Winter vacation in Tokyo

So when winter break was coming up I knew I should make plans to go somewhere since really they only like you to take your vacation time when classes aren't in session and this is one of the only times of the year when classes are out, but I put off thinking about it for a while and didn't really have any plans. There were some places I had it mind up in Tohoku, but they would mostly be a big pain to get to without a car, so eventually I settled on Tokyo, since I could get around it easily without a car, I had already draw up some plans for it a while ago since I intended to visit Japan anyway even if I didn't get into JET, and it's just one of the most obvious places to visit when you're in Japan.

So I bought the tickets for the shinkansen, even though a plane probably would have been faster and cost about the same, just because I hadn't been on the shinkansen yet and wanted to try it. I booked the Tohoku shinkansen down because it's the fastest line in Japan (320km/h), but I booked the Joetsu shinkansen coming back because it's a little cheaper and shorter.

So I woke up at 5:30 on Thursday to eat a quick breakfast before my local train left at 7:00 for Akita station, which is an hour and a half trip, then my shinkansen left about 9:15. You couldn't really tell how fast it was going, by looking at the scenery go by in the window, because I guess once you're going that fast it's hard to tell the difference between 100mph or 200mph, but looking further into the distance you could see just how fast the train would pass by an entire town which must be at least a couple miles wide, so that's about the only thing that really gave away the speed. The other interesting thing about the train was that when it passed another train you could feel it shift a little to the side because of the air pressure between the two trains.

So I got into Tokyo station at about 1:00. Even though my hotel wasn't near Tokyo station, I had a reservation to tour the Diet building (Japan's parliament) at 2:45, which is the only time they have an English tour, so I figured I would get into Tokyo station, spend the meantime wandering through the Imperial gardens, and then head down to the Diet building. So I stuck my luggage in a coin locker and toured the gardens for a little bit. It's not so much flower gardens as just a sort of park, except it all used to be a fortress, so there's a moat and giant stone fortifications and old Japanese-style wooden barracks and stuff all over, so that was all pretty cool and I wish I'd had some more time to explore it all. There's a little museum or two in there too that I didn't have time for either.

From there I walked down to the Diet building. There's a ton of joggers that run around the whole Imperial palace complex; for some reason I guess it's the big jogging spot in Tokyo. There's these markers in the sidewalk every 0.1km and each of them is marked with a prefecture of Japan, so all together they mark out about 5km, so I wonder if it's just that convenient measuring system that makes it popular for jogging.

 

The Diet building is probably one of the less inspired parliamentary architectures in the world, but it's a bit nicer on the inside. There really wasn't much to the actual tour, and it was only a tour of one of the Houses (the House of Representatives, but not the House of Councillors), but it was still a nice little tour nonetheless. There's actually internal mail chutes every once in a while in the hallways that they were showing us and that they specifically pointed out because they're one of the two things in the building not made in Japan. The stained glass was made somewhere else (England I think?) and these mail chutes were made in... Rochester, NY! But the only place we were allowed to take pictures was in the actual House chamber, so they didn't let me take a picture of the company's plaque on the chute.

So after the Diet building I went back to Tokyo station and got my bag and took the Yamanote line (in the right direction! Anime has taught me to watch out for that!) up to Akihabara station which my hotel was nearby. One of the other things that's always been on my bucket list for Japan was to stay at a capsule hotel, so that's what I booked for this trip. This one was actually really nice, with a nice shared bath in the basement level and a little cafe on the second floor, and the capsules on the upper floors. I didn't want to disturb anyone with the camera noise, so you can check out some pictures of the place on their website. (Phones in Japan have a 'feature' where if there's a Japanese SIM card in them the camera always makes a sound when you take a photo, to discourage people (guys) from taking clandestine upskirt pics.)

