Click here to see all of the photos I took on this day.
The last full day! Time to spare up any "we have to do such-and-so when we're in Japan" items on our list. Some of these things included eating at a kaiten sushi restaurant, getting a view of Tokyo from the top of Mori Tower in Roppongi, and seeing the statue of Hachiko the dog in front of Shibuya station. First stop: Roppongi.
We hopped on the subway and headed toward Roppongi (just a few stops down the line from our hotel). It was rush hour, and the train we got on was completely packed. We were squished together in the middle of the car. Erin was facing me and I had my arm around her so she hopefully wouldn't get groped. Groping is a huge problem on Japanese subways...so much that they now have "Women Only" cars during busy times of the day.
When we stopped at the next station and the doors opened, no one got off, but several more got on. We couldn't grab the handles for when we started or stopped, but it didn't matter because we were literally packed in so tight that no one moved when the train sped up or slowed down. Finally, we reached Roppongi station and got out.
Roppongi is a much more recently developed area of Tokyo, and is therefore much more western in appearance. The usual Japanese mess of overhead utility wiring (which I actually quite like) is nowhere to be found. This is also the heart of Tokyo's high-class society, where many celebrities live and shop.
It was a simple matter finding Mori Tower...it's the very tall building with a giant sculpture of a metal spider out in front of it. At the top of this tower is an observatory, so we set out finding the entrance. We saw signs saying that it opened at 9 AM, but then another that said it was closed. I asked a maintenance worker when it opened and he said 10 AM. It was just after 9, so we decided to look around the mall in the lower floors of the tower until the observatory opened.
None of the stores in the mall were open, either, but it's just as well. We couldn't have afforded anything they sold. There were many stores that sold only one very specialized type of thing. One store sold purses. Another sold gloves. Finally, it was 10 AM, so we headed to the observatory entrance.
The cost to visit the 52nd floor observatory (called "Tokyo City View") was 1500 Yen per person, but the price included a ticket to visit the 53rd floor Mori Art Museum and the roof observatory ("Sky Deck") as well. We paid our money and were led to an elevator where a uniformed woman reached in and pressed the button for us.
As the elevator rose, the interior lighting on the ceiling slowly faded from white to orange. We were greeted as we exited the elevator where it seemed to be expected that we wanted to visit the Sky Deck first. We were told that we could only take our camera to the roof and must put the rest of our belongings in a locker (which oddly enough cost a 100 Yen that was returned to us when we inserted the key to reclaim our belongings later). We were sent up yet another elevator. This one's lighting changed from orange to blue.
When we stepped out on the Sky Deck we were surrounded by heavy equipment behind fencing, and followed the signs around the corridor and up a flight of stairs to the roof, which was essentially a heliport surrounded by a wooden path. We were the first visitors that day, but a female employee was setting up a camera to take photos (for a fee, of course) of people standing in front of the nearby Tokyo Tower. The air was surprisingly still. We walked around the whole tower taking photos for a while, then headed down the elevator again.
After reclaiming our items, we headed up the escalator to the 53rd floor to see an exhibit of Anette Messager art installations in the museum. Our belongings were collected again (I put my camera in my backpack before checking it), but this time we gave them to a man who gave us a numbered plastic disc in exchange.
The art exhibit was very unusual. The first room was full of the stuffed bodies of actual animals wearing the heads of stuffed animal dolls as masks. Further in were strange installations of marionettes made from parts of stuffed animals and other bizarre creations. The descriptions posted next to most of the works sounded positive, but the works themselves were generally creepy to look at. One installation (which had won an award in Europe) was based on the story of Pinnochio and featured a huge red cloth that poured through a doorway in the back of the room and spread out on the floor. Periodically a breeze would blow from the back which made it look like a red flood pouring out onto the floor. There were vague shapes beneath the sheer red cloth that changed and lit up over time. We sat quietly with other visitors and watched this exhibit for a good ten minutes at least.
There was a gift shop and some works from a local artist comprised of wax animals and insects, then we collected our things again and headed back down the escalator to the Tokyo City View observatory. Here we walked around the halls and looked out at the city, but the view was basically the same as it had been on the roof, except through windows. Erin paid to use a video telescope for a minute, after which we headed back down to the ground level.
Erin was getting pretty hungry, so she stepped into a Lawsons in the mall to find some food while I looked through a book store. She found what she thought was a plain ham and cheese sandwich on a crescent roll (she'd been complaining about how every sandwich seemed to be drenched in mayonnaise here), but it turned out to have some sort of ranch dressing and basically a small salad on it. She still enjoyed it.
We left the tower and, just for fun, headed down an escalator to the basement level on our way to the subway station. By chance, Erin noticed a kaiten sushi restaurant below us, so we headed there to get my lunch and mark that off our mental list.
"Kaiten" means "conveyor belt". In these sushi restaurants, the chefs prepare the sushi and set it on a conveyor belt that makes a circuit around the bar. Customers simply grab the sushi they want and eat it. When you're finished, your plates are added up to determine your bill. Plate colors represent the different prices. Hot matcha (Japanese green tea) is complimentary, and you fix it yourself by scooping the green powder into your cup and pressing a button on the counter to fill it with hot water.
I grabbed a plate of tuna nigiri and another of octopus nigiri. Both were excellent. After conversing for a bit and getting some tips from an Australian woman who was sitting next to me, we asked for our check, at which time a girl scanned my stack of plates (the laser must have been able to detect the color or reflective flakes in the plates to determine the cost), we paid what was roughly six dollars, and left.
