Yes indeed, Good Morning Tokyo! After lots of fretting about getting here we finally made it and this morning woke up in our lovely hotel in central Tokyo. The ‘we’ this time is me, Jane, Joyce and Enid. We haven’t been on a big trip together since China in 2014 but we’re reunited for this big adventure around Japan.
Our flight here from Heathrow took 13 hours with Joyce and Enid travelling in Business Class to celebrate their big birthdays. Jane and I meanwhile, aren’t that old so we were in row 38 v near the back of the plane. It was a bumpy ride with some iffy food but other than that perfectly acceptable. We missed a day and went straight to bed when we got here but lay awake in the early hours of the morning, so we all suffered from degrees of jet lag during the day today. Sensible people might decide to have a day of gentle recovery but not us. We were up early and having breakfast ready to meet our guide for the day at 9am.
Today would be our guided Tokyo tour and after a jolly reasonable (cereals and mini croissant) breakfast we met up with our lovely guide Ms Kanako Suzuki. We had a busy day planned and here in Tokyo you do this by catching public transport. So with Kanako’s help we having been popping about all over Tokyo using the metro and JR Yamanote Line. We have our Suica cards – like the Oyster card in London and it’s remarkably similar. A bit of a maze but if you know the line you want to be on and the station you’re heading to it’s ok. This morning as we caught the Asakusa Line from Mita station it was very busy and I soon started over-heating. At each station stop music is played and I think it’s a different tune at every stop, which is nice.
Our first stop today was Tokyo Skytower (634mettes high) which is a telecoms tower with a viewing platform for the public at 350metres. It is in fact the tallest self supporting tower in the world and the third tallest structure in the world, behind Merdeka 118 ( 678m) in Kuala Lumpur and Burj Kalifa in Dubai (828m).
It was built in 2012 and is twice as high as the previous tallest structure in Japan, the Tokyo Tower, which we can see from our hotel room. By the way, the view from our hotel room is splendid. Whilst it really only seems to look onto office blocks and apartment buildings, at 8am this morning, it was a hive of activity with orderly queues for buses, men at work painting a new zebra crossing, trains, canals, hundreds of ‘Salarymen’ dressed in black rushing to their offices. It looked like a miniature railway from up here on the 8th floor
Anyway….meanwhile back on the 350th Floor the views today were very erm…..grey! But you could indeed see for miles but no Mount Fuji views today! We wandered round and took our photos of Tokyo Bay etc before going down to walk on the glass floor a few floors down.
Back down to earth it was time to go back into the past with our visit to Sensoji Temple. To get to the temple we had to walk through a street lined with touristy shops. It looked to have some very nice gift items but it’s only day one and it was extremely crowded so we walked straight through averting our eyes. The Buddhist temple in Asakusa is the oldest one in Tokyo founded in 628AD. We passed through the Kaminarimon Gate with the huge red lantern. There is a 5 storey pagoda and the statues of the goddess’ of wind and thunder.
My main mission here was to collect a ‘Goshuin’ which is a red ink stamp along with some calligraphy. I’d discovered this is a thing on Instagram but hadn’t realised that everyone else would be doing the same thing and the queue was long. I decided to not bother waiting for the one printed there and then but to buy a pre- prepared one which was much less painful!
Next stop was to have our fortunes told at the Temple. For another small fee you can shake a box, pick out a numbered chopsticks and then open the drawer with that number on. Take a piece of paper out which tells your you’re fortune! If you get bad luck you can screw up your paper and tie it to a washing line. But if you’re lucky like me you take it away! Hurrah
After this we were starting to fade so we had a little lunch stop where we mostly chose to eat chicken nuggets and Jane had a pork katsu don. Revived we pressed on….next to the Meiji Shrine. Kanako explained that shrines were part of the Shinto tradition whereas Temples are for the Buddhist religion. The shrines feature the famous Tori gates and the ones at the Meiji shrine are impressively tall. By now it was starting to rain but it was nice walking through the woods to the shrine and the lines of painted sake barrels donated in sponsorship of the shrine, were quite a site. The shrine itself looked really old so I was surprised to read afterwards that it was only completed in 1920 to celebrate the wonderful Emperor Meiji who had done much to bring Japan out of isolation and into the modern world.
Our final stop today couldn’t have been more different. We hoped on the Metro once more to Harajuku and the appropriately named ‘Takeshita Street’. It was definitely very tacky and rather….
Or as Google prefers to describe it ‘a vibrant, pedestrian shopping lane known globally as the birthplace of Japan’s youth and kawaii (cute) culture. It was very busy and quite jaw dropping and quite frankly us olds didn’t really understand most of what was going on. Shops selling toys in pods, very very pink shops, shops with vintage cloths in and boots with massive platforms. Sweets, stickers, cos play, J-pop, crepes, cheese dogs, aaaaarrrrghhhhh get me out of here!
But wait…..did someone mention cat cafe? Or perhaps you’d prefer a dog cafe. No? Well hold on then maybe you’d prefer your cup of matcha tea with a capybara, or an otter or maybe even some micro pigs. Yes…they’re all here but today we said ‘no’ , there’s something just not quite right about all this.
Time to get us back to our hotel before the rush hour. We took the Yamanote line which runs above ground and stops right near our hotel which was good because by now the rain was getting really heavy. We said our thankyous and farewells to Kanako but we will be seeing her again on Friday!
Meanwhile, we visited the local 7-11 for emergency milk. More of these stores later no doubt.
Tonight we ate locally because of the jet lag and rain but sadly couldn’t get in the nice restaurant Jane had found. Instead we ended up back at the one where the two girls were out on the street in the rain trying to drag people in. We all know that’s not a great idea but here we were. It was empty apart from us, freezing cold and with a very Japanese menu. Jane decided she really wasn’t upto eating anything so Joyce, Enid and I ordered ‘Yakitori’ chicken skewers and French Fries! The choice was between thighs, tails (bottoms?) and ‘other’. I chose thighs so why on earth Enid and Joyce opted for ‘other’ I don’t know! Anyway, Enid really didn’t like it or recognise it as chicken whilst Joyce declared that it had been ‘velveted’ and was so delicious that she finished off Enid’s. Thank goodness the beer was good.
