Japan Day 13: Sunday 19 March
Sat, Jul. 29th, 2017 07:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
annarti
Day 13, featuring Harajuku, Meiji-Jingu shrine in Yoyogi Park and Odaiba. Oh yeah. We got busy in Tokyo.
The next morning while I was showering and getting dressed, Cassie once again picked up the hunt for the lost handbag. It was at this point that it was discovered the Hiroshima station's lost and found is manned by one person. It was therefore next to impossible to contact them, and in fact at this stage, nobody had been able to, or so they told Cassie; whether or not they'd even made the effort was debatable. The Japan Rail people were Useless. By the time I made it down for breakfast, Masa-san (our awesome host at Family Inn Saiko) was getting Peeved on Cassie's behalf. Cassie translated part of what he was saying to them, telling them how he had this poor stressed Australian girl just trying to get her passport back--do none of you understand how important that is?--and you people are being INCOMPETENT. He was just losing his shit at them in a way really only a Japanese person would be allowed to, I'm sure. It was so heartening to have someone in our corner :< Masa-san was awesome. I love him.
In the end he managed to get them to call him back if they had anything, and more importantly make sure they would LOOK for something, too.
Breakfast, provided by the hotel this time around, was just jam/honey on toast, so Cassie was glad of the left-over rice dumpling thingies from dinner last night (no gluten free bread, just bog standard white). So with brekky done and Masa-san manning the phone, we set out into Tokyo!
The previous night we'd just taken a taxi from the train station to the hotel, because we were literally minutes from missing the checkin time, but this time we were able to more leisurely walk through suburban Tokyo. I didn't get any photos til the last day, but it really is so, so different to anything I've experienced. The streets are TINY. You can barely fit a vehicle down them, which makes the taxi's pace from the night before even more terrifying than it was at the time. We barely saw a car on those backstreets, but plenty of people. Everyone either walks or bikes; I actually saw very little traffic in the city at all for the whole time we were there. One of the biggest, busiest cities in the world, and because everyone's on foot and they have their tinytiny eateries, it honestly feels like a tight-knit country community.
After somehow managing to navigate the Tokyo train system (no, really, LOOK AT THIS NONSENSE. I'm from a city that looks like this. Note how this also includes the single tram line and the interstate line, which is more tourist trap than a legitimate form of transportation) we made it to Harajuku! Famous of course for the Harajuku Girls and beautiful goth-lolis and generally mad clothes. We saw none. Not on the main shopping strip pictured here, nor the Harajuku bridge where they used to hang out to be photographed, nowhere. Not a single goth-loli to be seen =( We were saddened. Later on the train we googled where all the goth-lolis had gone, and it turns out they've basically been scared off by the tourists. People don't ask if they can take their photo, and even if one does and they give their permission, other tourists take that as a free invitation for them to take photos, and suddenly the poor girls are swamped by tourists with cameras as if they're paid to be there. So now they just meet up at each other's houses to dress up and have awesome fun times without tourists. Poor loves =( I would've loved to see some, but I totally understand why they gave up on Harajuku.
The strip itself still had some goth-loli clothes, but it was mostly just modern trendy stuff. Again, the eclectic stuff has been driven out by tourism driving the rentals up, so only mainstream places can afford a place there and all the boutique goth-loli stuff has been shuffled out. So sad =(
Right down the end of the street in that first photo, you can see the edge of this place: Yoyogi Park. Always the contrasts <3 Hectic busy PACKED with people Harajuku, go over a bridge, and you're in this huge forest with giant trees that would take three people to hug.
This is also the entrance to the Meiji-Jingu shrine, which is (I think?) the biggest/most important/some superlative shrine in Tokyo. It has a goddamn FOREST. In TOKYO. Do you know how many millions of people they could have otherwise put there? And they leave it as peaceful green trees <3 I love.
TOKYO! I did not expect to find this level of tranquility in Tokyo.
And coming up to the shrine itself. Hey look construction.