After checking into the hotel there wasn't much touristy stuff left to do after dark (I was saving Akihabara for its own day), so I figured I'd take advantage of the fact that I was in a city for a change and went down to the movie theater to watch Rogue One (in English, of course, with Japanese subtitles). Since Nihonbashi was on the way, I took a little side trip to visit that. It used to be considered the center of the entire highway system of Japan back in the day, so there's a 0km marker in the middle of the bridge, but since it's in the middle of traffic I couldn't take a picture of it, so you'll just have to make do with the one from Wikipedia.

Rogue One was pretty cool (although the movies in this town are a bit expensive), but afterwards I just went back to the hotel and crashed because: 1) I got up really early that day and only caught up on my sleep a little on the train, and 2) because I was getting up early again the next day.

So on Friday my plans were originally to visit Asakusa in the morning (specifically Kaminarimon, Nakamise-dori, and the Skytree, but it ended up looking like there really wasn't going to be time that day, so I got up at 5:45, had a quick breakfast at the Denny's nearby, and headed over to Asakusa station to catch a 7:20 train out to Nikko. It was about two hours to get out there, and then a bit of a walk outside of town to the actual temple/shrine complexes (there were tourist busses, but I felt like walking through the town and looking at the shops along the way), but then I spent at least two hours visiting a bunch of those, and being my first shrine visit since the New Year's, Tosho-gu ended up being my first hatsumode shrine.

These are the only pics I got from Futarasan Shrine:

 
This is Rinno-ji Temple (lots of it was under restoration):

And these are from Tosho-gu:

The famous three monkeys had just been restored.

The mausoleum of Tokugawa Ieyasu

After I was done at Nikko and got back to the station at about 1:00, I took another two hour train ride back in the direction of Tokyo to a suburb called Washinomiya. This place has also been on my Japan bucket list for a few years because the shrine in this town was used in the anime Lucky Star, and after the anime came out it became a huge place of pilgrimage for otaku. I wondered how much that had died down eight years later, but when I got there the place was packed, even though it was already a few days after New Year's, and sure enough there were still a bunch of Lucky Star and anime themed ema hanging up. I have no idea if the shrine was always that popular before that anime came out, or if maybe they just included it in the anime because it was already a well-known shrine, but either way there was a line of cars waiting to get into the parking lot the whole time I was there.

Compare

The path leading up to the temple was lined with food stalls like for a festival, although most of them were covered with tarps and only a few were still open this late after New Year's. I was making this my official hatsumode shrine though, so I bought my o-mamori and hamaya arrow and o-mikuji here. Then on the way out I bought some okonomiyaki at one of the stalls that was still open, so that was my first real okonomiyaki (not counting the one's that I've made myself at home). Also, the souvenir shop right outside the shrine was selling some Lucky Star themed goods, so I bought a little bag of rice with some of the characters on the package, just because. Afterwards it was about an hour ride back into Tokyo and there wasn't any time left to do Asakusa, so I figured I'd save that for the next morning.

I went back to the hotel and, since my knees were killing me for some reason (yeah, I'd been doing a lot of walking, but I've always done a lot of walking; did the mountain climb a few months ago really do that big a number on them?), took my first shared bath in Japan. It wasn't as bad or embarrassing as I was afraid it would be, so it ended up being good preparation for whenever my first onsen visit happens to be. And of course they had a milk vending machine in the hallway since that's the traditional thing to drink after a stint in the public bath, so I had to chug one of those to complete the experience. Then, freshened up after my hiking around all day, I went out to the theater again, this time to watch Kimi no Na wa.

I hadn't even heard of the movie before I got to Japan, but after I got here I seemed to hear about it a lot. It came out way back in August and is the fourth highest grossing movie ever in Japan (behind only Titanic, Frozen, and Spirited Away, another anime movie) and there's a song from it that became super-popular here that not only would you hear on the radio (for example, in the supermarket), but even my middle school wind ensemble (need I remind you, the best middle school wind ensemble in all of Tohoku) played a rendition of it, so I'd been wanting to see it ever since I heard all this about it. I had planned to go up to Akita to watch it some weekend, but the only theater it was still playing at wasn't near the station, but at some further away mall, so it would have been a full day trip to get out to watch it, so I never did. But then when I was looking at the showtimes for Rogue One, I saw that Kimi no Na wa was still playing, months later, at this theater, so I finally got my chance to watch it.

