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Published: August 6th 2014
Shibuya in the rain
very Blade Runner 'ish'This trip to Japan almost never happened. Before our trip we had to renew our passports which involved sending them back to the UK and we only had a 6 week window for renewal before our visas were up! 2 days after we sent the passports off, news broke about huge delays in the UK Passport office. To cut a long (and very stressful) story short, thanks to a Member of Parliament in the UK we got our passports in the nick of time and had a chance to get excited for our trip!
Japan has long been on our bucket list of places to visit and to put it mildly, we were very excited. We had a packed itinerary with lists as long as our 4 arms of what we wanted to see, experience and try…and we had decided to travel a little differently to what we usually do.
On arrival into Haneda, we were a little dazed – arriving into any country at 5am isn’t ideal and we had a first in a very long time…Customs actually searched our bags! We don’t think it was because we looked dodgy or anything, it was more to do with
the Customs officer wanting to practice his English with us or maybe he was trying to steal our Lindt chocolate 😉
Hotels…yes, you read right…hotels! We have only slept in a dorm when it’s been absolutely necessary or if we are in a place for less than 12 hours. We hate sharing a room and bathroom with other people (yes, we aren’t very good backpackers!). So when we were researching accommodation in Japan, it struck us that a private room in a hostel (sometimes with a shared bathroom) wasn’t very good value and so we started looking a bit apprehensively at hotels. Japan has a reputation for being expensive, but if you use the booking sites wisely you can score a bargain for not much more than a hostel!
All the hotels we booked were fantastic and were around 4* in rating, they also had the amazing electronic toilets (more on this later!) and provided all the toiletries we could ever need – shampoo, conditioner and razors! At the end of each blog we will put a little bit about the hotel we stayed at in each location.
Transport…the crazy work of art of the subway system!
Wow, the Tokyo subway system was THE most complex subway system we have ever laid eyes on…just take a look at the picture of the subway map! At least there was a handy button on the machines for English language and it was pretty simple once you got the hang of it.
We decided to purchase a Suica card, which is basically a stored value card for transport and convenience stores like 7-11, Family Mart and Lawsons. We use a similar card in Hong Kong and it really does save a lot of hassle. So the Suica set us back ¥2000 (£11.49) each, ¥1500 (£8.62) of this is stored value to spend and the remaining ¥500 is a deposit. It saved us a lot of time and fiddling to just be able to walk through and tap the card to the ticket sensor!
Japan’s reputation for timeliness is not understated, all transport can be timed to a matter of seconds…honestly, it was a revelation for everything to be bang on time. It was super-efficient, clean and very well laid out. We found it very easy to use and particularly liked the little nursery rhyme type tune
which played after a train pulled into a station! We’ll say more about the Shinkansen bullet train on another blog. Let’s just say Donna was in heaven with the near OCD-ness of everything running smoothly…no fidgeting with impatience from her on this trip! We filmed getting off the train to show how polite and well-ordered everything is.
The most noticeable thing about the subway was the notices EVERYWHERE about mobile phones – these notices said they should be switched to silent and people shouldn’t talk on them at all and it worked! Looking around on the subway, people weren’t absorbed in their phones; if they were with someone they were actually talking to each other and making eye to eye contact. This was a major change from Hong Kong, where the majority of people are incapable of even putting their phone away while walking and are seemingly glued to them!
Food glorious food…oh my, we had a lot on our list! Well, where do we even start with the food?! We have never really tried that much Japanese food in the past but this trip really didn’t disappoint us with food. Although we didn’t speak a word
of Japanese and a lot of restaurants only had menus in Japanese, we didn’t have one bad meal in the entire time we were there.
The Japanese seem to have a very refined palette, there was never any salt or pepper on the table and we never needed it. Every dish we ordered and ate was perfectly balanced with seasoning. We were shocked at how many European restaurants there were in every place we visited – the Japanese have a real love of Italian and Spanish restaurants!
Our first night we were wandering around the Ueno area (pronounced oo-ey-no) and saw a little restaurant that was very busy and served tonkatsu (とんかつ or トンカツ). This is basically a pork cutlet in panko breadcrumbs and deep fried. This restaurant served chicken katsu as well (shown by a little chicken cartoon on the all Japanese picture menu). So we took a stab at it and got served the hugest chicken katsu, a large portion of rice, miso soup and shredded cabbage. On the table there is also the ‘special katsu sauce’ to be used with the katsu, which to us tasted like HP sauce. The meal was really nice, but
we really aren’t used to fried food and it filled us a little too much.
