This year for my birthday we visited Tokyo 🙂
After Christmas 2018, when we went snowboarding in Niseko, Hokkaido, we had decided that we wanted to go back and see what the some of the rest of the country was like. Tokyo seemed like the obvious first choice.
Our flights to Japan went via Sydney. Thankfully there wasn’t a long stop over! We just a little bit of waiting in the airports departure lounge watching the rugby (England vs Australia. England won 40 to 16).
Arriving in Tokyo (Sunday)
Arriving into the airport, we were tired but excited to see what a week in Tokyo would bring. Getting through immigration was quick and we were soon on the train into the city. Everything was oddly easy, yet stressful.
Me outside the ICI hotel. It was a lovely place to spend the holiday, with a bar and free hot drinks for the people staying there, whats not to love 🙂
We couldn’t check into our room properly until 3pm, so dropped our bags off at the hotel for storage and then went off for a wander about in the area we were staying; Akihabara. It’s a district known as the centre of modern Japanese popular culture. The area has lots of shops selling electronic goods as well as arcades and many, many maid cafes! Apparently back in the early days of technology, the gamers used to go to the area to get new upgrades for their computers. Now it just feels busy and sort of like sensory overload; there are noises and lights coming from every direction!
After exhausting Akihabara, we went out a little bit further to a place called Ueno. The numerous streets are like a rabbit warren, theres a lovely park, and just loads of people. We spent ages just walking, people spotting and seeing the little nooks and crannies of the area.
We had almost a whole day of wandering around and seeing the sights before we could get properly checked in, so we ended up doing a LOT of walking. I’m not sure that my feet have ever been so sore!
Once we could get into our room, we went straight up and got changed…we’d been in the same clothes for almost 24 hours, so it was quite nice to get out of them and shower.
The room was so cute (or should I say Kawaii?). Tiny, but really what do you need in a hotel room when you’re sightseeing around a city?!
There was a double bed up against the wall, and then the rest of the space was either the walking space or the storage space. I really liked it. The room reminded me of dorm rooms from university!
There was also a little bathroom, complete with talking toilet and teeny tiny bath. I love Japan 🙂
Asakusa
That evening we met up with some of James’ brothers friends (who were in the city for the Rugby World Cup) and watched a rugby match in what can only be described as the smallest pub I’ve ever set foot in. I think there was space for about twelve people!
It was out in another area of the city called Asakusa, an area commonly referred to as Tokyo’s traditional cultural centre. As soon as you get off of the train you can see why. You are right in the thick of it, surrounded by old buildings, temples and lots of people wearing kimonos! Everything feels like it’s probably not changed in hundreds of years.
I would have liked to walk around and see more of the area, but we needed food and had other plans. We ended up eating in what looked like a little hole in the wall restaurant. As we’d only just got to Japan, were fairly jet lagged, and weren’t feeling extra brave, we opted for a restaurant with a menu in English. It ended up being epic food!
James had a dish called Okonomiyaki. It’s a sort of savoury pancake. Searching the internet i have found that the name comes from the word okonomi, meaning “how you like” or “what you like”, and yaki meaning “cooked”. I had a Beef Kofta with potato slices. It was amazing!
Scenery
We begun the first full day with a trip to the Kyu Shiba Rikyu Gardens. It’s one of two surviving Edo Period clan gardens in modern Tokyo. That basically means that the gardens are very, very old!
After the land was reclaimed (from the sea) between 1655 and 1658, the site was used as an official samurai style residence of the Tokugawa shogunate. When it was first built, the garden had a beach to Tokyo Bay, but as the city expanded the sea was reclaimed and reclaimed, and so now there is no connection between the garden and the sea.
Lots has happened to the gardens over the years, parts have been destroyed and then rebuilt, and then finally the gardens were donated to Tokyo City in 1926. Since then the gardens have been completely rebuilt and designated as a place of scenic beauty and special historic interest.
Despite the garden being right next to the bustle of the city, it felt calm and quiet. There is a lovely little tea house in the middle of the garden, although we didn’t get to visit as it was very busy.
Shopping
Later on, once we’d had enough of scenery and culture, we ventured to Ginza. Ginza is the shopping district of Tokyo. Here you can find a shop or a department store section for any brand you can think of!
We went straight to Uniqlo, our favourite Japanese clothing store, and spent all of the money 🙂 Following an epic jaunt in Uniqlo, we had to find me some shoes. I had been wearing the same Converse for the last few days and as they have zero insole support, my feet were not happy.
