Ginza
Another early morning due to jet lag. We decided to head to Ginza, which was really near our hotel. However, we soon realized that Ginza is very dead at 8:30AM on a Sunday. Whoops. I did get some nice pictures of the newly renovated Kabuki-za, which is a famous kabuki theater in Tokyo.
Kabuki-za Theater
We tried to get breakfast from a vending machine restaurant that sold soba, but we couldn’t figure out how to use the machine to get our tickets. The English sign did not help at all; it said something like,
“1) Choose what you want and get a ticket.
2) Give your ticket to the waiter inside.”
etc
We were like, “how do you even get the ticket in the first place???”. It was really maddening. Anyways, we decided to go to a ramen place across the street instead. It was ok, not particularly memorable.
Vending machines at restaurants generally look something like this
Tokyo Station
After breakfast, we walked through Ginza a bit and eventually got to Tokyo Station, which is the busiest station in Japan. It was so huge! I think only Tokyo Station and Shinjuku station have the shinkansens in Tokyo. Anyways, I read somewhere that they still had some of the original building in Tokyo Station, which we found. It was originally completely built of brick, but now only the west side is brick.
Inside the west side of Tokyo Station
Tasty bento!
Shibuya
Then it was off to Shibuya to meet my college friend Cristina, who was studying abroad in Tokyo at the time. We met at the Hachiko statue, which I realized is actually really small and kind of hard to find, even though a lot of people use it as a meeting spot.
The infamous Hachiko statue
We crossed the giant Shibuya crossing! Which Cristina told me was apparently not that crowded (I think it was not as bad as in this picture)
And then we went inside Shibuya 109 for a little bit. It’s a giant shopping mall, but otherwise not that different from other shopping malls in Asia. Asian shopping malls are interesting; they tend to be really tall and have a bunch of small stores one after another. It’s not like American malls, which have a lot of walking space. The shopping malls in Japan are actually pretty similar to China.
During our walk through town, we saw some ad trucks blaring music for some new album. I was so confused when I first heard music coming from the streets – it never occurred to me that a giant truck would be playing it.
Something like this, though not as big and not AKB. The link has more amusing trucks.
Harajuku
Eventually, we made our way to Harajuku. I was hoping to see some cosplayers since it was a Sunday, but it seemed that we were there too early (about 12PM). So we went to Meiji Shrine first. It was pretty cool, although after a while, all shrines kind of look the same.
Me and Cristina at the shrine
Lots of sake barrels as offerings
After Meiji Shrine, we wandered around Harajuku trying to find somewhere to eat. Well also I was trying to find the WE shop, which is a shop run by the talent agency Watanabe Entertainment that sells bromides for actors in D-Boys and D2. D-boys is a male actors group, and D2 is their sister group. I am a tad obsessed with D2 at the moment… so I was curious about where this WE shop was. I knew it was somewhere around Omotesando Hills, which is a big shiny shopping mall. But then after we walked past it, we still couldn’t find it. Turns out, it was down a side street across from Omotesando Hills, around the corner from a Ben and Jerry’s (which still exist?? but not in the Bay Area, sob), and next to a Lawson’s convenience store. Somehow, I hadn’t realized that the “shop” is actually just a truck, which is just like in the picture from the Watanabe Entertainment blog that I had seen before. Anyways, I was too embarrassed to buy anything, but now I know where to get new D2 bromides, next time I’m in Tokyo.
Hm, somehow I thought it was more like a truck when I visited. But I originally thought it was going to be a small store before I visited, not just an outside stand.
Meanwhile, we were still looking for lunch. I think it took like 30 minutes, but eventually we decided on this restaurant near Omotesando. It had Korean-like Japanese food (at least, I think it was still Japanese). Things like tofu soup and so on. Unfortunately, I didn’t take pictures, but I think Cristina and my boyfriend had a bento with fish, and I had a bento with pork and tofu soup. Or something like that. It was decent, but didn’t stand out much in my mind.
Oh yeah, and as for the cosplayers I mentioned earlier, somehow the gathering never materialized, even though I read that they used to gather on Sundays by this bridge near Yoyogi Park/Meiji Shrine. But I Googled some info about it yesterday, and apparently people don’t do that anymore, although there definitely were some cosplayers walking around that day, mostly lolitas.
I’m going to stop here for today – this post is actually a lot longer than I thought it was going to be. Next is Shinjuku and Odaiba.
gybl travels 