WEDDING! Being the most [relevant superlative] shrine in Tokyo, there's a wedding or two there every weekend and swarms of people were taking photos, so I didn't feel too bad taking some myself. There were many formal black kimono in the wedding party, which were stunning. Also the one at the front in white isn't the bride. I have no idea what her role was.
That's the bride and groom. Being the most [relevant superlative] shrine in Tokyo, it's safe to say these people are Loaded. Having seen my fair share of wildly expensive wedding kimono by now, I'd put a conservative estimate of a million yen for that kimono.
Cuuuuuuursed. Also Tokyo 2020 Olympics don't help. And it's Meiji-Jingo's 100th anniversary in 2020, too. Also, for those keeping track, yes, it's been completely rebuilt once in its life already, after having been bombed in WWII.
=DDD Wandering the forest. I WAS SO HAPPY YOU GUYS. Just LOOK at all the green. Every garden we'd been to had been brown and dead and we had to largely imagine how beautifully green it could be, but this place was in its prime.
On the monorail over to Odaiba, a completely man-made island off the coast of Tokyo. The monorail is characterised by a loopy-loop, so here we are going around it.
Slightly better attempt at a shot of the loopy. You can see the bottom part of the track right behind the railing. Why does it loopy? Why not? Also, that there is the Rainbow Bride, which we stayed on Odaiba to see light up at night.
Odaiba! Also the bluest sky Tokyo will ever see. So yeah. Odaiba, originally intended in the 60s to be this massive hub for industry. Which was a great idea! The whole coastline of Tokyo is used for shipping, so stick a man-made island right next to all your shipping for industry, sounds great! Except that virtually every business that tried to set up there went bankrupt and nobody really wanted to move there to live. Until, that is, in the mid 90s when a TV station set up their headquarters there, and started a little show called Digimon, and suddenly Odaiba became a tourist destination. It's now filled with shopping centres and weird.
Having rocked up in time for a late lunch, we beelined for the first shopping centre to find its food court. This turned out to be one called Venus Park.
AND THEN, SUDDENLY AND FOR NO REASON, RENAISSANCE ITALY.
............. Oh. we both said. IT'S HARD TO PUT THIS REACTION INTO WORDS, AND YET WE BOTH HAD THE EXACT SAME 'OH' NOISE. It was a noise of realisation, linking the name of the place with suddenly Renaissance Italy. The noise of what-the-hell-have-we-walked-into. The noise of WOW this is beautiful and look at the SKY and this is a SHOPPING CENTRE. All in that one '........Oh.'
I mean.
I MEAN. Even the SKY looked like a Renaissance painting. Like, it wasn't trying to mimic sky. It had that sort of faded yellowish-turquoisey-blue you get on Renaissance oil paintings.
Featuring a Cassie, clearly thinking 'what even is Japan'
im mature and also im 12. do you think they know?
I forget what I even ended up having for lunch. I remember the food court... probably udon? Idk this place was all about the Italy. There was certainly Italian food available but Cassie had previously warned me off of pizza and pasta in Japan. We can get far better in Australia, and also, despite appearances, I was still in Tokyo. So it was definitely Japanese, whatever I had, and I THINK it was udon.
There was a giant ferris wheel outside, which I insisted on cos I love a view :D Kinda like the London Eye, in that it's very slow and you only do one rotation. So this is some impossibly tall building with not a single window to be seen. It was ominous. I feel like some sort of government conspiracy goes on in that building.
Up the back, just to the left of the middle, is the headquarters of that TV station that saved Odaiba with Digimon.
Ominous building again, with a whole lot of road, and I think the loopy-loop of the monorail was back behind there. Not sure. We couldn't see it from the top, in any case. Also apparently it got overcast while we were having lunch. That happens in Tokyo.
Emphasising the man-made-ness of the place, and also all the industry. 'Sweird having these massive shopping centres and huge industry right next to each other, but apparently it's working for them now?