I understood a lot more of it than I expected to, probably a good 80%, and it was mainly just unimportant side conversations I missed out on, and a lot of what was going on was transmitted through the imagery (worth thousands of words), unlike a lot of the times I try to watch raw anime and lots of what's going on is transmitted only through conversations between the characters that I only understand about 50% or so of, and it's the least important 50%, so in the end I probably got about 95% of the enjoyment out of Kimi no Na wa as I would have if it had had English subs.

It was a great movie. A lot of it was a juxtiposition of life in Tokyo and life in a little inaka (rural) town in Japan, so it really mirrored a lot of what I was doing, living in a little inaka town, but visiting Tokyo here for the first time. And the setting for the rural town was supposed to be somewhere in Gifu prefecture, and the crater lake featured in the movie was similarly supposed to be drawn from a lake around there, but since the lake looked really similar to another lake in Akita prefecture, and a train company in Akita near that lake highlighted the fact that one of their stations strongly resembles the rural train platform that showed up for a second in the movie, it was easy to imagine that it took place in Akita rather than Gifu and made it feel even closer to my situation in Japan, so that contributed a lot to my enjoyment of it too.

And after the movie I crashed early again to try to catch up on my sleep.

I got to sleep in the next day, but was still able to get up early since I had gone to bed so early. Most of the stores in Akihabara didn't open until later in the day, so I started the day by going back to Asakusa and seeing Sensoji Temple and Kaminarimon. I saw the Skytree while I was there too, but didn't have the time to actually go up it. And I got a picture of the Golden Poop.

The Golden Poop

Afterwards I went back to Akihabara to spend my day there. I didn't really have any concrete plans beyond the names of a few stores to go to and some items to look out for, so basically I just wandered the streets and popped into any store that looked interesting. The one thing I wanted to make absolutely sure to buy though was some electrical adapters from three to two prong plugs so I could plug my laptop into outlets properly without having to rely on the silly extension cord workaround I had been relying on until now. Being the Electric Town, this was the place to buy an item like that, so I made sure to pick up a couple of those.

After spending the morning in Akihabara I went to a cat cafe for lunch. Unfortunately (but understandably, since there are probably health regulations against such a thing) they only served drinks, but I still got to hang out and play with a bunch of cats for a half an hour. After that I went over to Jimbocho, which is the bookstore district. Literally almost every store on the main street was a bookstore of one sort or another, but only on one side of the street, and the reason for that is that's the side that doesn't get any sun, which would damage the books. So I picked up a Japanese dictionary (not a Japanese-English one, but just a regular native-language Japanese dictionary) and a Japanese version of Alice in Wonderland.

The Edo-Tokyo Museum closes late on Saturdays, so it had been my plan to go over there that night, so I went over to the neighborhood it's in and had dinner, but because my knees were still killing me and even with it's closing late I would have been a bit constrained for time, so I decided to skip it for that night and just went back to the hotel. Considering the state of my knees I figured the best thing to do would be to altogether skip my plans for Sunday of walking all over western Tokyo (Meiji Jinja, Shibuya, Harajuku, Omotesando, etc.) and instead go to the Edo-Tokyo Museum (and the Tokyo National Museum if there was time) and also visit a maid cafe in Akihabara for lunch, since I didn't get around to it that day.

So back at the hotel I sat at a table in the second floor common area and started writing the first half of this post (I didn't want to do it in the capsule because of the keyboard noise) and after a few minutes a young guy came in and ended up sitting across from me and starting a conversation, so I had a mostly successful conversation with him for about ten minutes. After that and writing out the first two days worth of this post, I went back to the capsule and just watched a little Youtube before going to bed.

