Hello all! In this post, I (Katie) will be talking about our trip to Tokyo! Last weekend Ryne and I went to Tokyo for about four days to do some sightseeing and visit with my dad, who was here on business.
Here’s Pop enjoying the Tokyo boat tour. 🙂
We left Izushi on Thursday night. The long, long journey went like this:
- Bus from Izushi to Toyooka City—25 minutes
- Train from Toyooka City to Osaka (with 2 transfers)—3.5 hours
- Overnight bus from Osaka to Tokyo, Shinjuku Station—7.5 hours
- Train from Shinjuku to Tachikawa (where the hotel was)—40 minutes
Plus whatever time we spent waiting for trains and walking here and there. I don’t even want to know what the total transit time was.
We were actually pleasantly surprised with the night bus from Osaka to Tokyo. The ride was really smooth, they kept the bus nice and dark, and the seats were much more comfortable than expected.
The seats look like this.
They’re pretty cushy and soft, they recline pretty far, they have a leg rest and a footrest, they come with a blanket and a pillow (well, sort of a pillow), and there is even a privacy hood you can pull over your face (spared me a fair amount of embarrassment… we all know what I look like when I fall asleep with my head back in a car).  So, overall, it wasn’t so bad!
Before leaving for Tokyo we made out a list of places we wanted to visit, and we actually ended up making it to the majority of them, thanks to my dad and our friend Haruna.
Like I said before, one thing we did was go on a boat tour with my dad. We got to go on this crazy looking futuristic boat that was designed by a Japanese comic book artist.
SO COOL!!!
The tour was really great—a nice relaxing ride in a super cool boat and some great views of the city. Here are some pictures:
The golden building is the Asahi Beer headquarters (its supposed to look like a beer with foam on the top!), and the skinny building to the left of it is the Tokyo Sky Tree, which was just completed this year.
And, of course, there was a Denny’s.
Wait, what?
After the boat tour, we went with my dad and some of his coworkers (such nice people!) to Asakusa, a ward of Tokyo that has a lot of interesting things to sell and a huge temple called SensĹŤji.
Leading up to the temple, there are tons and tons of shops selling food and souvenirs and a bunch of other interesting things.
Not the first time we’ve seen weird masks in Japan.
I was surprised to find out that this giant thing is actually just a gate, not the actual temple. Wow!
Hi, Ryne!
A really big, beautiful temple! Notice the tiny people in the lower left corner. And it was one of the only ones I’ve been to that doesn’t require you to take off your shoes before going inside. I guess it would probably be impossible to make that work there because it’s such a high traffic area.
It was also one of the only temples that allowed pictures inside. YES!!!
A really cool pagoda off to the left side of the temple.
The next day, we went to the Meiji Jingu shrine in Shibuya with Haruna. 🙂
And here we are at the shrine! Got a security guard to take a quick picture for us.
An adorable little girl posing for pictures outside of the Shrine.
We also spent a fair amount of time in Shinjuku, Shibuya, and Harajuku…words just cannot express how much fun we had there! There are a million and one clothing stores, from 9 floor department stores to boutiques no bigger than your kitchen, in addition to tons and tons and tons of restaurants and shops. We were so busy having fun in these places that we didn’t take a lot of pictures, so these next pictures are about half from our camera and half from google.
Harajuku and Shibuya are the really fashionable districts of Tokyo, and it seems like it’s pretty common to see people with pretty extreme outfits like in the picture above. We definitely saw a bunch of people dressed like this!
We also found this really strange mannequin in Harajuku.
The Hachiko statue! We saw it. 🙂
And the Colonel. He was all dressed up in his Santa outfit more than 2 months early.
For anyone who doesn’t already know this, it seems to be fairly common in Japan to eat KFC on Christmas. They have special Christmas meals and you can order your dinner up to 2 months in advance.
This is the drink menu from a really interesting themed restaurant that Haruna took us to. It’s called The Lock Up, and its a prison themed restaurant where you eat your meal in a cell. When you enter the restaurant you have to go down a dark, haunted-house-like hallway with a few things to spook you (me and Haruna got our biggest scare when we saw a group of people leaving…oops). You are led to your table by a girl dressed up like a prison guard who handcuffs one person from your group for the walk to the cell, and at one point during the meal there is sort of a show where the lights go off, scary music comes on, and the staff, dressed in costumes, runs around shaking your cell doors. It was a pretty fun experience!
Dr. Tremmel mixes his drink.
We also went to the electronics district, Akihabara, and to the Ghibli Museum (Studio Ghibli is an animation studio that makes some really fantastic movies–we love them!).
Both of these pictures are from Akihabara. They have any kind of electronic device you could possibly think of here. I also got a really good caramel crepe here–you see a fair amount of French stuff in Tokyo.
These last two pictures are from the roof of the Ghibli museum. Unfortunately, the museum only allows pictures outside, so I don’t have any photos of the inside. It was a really fun museum that felt more like a visit to some very eclectic and creative person’s house than a visit to a museum. There were three rooms that were set up to look like rooms in someone’s house, with books stacked everywhere and sketches tacked up all over the wall. There was another really cool room that was full of interactive animation displays, and we also got to see a short film that you can only see at the museum in a cool little theater that is built into the museum building. Overall, it was a fantastic museum! Would love to go there again.
That’s all I’ve got for our trip to Tokyo! We really had an awesome time there, and are looking forward to our next trip!!
Nihonward Bound 