And that is how we ended up in the Birkenstock shop 🙂
For those of you who don’t know me personally, or don’t know James, let me explain something: James hates Birkenstocks with a fire that burns deep.
Anyway, I bought a pair of sandals. They were amazing on my poor stressed out feet and I ended up wearing them for the rest of the trip. With socks. Gangsta.
That evening we took the train to Shibuya to see the crossing. I hear that a trip to Tokyo wouldn’t be right without it. The crossing, one of the busiest (if not the busiest) crossings in the world, is chaos, yet strangely organised. We stood and watched the traffic lights change a few times and then ventured across ourselves.
We found a really cool little ramen place where you order through a vending machine (on the outside of the restaurant), then take the ticket to the front counter and then sit down. Your food gets cooked and brought to you at a table. It was very good ramen!
Harajuku – Shibuya
I feel like a trip to Tokyo is wasted if you don’t get to Harajuku. It’s basically where you go to get that cutesy, schoolgirl inspired, Japanese style of atire that you see on the tv, in movies and in Anime. Our second day was spent walking round the Harajuku and Shibuya areas, taking in the atmosphere…and shopping.
We begun at Harajuku train station, looking down Takeshita Street, the main teen fashion street. It was carnage! There were teenagers everywhere, and music, and bright colours (and umbrellas as it was heaving down), but it was amazing! I had read about this place in so many of the travel guides, blogs and websites, that I was a bit overwhelmed at first!
The first place we went was the cat cafe, Mocha!
You go in, swap your shoes for slippers, and then go see some cats. We chose to also have sone cat food thrown in, so we could feed them. It ended up being a very expensive ten minute visit though!
Most of the cats were munchkin cats, a breed i’d never actually seen in the flesh. They look much stranger in real life. They looked very well kept, they had shiny fur and they didn’t look too fat or too thin. However, they didn’t seem right either. They were very sleepy and slow until we got the food out. I’m not completely convinced that they’re not being sedated.
We walked down Takeshita Dori and looked in all of the quirky shops, stopping for a lovely hot drink in a twee little cafe halfway down.
There was just a little old man and a little old woman, no other customers, and no staff. It was really pleasant. The place was up on the second floor, so we sat in the window and watched the world go by. It was lovely to just watch the sea of people below.
The hot chocolate was life changing! So creamy and sweet. I really enjoyed the combination of the sugar rush from the cheesecake as well as the sugar rush from the hot chocolate!
Nippori fabric town
Another stop we made through the week was a place called Nipori Fabric Town. Basically its THE place to go to buy anything that even resembles sewing or haberdashery goods. I was in my element, but we didn’t stay long as i was on the look for something specific…waterproofing seam tape.
Waterproofing seam tape is what gets ironed onto the inside of seams of an item like a raincoat or an umbrella. It’s there to prevent the water from getting it. I haven’t managed to locate any in New Zealand, so as we were visiting Tokyo, i thought it might be a good place to look. It did not disappoint.
DisneySea
For my birthday, we visited DisneySea. Yay!
There are two Disney parks in Tokyo; DisneyLand and DisneySea. DisneyLand is the Tokyo equivalent of the typical Disney Magic Kingdom park and DisneySea is a Disney park set with a nautical exploration theme to it.
There are seven “ports of call”. You begin in Mediterranean Harbour which then opens up to six more nautically themed ports: American Waterfront, Lost River Delta, Port Discovery, Mermaid Lagoon, Arabian Coast, and Mysterious Island.
The idea for the park apparently came about when Disney wanted to create a second theme park in Southern California called Port Disney at around the same time as EuroDisney. The EuroDisney development ate up a lot of money, and the idea was shelved, only to be passed on to the Oriental Land Company to expand their resort in the early 2000’s.
According to Wikipedia;
Owned by The Oriental Land Company, which licenses Disney characters and themes from The Walt Disney Company, Tokyo DisneySea attracted an estimated 14.651 million visitors in 2018, making it the fourth-most-visited theme park in the world.
Wikipedia, 2019
It was amazing. It was much more Disney than I could have ever had imagined.
The weather was rubbish, it heaved down for the entire day. I mean there was so much rain that I fully expected Noah to float by in his Ark! It was ridiculous. We still had a great day, despite the rain. Once you’re drenched its easier to just go with it!
The park was probably half empty, and so this meant that the rides that had queues outside were very, very short. We managed to get on all of the rides that wanted, some we even went on more than once 🙂
The rest of the trip was spent doing random sightseeing and then travelling back home. We even managed to get into one of the photo booths and get some Japanese style photos done.
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