Tokyo, Japan: 10th – 12th Jan 2010

On Sunday we flew for 6 hours from Singapore to Tokyo, where we’ll spend 4 nights. We’re staying in a hotel around the corner from Shinjuku station, the busiest train station on the planet, which has 3 million people passing through every day. The weather is cold, about 4 degrees Celsius. I’d say it’s a bit nippy, but Matt says that’s inappropriate in this country.


Yesterday we went to Yogogi park to visit the Meiji-Jingu temple. We’re really lucky with our timings as it’s the second Monday of the year which is ‘coming of age’ day - that meant loads of 20 year old girls dress in traditional kimonos and visit the temple for a blessing – a great sight.



We also saw several wedding parties pass by, with the brides in their freaky white headgear, looking like a cross between the Ku-Klux Clan and Moomintroll.




We then walked through the park and came across an archery contest with loads of people dressed in traditional warrior garb. They all seemed to take it very seriously and a reverent silence prevailed…we also visited the treasure house of one of the Emperors. I’d read that he was very debauched and had 15 children by 5 women, none of which were his wife - having seen her portrait in the treasure house I can see why…Jeez, we’ve never seen such a large chin (even on Jimmy Hill)!


After that we visited city hall, which has an observation deck on the 45th floor with amazing views over Tokyo. We were surprised by how large the city is – it stretches as far as the eye can see, and although the inner wards have a population of 8 million, similar to London, the entire conurbation has 23 million people making it one of the largest cities in the world. Mt Fuji can normally be seen from the tower but it was too cloudy to see it unfortunately.

In the evening we went to Ginza, the premier shopping area and had dinner followed by a movie – Avatar in 3D, very good!

Today was a bit of a wash-out, literally. It was raining all day. We had planned to visit the imperial palace (I love a good palace blah blah blah…) but we’ve decided to wait for more clement weather tomorrow. We changed our plans for indoor pursuits i.e. museums – only to find that they were all closed as yesterday was a public holiday…strange!

Tokyo is very cool, very hi-tech and very confusing. It’s difficult to find your way around, especially when you can’t read any signs as they don’t use our Latin alphabet, but we’ve just about managed.

Many of the restaurants are very expensive, and for the cheaper ones you often have to buy tokens for your meal, before ordering it – which is impossible if you can’t read the language. The Japanese have come up with an idea to assist – plastic food displays – we simply point to the plastic food we think we might like and they quickly serve up the real version, sometimes resulting in a delicious meal, sometimes not! We’ve managed OK though, alternating between local cuisine cafes (yum!) and McDonalds/KFC – We know it’s naughty, but I read that the Imperial Family alternate their meals between Japanese food and Western food, so we can sit in Macy D’s knowing we’re in illustrious company!