’ll hold out for a bit longer yet.