Joaquim Rocha
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Two Weeks in Japan, Part 6: Tokyo vol. II

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    Joaquim Rocha
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  • Principal Software Engineering Manager at Microsoft

This article is part of the “Two Weeks in Japan” series and follows Two Weeks in Japan, Part 6: Tokyo vol. I

For our second day in Tokyo, August the 19th 2012, we first visited the Sony Building in the fancy district of Ginza. The building has several floors, each one with a bunch of Sony gadgets. It is not very interesting unless you’re into technology and you like Sony.

Tokyo Imperial Palace

After that, we tried to visit the Kabuki-za theater nearby but it was, unfortunately, under construction so we had lunch in a rāmen place nearby. After lunch, we visited the Imperial Palace in the heart of Tokyo. Of course we could not enter the actual palace but just seeing the surroundings is nice, especially because I remembered the place from some documentaries I had watched. In there, another very Japanese anecdote happened: we had stoped for a minute (it was hot as hell), and when we were already leaving, we realized we had lost our map (just a regular paper map but it had our itinerary) so we went back to the little security guard cabin to ask if they saw it and they had it! They saw it flying around, picked it up and kept it in case the owner came back 🙂

Kyoto's Imperial Palace
Yours truly in front of the Tokyo Imperial Palace

Tokyo Tower

Tokyo Tower
The next step in our trip schedule was to visit the Tokyo Tower, and go there by foot. It seemed to be so close to the Imperial Palace in the map but with the heat and our tired feet, although it took us just about 1 hour to get there, it felt like much more. We might have waited around 15 minutes in the line before going up. With 333 meters (2 meters more than the Eiffel Tower), the view over Tokyo was awesome and it even had a window in the floor so you can stand on it and imagine what’d happen to you if you fell 🙂
View from the Tokyo Tower

Yoyogi Park

After the Tokyo Tower, we headed to the Yoyogi Park. This park is world famous for the rockabilly style dancers performing in there but this wasn’t the only interesting thing that it had. It is very big and a lot of people were doing different activities in there, from a drums group, to lousy music bands and group gimnastics or dancing. When we were watching the rockabillies’ performing and taking their photo, there was a drunk japanese old man taking photos of western tourists, including Helena’s. Later, walking through the park, we saw how he would try to participate in every activity he passed by. He was kind of screwing the group dancing session so what did the group leaders do? Instead of telling him to go away, they kept moving the group of around 20 people away from the guy, several times. Oh, and the guy was drunk and drinking beer can after beer can but he had a bag of trash with him and kept all the cans, never littering. Gotta love Japanese education.

Rockabillies in Yoyogi Park

Roppongi Hills

The night was finished in the rich area of Roppongi Hills. It was like a fancy mall, with expensive stores, live music and restaurants here and there. We went the cheap way instead, got our food from 7-Eleven and had dinner in a nice square with chairs and tables that didn’t belong to any restaurant.

Roppongi Hills

After dinner we went to the hotel, a different one than the previous couple of days. It was called Chiyoda Inn, located in Arakawa and it was a bit more expensive (about 85 €/night) but much better. The next day would be a very special one to me and any anime fan: we would visit Akihabara!

Akihabara

I have mentioned in previous articles that going to Japan was a childhood dream for me and an important part of that dream was to visit Akihabara. If you don’t know about it, Akihabara is the electronic district of Tokyo, a paradise for any video games/electronics/anime fan! As a proof of her love and patience, Helena agreed to spend the whole day in there. So basically we arrived at around 10AM and confirmed the view that I expected to find in there: massive buildings, covered in ads for video games and anime outside; inside there were usually several floors, each floor with a different theme/purpose. For example, comics stores had usually one gender or demographics per floor; including hentai for all the tastes (I will leave the details to your imagination).

I felt like a kid in Akihabara. I lost count of how many books, games, electronics and anime stores I visited that day. I especially loved to see the action figures for anime TV series I loved when I was a kid. Unfortunately those were very expensive so I didn’t buy any (around 80 € for a small one).

Picture of buildings in Akihabara
Buildings in Akihabara

Some of the buildings’ floors were actually amusement arcades with a great variety of games, from classics like Dance Dance Revolution (in which the local players completely blew our minds with their speed and accuracy) but also more modern ones like guitar hero or some XBox dancing game using the Kinect. Helena played her favorite video game — Tekken — hitting the buttons so hard that the other players around us thought Godzilla was coming to town again. I just played some Guitar Hero clone.

In the evening we also went to a Maid Café — a café where the waitresses are dressed in traditional French maid costumes and treat customers as their “masters”. We were heading to some less expensive one that was mentioned on our guide book and found a “maid” in the street getting people to go to her café. I thought that she would take us to the one I was looking for but she took us to a different one on the other side of the block instead. So once inside the café, there was a minimum consumption policy of around 15 € — if I remember correctly — and, obviously, prices were high. We were hungry so we asked for a menu that included a drink and a piece of cake only to find that the juice we ordered was in a very small glass and the cake was okayish in size but the price was rather “justified” by the anime drawings made in topping on the dishes as you can see in the picture. The maid was “pleasing us” just when she delivered the cake and made us mimic some “kawaii” gesture and words to magically make the cake more tasty.

Picture of a cake with Shin-chan drawn in topping.
Only Shin-chan could save us from this ripoff!

The feeling was very strange. I love a lot of things in the Otaku culture that might seem strange to people but maid cafés is not one of them.

In the end of the day, we bought some souvenirs for our family (I bought a Japanese whiskey bottle for my father which was not expensive at all but was really good!) and went back to the hotel but our geek journey wasn’t finished for the next day we would visit Odaiba but that’s a story for another day.

[flickr-gallery mode=”tag” tags=”Tokyo”]

to be continue…