Now it was time to do some of the things left on Erin's list: Shop for crafting books and scrapbooking supplies. She had read on-line about a particular store in Kichijoji called "Yuzawaya Department Store" that was focused mainly on crafting supplies, so we took the subway back to Shinjuku, walked to the JR station and caught a train -- unexpectedly -- back to a familiar location.
Kichijoji sounded familiar to us, and when we arrived we realized why: This was where we had caught the train after visiting the Ghibli Museum, and in fact the department store was right next to the station. Also, I was pleased that my Japanese reading skills were actually necessary here, because the name "Yuzawaya" was not written in English anywhereon the department store's exterior. As we entered, we noticed a movie theater across the street that was showing Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea, the latest Studio Ghibli film. We decided to go check that out after we were done shopping.
The Yuzawaya department store was huge and almost exclusively sold supplies used to make stuff, from clothing to comic booksand everything in between. Once again, being able to read Japanese was very useful in here, as nearly all of the signs were English words written in Japanese. After searching a few floors we stumbled across some stuffed felt craft design books that Erin had been wanting that cost a fortune on the Internet, but were reasonably priced here. I helped her sift through these to find several good ones, which she bought before we headed to another. We eventually found a bunch of stamps and a few scrapbooking stencils and stickers, but all of the papers were exactly the same as can be obtained in the US.
She bought some stuff on two other floors, then we headed across the street to find out if we could see Ponyo. Much like how we caught the Limited Express to Nikko, If we had arrived any later we would have missed it. The movie started at about 2:30pm and it was about 2:25pm. We paid about 1500 yen per ticket and headed up to the second floor theater to watch it. There was no concession stand, but there was a vending machine (where we bought a Dr. Pepper) and some weird hoppers containing popcorn and something else that looked vaguely like plain hot fries with vegetables in them...we passed on those.
The theater had a real curtainthat opened before the movie started and closed when the movie was over...I haven't seen that since I was a kid. I think we could have safely licked the floor, as the place was spotless. We saw previews for several Japanese movies which actually looked pretty good, plus the teaser trailer for the upcoming American made live-action Dragonball Z movie, after which I heard grumblings from the audience that seemed to indicate that the Japanese think that movie is as bad an idea as I do.
The movie was cute. After it was over we both had to use the restroom, so we went to do that. While I was in there going, I heard a little boy yell something and looked to my right (toward the sinks). In the mirror I saw several women standing out in the hall with nothing blocking their view of me going to the bathroom. This sort of thing seems common in Japan...at least more common than the US. The concern for personal privacy just doesn't seem as strong. I've read in reviews of our hotel that some rooms on the South side (ours was on the North) had nothing but a view of a row of urinals straight through a full length window in the adjacent building.
Heading back to the station, Erin saw some pastries she thought looked good in a bakery, so we stopped in. You were supposed to pick up a tray and a pair of tongs, then go around the store picking up what you wanted to buy. Erin got a big cheese filled pastry and we shared a few pigs-in-a-blanket style rolls, two of which had cheese instead of sausage. It was all great food, and it struck me as unusual that so much food containing cheeses and meat were just lying out in the open and not refrigerated as they would be in the United States. I guess we're a little over-reactive in the States about the kinds of foods that need constant refrigerated.
After eating, we decided to head back to the room and drop off the stuff we had bought before heading to Shibuya. We decided to take a different train line back to Shinjuku just for fun, and it turned out to not go there at all. The end of the line turned out to be Shibuya, so we decided it was better this way and just rolled with it.
By the time we got to Shibuya, it was dark, and even though it was just an average Wednesday night, it was crowded. After finding our way out of the station, our first stop was the famous statue of Hachiko the dog.
Hachiko was a dog who waited daily at Shibuya station for his master to come home from work. Then one day his master died at work and never came home. Even so, the dog came to the station every day for the next seven years until the dog himself died. To honor Hachiko's loyalty, a statue commemorating him was put up right outside the station, and is now a popular meeting place.
We had heard that there was a great view of the famously busy intersectionfrom the second floor of Starbucks, so we headed in to check it out. It actually ended up being too busy to see out the window, but we had a lot of fun shopping in the huge attached store. We spent a long time going through CDs on one floor before we realized it was only CD rental. Finding albums is difficult for an English speaker in Japan anyway, because things aren't alphabetized "A, B, C, D, etc." They are in the Japanese syllable order, which is "A, E, I, O, U, Ka, Ke, Ki, Ko, Ku, etc." I finally figured this out after a while, but never did end up buying any music there. We did buy several unusual Japanese videogames and movies, though. They were used, and when I was checking out the sales clerk opened all of the packaging and turned each disk over for me to inspect and give my approval of before he would sell them to me. This practice is common in Japan, and is in stark contrast to what happens when buying used goods in the USA...most stores will act annoyed if you even ask to see the condition first.
It was getting late, so we headed back to Shinjuku on the subway. I don't think we mentioned it to each other, but it was a little sad to leave the station knowing we wouldn't be riding it again before we went home the next day.
We dropped our stuff off at the room and I headed out to get us some dinner. I also told Erin to look out the window in about five minutes so I could take a picture of her from the street. Then we tried to pack our stuff and discovered we really didn't have enough room to take home everything we'd bought...but more on that tomorrow.
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