Due to our travel arrangements, we visited Tokyo twice. The second time around we actually visited Narita, which is where the other "Tokyo" airport is. It's nowhere near Tokyo... but since we'd already been there that worked out.
Bright lights and a big city were what I was expecting, and we certainly found those things in actual Tokyo:
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| Country folk looking at tall buildings |
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| Perhaps exactly the sort of thing you should expect to see in Tokyo |
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| The real reason I wanted to visit the Tokyo tower |
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| Shinbashi station - not the set of Bladerunner, but could have been, and the only place I've ever seen a bar with no chairs or tables and a capacity of about 8 people. When you have 30 of them on the same street I guess that works just fine. |
It does turn out though that there's plenty in Tokyo that's not illuminated, crowded, or tall and made of concrete:
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| Adventure tree in the imperial palace gardens |
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| Steps up to Zojoji temple |
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| Zojoji temple |
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| Some tourists at Odaiba Oedo Onsen Monogatari |
Somewhere among all of this we managed to end up getting the train home during rush-hour with two sleeping children in the stroller. Whilst I can't pretend that was a calming experience, I can't imagine anywhere in the world it would have gone better than in Japan. The level of tolerance for foreigners doing nonsensical things was pretty incredible.
Then there was our visit not-really-Tokyo on the way back from Amami island. This only happened as we needed to fly back from the island on one day and not leave for home until the next, but it turned out to be a fun day none the less.
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| Something to aspire to next time I paint the ceiling |
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| Not a bad way to wait for your flight home |
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| Japanese shopping malls - superior facilities to Vernon (no surprise there) |
In the third and final installment we will re-visit the week we spent on Amami Island, which was entirely unlike Osaka or Tokyo.