AND THEN, SUDDENLY AND FOR NO REASON, NEW YORK. Just kidding, it's still Tokyo.
There was no explanation given as to why Statue of Liberty.
I guess any such question can be answered with 'Because Japan' and I'm okay with that.
She was nowhere near as big as New York. Not that I've seen the original, but I can tell you there's noway you could chain Wolverine and three other X-mens up in this one's head. Yes that's my point of reference on the size. Shush.
So, Odaiba is an island, right? And aaaaaall of Tokyo's coastline is for shipping. Not a beach to be seen, except on Odaiba. We caught a glimpse of the pathetic little thing from the monorail on the way over, and were reminded time and time again of how Odaiba was an island with a beach. They had 'beachside' cafés with boardwalks out the front as you look out over the sea, done up to look like Hawaii, the Côte D'Azure, the Greek islands. One had surfboards hanging from the ceiling, one had shark jaws... they were trying SO HARD to be beachy and it was adorable, so we decided to take a walk along the seafront and hunt down this strip of sand the poor sods were calling a beach. We're Australian. It's practically a national passtime to mock other country's beaches.
On the way, the single most Japanese thing happened. 'Haha,' I said as someone walked past us looking down at their phone with a very familiar screen, 'look, he's playing Pokémon Go.' A few seconds later, two more walked past. 'Oh hey, they are too! ... And those six people there... Everyone is playing Pokémon Go.'
'Oh my god,' omg-ed Cassie, 'We've stumbled on a Pokémon Go walk.'
Literally everyone, hundreds and hundreds of people, had their phones out, walking along catching poke-mans. Even the people on bikes had their phones strapped to the handlebars. So if course we got ours out, each caught about a dozen (sadly no Farfetch'd for the entire trip, boo) and completely forgot the reason we'd gone there in the first place. We never did find that beach, but omg the Poké-Go walk was so much better.
As the sun sets, the illuminations come out!
The Coca-Cola shop. Because of course there is.
We did a bunch of shopping in here, including the Pokémon shop, observation of a FREAKY uncanny-valley robot information lady that looked at you, many adorable cute plushies and stationery and embroidered little pencil cases and such. We did not, however, get to see the famous giant Gundam. Because it had been taken down literally two weeks ago. Goddamnit.
Rainbow Bridge! Which very slowly changed colour. Here it is in turquoise!
The TV station again. The lights were all wildly animated, and every window on the building could light up in colours. I've got a few videos of that, which I'll put together with all my other videos at the end.
And here it is in green! With the Statue of Liberty in the foreground and the very tip of Tokyo Tower in the background.
I never tried to get a better shot of Tokyo Tower from Odaiba cos I figured we'd be going there. Turns out we didn't, so this ends up being my best photo of it. Whoops.
We'd hoped to get a place with a view of the bridge for dinner, but only the really pricey places where you had to have made a booking had the view, so instead we found a Pomme-no-ki, which is an omurice chain Cassie got addicted to when living in Osaka. This was a wildly better omurice experience than the first, probably because I picked a better topping XD Can't remember what I had exactly, but it was warming and awesome. I feel like karaage chicken was involved.
And then back we got on the monorail, back through the impossibly complicated subway and back to our hotel for bed.
ALMOST.
Masa-san said Japan Rail called him through the day but that they needed to talk specifically to Cassie for security. So she called them back, heart-in-mouth, and they found it! THEY FOUND THE HANDBAG! And to their eyes, it looked like everything was still there, including the several thousand yen of cash! They'd overnight it to Tokyo and it'd be back in Cassie's hot little hands tomorrow! From memory it was at no charge, too, or something so ridiculously cheap for an overnight courier across the country that it was inconsequential. OH HAPPY DAY. So we went to bed, knowing we weren't out of the woods just yet, but feeling a hell of a lot better about life. WOOHOO!