The last day I got up early without an alarm again and checked out of the hotel and put my bag in a coin locker at the station before going over to the Edo-Tokyo Museum right after it opened in the morning. This was a great museum and took a couple hours to go through. Lots of English descriptions, almost as much as there was Japanese, and lots of dioramas and interactive exhibits, so great for families too. Half of the museum is Edo Tokyo during the whole Tokugawa period from when it was just a little town and first became the capital and up to right when the country opened up to the West, and then the other half of the museum is the development of the city into modern-day Tokyo since then (and it's constant redevelopment due to constant destruction by earthquake, firebombing, etc.).

There was a special exhibition too of the Warring States period, but it was mostly just portraits of daimyos and scrolls of legal texts and long descriptions of them in Japanese with very little English, and it was extremely crowded besides, so even though that made up most of the cost of the joint ticket that I had bought, all that, combined with the fact that it was already starting to get a little late because the general exhibit was just so big and had already taken me so long to go through, I just breezed through the special exhibition quickly before heading back to Akihabara.

Now there's maid cafes all over Akihabara, and more than one chain with multiple locations, so it's a big business these days. Apparently a couple of them try to keep some English-speaking maids around, since visiting maid cafes has become more of a tourist attraction these days, but it wasn't a big concern of mine to find any English speakers since it would be a good chance to practice my Japanese. There's a couple of them right outside the station, which was good since I didn't want to walk far with my knees in the state that they were,  and they all have maids out on the streets handing out fliers and trying to draw in customers, so I just went out of the station and went up to the first maid I saw and she took me up to her cafe.

Turns out she was the one with the best English (which is probably why they had her out on the street, to lure in the English-speakers), so she gave me a quick rundown of the procedures and the menu, and after I ordered went back out on the street. There were a couple other maids that stayed inside with the couple other customers and who didn't speak English, so when the one brought out my food she was relieved to find out that I spoke Japanese ("tasukarimashita"). The staple of maid cafes is omurice with whatever you want written on it with ketchup, so of course I ordered that and just let her put whatever she wanted on it.

They also had a smartphone at the counter plugged into the speaker system playing various anime and Vocaloid music, which I recognized a surprising amount of and kept naming off to the maid who was good enough at her job to act impressed.

I left a little before my hour was up just to make sure I had enough time to catch my train, because I still had to head back to Asakusa and buy some kind of omiyage (souvenir) for the office. There was one shop that had a good selection of various types of little crackers and things that I had gone by the other day, so I went back there and picked up a box of little crackers that were wrapped up to look like little dolls. I hadn't gotten them the day before because I had limited storage space at the hotel and in my bags. So after grabbing that I went back to the station and collected my bag and waited for the train.

And then for dinner on the way back I had an ekiben.

In the end the capsule hotel ended up being pretty good, except that there's only a thin screen on the front of the capsule for a door, because there's apparently some hotel regulation in the section of the city that I was in that's never been updated for capsule hotels, so they're not allowed to have a lock on them. So it was a pain having to store my bag in the separate lockers they have on the first floor rather than just keeping it in the capsule the whole time, especially since the locker was so narrow that it barely fit. And the other issue with that was that with just the thin screen, you can hear everyone else coming in and out of the hallway, getting into their capsules, snoring all night, etc., so that sucked the first night, but I was able to sleep better with it the next couple nights.

And the big observation I had about Tokyo was all the English that's around everywhere. Most signs are translated into English, all the trains have announcements in English, all the ticket machines have an English option (including the ticket machine at the movie theater), and all the restaurants have English menus. And not even just English, but even Chinese and Korean are on a lot of the signs at train stations. And then at all the stores and restaurants they always assume that they'll have to talk to you in English, and sometimes even if you say something to them in Japanese they won't even notice that you used Japanese, but just assume that whatever came out of you mouth was some English that they couldn't understand. Quite different from little Kisakata here. So if you ever wanted to visit Tokyo but worry that you don't know any Japanese, don't worry.