The next morning while I was showering and getting dressed, Cassie once again picked up the hunt for the lost handbag. It was at this point that it was discovered the Hiroshima station's lost and found is manned by one person. It was therefore next to impossible to contact them, and in fact at this stage, nobody had been able to, or so they told Cassie; whether or not they'd even made the effort was debatable. The Japan Rail people were Useless. By the time I made it down for breakfast, Masa-san (our awesome host at Family Inn Saiko) was getting Peeved on Cassie's behalf. Cassie translated part of what he was saying to them, telling them how he had this poor stressed Australian girl just trying to get her passport back--do none of you understand how important that is?--and you people are being INCOMPETENT. He was just losing his shit at them in a way really only a Japanese person would be allowed to, I'm sure. It was so heartening to have someone in our corner :< Masa-san was awesome. I love him.
In the end he managed to get them to call him back if they had anything, and more importantly make sure they would LOOK for something, too.
Breakfast, provided by the hotel this time around, was just jam/honey on toast, so Cassie was glad of the left-over rice dumpling thingies from dinner last night (no gluten free bread, just bog standard white). So with brekky done and Masa-san manning the phone, we set out into Tokyo!
The previous night we'd just taken a taxi from the train station to the hotel, because we were literally minutes from missing the checkin time, but this time we were able to more leisurely walk through suburban Tokyo. I didn't get any photos til the last day, but it really is so, so different to anything I've experienced. The streets are TINY. You can barely fit a vehicle down them, which makes the taxi's pace from the night before even more terrifying than it was at the time. We barely saw a car on those backstreets, but plenty of people. Everyone either walks or bikes; I actually saw very little traffic in the city at all for the whole time we were there. One of the biggest, busiest cities in the world, and because everyone's on foot and they have their tinytiny eateries, it honestly feels like a tight-knit country community.
After somehow managing to navigate the Tokyo train system (no, really, LOOK AT THIS NONSENSE. I'm from a city that looks like this. Note how this also includes the single tram line and the interstate line, which is more tourist trap than a legitimate form of transportation) we made it to Harajuku! Famous of course for the Harajuku Girls and beautiful goth-lolis and generally mad clothes. We saw none. Not on the main shopping strip pictured here, nor the Harajuku bridge where they used to hang out to be photographed, nowhere. Not a single goth-loli to be seen =( We were saddened. Later on the train we googled where all the goth-lolis had gone, and it turns out they've basically been scared off by the tourists. People don't ask if they can take their photo, and even if one does and they give their permission, other tourists take that as a free invitation for them to take photos, and suddenly the poor girls are swamped by tourists with cameras as if they're paid to be there. So now they just meet up at each other's houses to dress up and have awesome fun times without tourists. Poor loves =( I would've loved to see some, but I totally understand why they gave up on Harajuku.
The strip itself still had some goth-loli clothes, but it was mostly just modern trendy stuff. Again, the eclectic stuff has been driven out by tourism driving the rentals up, so only mainstream places can afford a place there and all the boutique goth-loli stuff has been shuffled out. So sad =(
Right down the end of the street in that first photo, you can see the edge of this place: Yoyogi Park. Always the contrasts <3 Hectic busy PACKED with people Harajuku, go over a bridge, and you're in this huge forest with giant trees that would take three people to hug.
This is also the entrance to the Meiji-Jingu shrine, which is (I think?) the biggest/most important/some superlative shrine in Tokyo. It has a goddamn FOREST. In TOKYO. Do you know how many millions of people they could have otherwise put there? And they leave it as peaceful green trees <3 I love.
TOKYO! I did not expect to find this level of tranquility in Tokyo.
And coming up to the shrine itself. Hey look construction.
WEDDING! Being the most [relevant superlative] shrine in Tokyo, there's a wedding or two there every weekend and swarms of people were taking photos, so I didn't feel too bad taking some myself. There were many formal black kimono in the wedding party, which were stunning. Also the one at the front in white isn't the bride. I have no idea what her role was.
That's the bride and groom. Being the most [relevant superlative] shrine in Tokyo, it's safe to say these people are Loaded. Having seen my fair share of wildly expensive wedding kimono by now, I'd put a conservative estimate of a million yen for that kimono.
Cuuuuuuursed. Also Tokyo 2020 Olympics don't help. And it's Meiji-Jingo's 100th anniversary in 2020, too. Also, for those keeping track, yes, it's been completely rebuilt once in its life already, after having been bombed in WWII.
=DDD Wandering the forest. I WAS SO HAPPY YOU GUYS. Just LOOK at all the green. Every garden we'd been to had been brown and dead and we had to largely imagine how beautifully green it could be, but this place was in its prime.
On the monorail over to Odaiba, a completely man-made island off the coast of Tokyo. The monorail is characterised by a loopy-loop, so here we are going around it.
Slightly better attempt at a shot of the loopy. You can see the bottom part of the track right behind the railing. Why does it loopy? Why not? Also, that there is the Rainbow Bride, which we stayed on Odaiba to see light up at night.
Odaiba! Also the bluest sky Tokyo will ever see. So yeah. Odaiba, originally intended in the 60s to be this massive hub for industry. Which was a great idea! The whole coastline of Tokyo is used for shipping, so stick a man-made island right next to all your shipping for industry, sounds great! Except that virtually every business that tried to set up there went bankrupt and nobody really wanted to move there to live. Until, that is, in the mid 90s when a TV station set up their headquarters there, and started a little show called Digimon, and suddenly Odaiba became a tourist destination. It's now filled with shopping centres and weird.
Having rocked up in time for a late lunch, we beelined for the first shopping centre to find its food court. This turned out to be one called Venus Park.
AND THEN, SUDDENLY AND FOR NO REASON, RENAISSANCE ITALY.
............. Oh. we both said. IT'S HARD TO PUT THIS REACTION INTO WORDS, AND YET WE BOTH HAD THE EXACT SAME 'OH' NOISE. It was a noise of realisation, linking the name of the place with suddenly Renaissance Italy. The noise of what-the-hell-have-we-walked-into. The noise of WOW this is beautiful and look at the SKY and this is a SHOPPING CENTRE. All in that one '........Oh.'
I mean.
I MEAN. Even the SKY looked like a Renaissance painting. Like, it wasn't trying to mimic sky. It had that sort of faded yellowish-turquoisey-blue you get on Renaissance oil paintings.
Featuring a Cassie, clearly thinking 'what even is Japan'
im mature and also im 12. do you think they know?
I forget what I even ended up having for lunch. I remember the food court... probably udon? Idk this place was all about the Italy. There was certainly Italian food available but Cassie had previously warned me off of pizza and pasta in Japan. We can get far better in Australia, and also, despite appearances, I was still in Tokyo. So it was definitely Japanese, whatever I had, and I THINK it was udon.
There was a giant ferris wheel outside, which I insisted on cos I love a view :D Kinda like the London Eye, in that it's very slow and you only do one rotation. So this is some impossibly tall building with not a single window to be seen. It was ominous. I feel like some sort of government conspiracy goes on in that building.
Up the back, just to the left of the middle, is the headquarters of that TV station that saved Odaiba with Digimon.
Ominous building again, with a whole lot of road, and I think the loopy-loop of the monorail was back behind there. Not sure. We couldn't see it from the top, in any case. Also apparently it got overcast while we were having lunch. That happens in Tokyo.
Emphasising the man-made-ness of the place, and also all the industry. 'Sweird having these massive shopping centres and huge industry right next to each other, but apparently it's working for them now?
AND THEN, SUDDENLY AND FOR NO REASON, NEW YORK. Just kidding, it's still Tokyo.
There was no explanation given as to why Statue of Liberty.
I guess any such question can be answered with 'Because Japan' and I'm okay with that.
She was nowhere near as big as New York. Not that I've seen the original, but I can tell you there's noway you could chain Wolverine and three other X-mens up in this one's head. Yes that's my point of reference on the size. Shush.
So, Odaiba is an island, right? And aaaaaall of Tokyo's coastline is for shipping. Not a beach to be seen, except on Odaiba. We caught a glimpse of the pathetic little thing from the monorail on the way over, and were reminded time and time again of how Odaiba was an island with a beach. They had 'beachside' cafés with boardwalks out the front as you look out over the sea, done up to look like Hawaii, the Côte D'Azure, the Greek islands. One had surfboards hanging from the ceiling, one had shark jaws... they were trying SO HARD to be beachy and it was adorable, so we decided to take a walk along the seafront and hunt down this strip of sand the poor sods were calling a beach. We're Australian. It's practically a national passtime to mock other country's beaches.
On the way, the single most Japanese thing happened. 'Haha,' I said as someone walked past us looking down at their phone with a very familiar screen, 'look, he's playing Pokémon Go.' A few seconds later, two more walked past. 'Oh hey, they are too! ... And those six people there... Everyone is playing Pokémon Go.'
'Oh my god,' omg-ed Cassie, 'We've stumbled on a Pokémon Go walk.'
Literally everyone, hundreds and hundreds of people, had their phones out, walking along catching poke-mans. Even the people on bikes had their phones strapped to the handlebars. So if course we got ours out, each caught about a dozen (sadly no Farfetch'd for the entire trip, boo) and completely forgot the reason we'd gone there in the first place. We never did find that beach, but omg the Poké-Go walk was so much better.
As the sun sets, the illuminations come out!
The Coca-Cola shop. Because of course there is.
We did a bunch of shopping in here, including the Pokémon shop, observation of a FREAKY uncanny-valley robot information lady that looked at you, many adorable cute plushies and stationery and embroidered little pencil cases and such. We did not, however, get to see the famous giant Gundam. Because it had been taken down literally two weeks ago. Goddamnit.
Rainbow Bridge! Which very slowly changed colour. Here it is in turquoise!
The TV station again. The lights were all wildly animated, and every window on the building could light up in colours. I've got a few videos of that, which I'll put together with all my other videos at the end.
And here it is in green! With the Statue of Liberty in the foreground and the very tip of Tokyo Tower in the background.
I never tried to get a better shot of Tokyo Tower from Odaiba cos I figured we'd be going there. Turns out we didn't, so this ends up being my best photo of it. Whoops.
We'd hoped to get a place with a view of the bridge for dinner, but only the really pricey places where you had to have made a booking had the view, so instead we found a Pomme-no-ki, which is an omurice chain Cassie got addicted to when living in Osaka. This was a wildly better omurice experience than the first, probably because I picked a better topping XD Can't remember what I had exactly, but it was warming and awesome. I feel like karaage chicken was involved.
And then back we got on the monorail, back through the impossibly complicated subway and back to our hotel for bed.
ALMOST.
Masa-san said Japan Rail called him through the day but that they needed to talk specifically to Cassie for security. So she called them back, heart-in-mouth, and they found it! THEY FOUND THE HANDBAG! And to their eyes, it looked like everything was still there, including the several thousand yen of cash! They'd overnight it to Tokyo and it'd be back in Cassie's hot little hands tomorrow! From memory it was at no charge, too, or something so ridiculously cheap for an overnight courier across the country that it was inconsequential. OH HAPPY DAY. So we went to bed, knowing we weren't out of the woods just yet, but feeling a hell of a lot better about life. WOOHOO!
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: Sat, Jul. 29th, 2017 01:56 pm (UTC)I AM SO HAPPY HANDBAG STORY HAS A GOOD END!
no subject
Date: Sun, Jul. 30th, 2017 11:33 pm (UTC)I COULD NOT HAVE BEEN MORE STOKED. If you ever lose important shit in the world, do it in Japan. It may take 'em a while, but you'll get it back.