One excellent aspect of Japanese restaurants is that you aren’t expected to buy drinks to go with your meal. The restaurants provide either water or green tea for you to drink – some of the drinks on the menus were as much as one main course meal! Tipping is not a done thing either, we have heard if you try and tip the servers will run after you to return the money.
Another night we decided to treat ourselves to a bit of a higher-end restaurant…well higher end for us! 😊 We found the recommendation from a food blog, a restaurant in the Kanda area called the Butcher Brothers. Wow, we weren’t disappointed. Neil ordered 500g of rump steak (¥1500) and Donna ordered duck fillet (¥950); both were served on a bed of chips (fries for the non-Brits reading!) and we also got free antipasti of prosciutto and olives. We ordered a beer each and tucked into the best steak and duck we have ever had. The steak was even better than those we had in Argentina, which is very high praise indeed!
The whole meal came to ¥4500 (£25.86) and was well worth it. The restaurant was great – it had an open cooking grill area with friendly staff who did a little routine of shouting completely unintelligible Japanese when people came in. A fabulous experience!
While we were in Japan we just had to try Mo’s burgers…with catchphrases like ‘Mo’s make my day’ and ‘Mo’s can make you happy’! We have to say the quality and choice was very good, it was more like a homemade burger than the types you get in McDonalds or Burger King (BK by the way serves beer in Japan!) and the chips were nicer than McD’s.
Our wanderings around Tokyo Asakusa Asakusa is famous for the Senso-ji temple, built in the 7th century it’s Tokyo’s oldest temple. Surrounding the temple are shopping streets, one called Nakamise street is one of the ubiquitous covered shopping streets feature in every city we visited. Senso-ji was interesting to have a wander around, only spoilt by the drizzly weather (little would we know that later in the trip we would be wishing for rain!).
Chiyoda - Imperial Palace The central (Chiyoda) area of
Tokyo seemed a little bland to us. Home to government buildings, offices and the Imperial Palace, which is the main residence of the Emperor of Japan. Unfortunately, we walked all the way to the Imperial Palace to find it was completely closed, even the grounds! So the only part we saw was the outer gardens which Donna loved for the sculptured trees 😊.
Akhihabara – electric town! Being a bit geeky and techy, we were very excited to see the Akhihabara or ‘Electric Town’ area of Tokyo. It was a bit full on…from huge gamer arcades, pachinkos (slot machine places) to maid cafés (cafés where the waitresses dress as maids!) and girls on the street dressed up in maid outfits with colourful wigs! Our favourite shop by far was Yodabashi camera and you can see from the picture how huge the building is! It just doesn’t sell cameras, there were 9 floors just filled full of stuff…there were massage chairs (which were tempting but we didn’t have the nerve to try them!), automated blood pressure monitors (good news, our blood pressures are perfect!), cameras and all sorts of other gizmos and gadgets. We spent a good few hours
wandering around Yodabashi and had great fun trying stuff out.
We were completely over stimulated at this point and spotted a sign for a British pub we had heard of ‘The Hub’, so we decided to take a look and we were in luck, it was Happy Hour! We decided it would be rude not to partake and promptly ordered jumbo size Moscow Mule cocktails each for ¥270 (£1.55). After polishing off the first, we opted for another and all the gizmo trying had made us hungry so we ordered a snack each – roast beef and mashed potatoes and fish and chips. We say snack because the portions were quite small and we have to say it was hilarious trying to eat fish and chips with chopsticks, especially as the cocktails were quite strong 😊.
Shinjuku This was the first place we really noticed the special smoking areas outside stations, every station had one – sometimes they were surrounded by glass partitions, sometimes it was just a gathering under a tree 😊. This is a real peculiarity about Japan, there are signs everywhere telling people not to smoke on the street, but the majority of bars
Tokyo station
Fabulous building and restaurants have smoking areas and hotels even have smoking rooms (so when booking remember to specify a non-smoking room!). It’s strange coming from the UK where smoking INDOORS is banned, but it’s allowed on the streets, this seems the logical way of doing things and doing it the other way around made us shake our heads a little in puzzlement!
Anyway, Shinjuku was home to more huge shops and a rather large Muji which even had a café! Muji doesn’t seem as popular in Japan as it is overseas, we didn’t see as many Muji’s as we expected to but we did see a lot of Uniqlo’s! Uniqlo must have at least 10 outlets in every single Japanese city 😉.
Right in the middle of all the posh shops (pretty well hidden too, it took a couple of ‘go-arounds’ for us to find it) is a cute little temple called Hanazono-jinja. It was very strange seeing this old (17th century) temple surrounded by the modern high-rises, surprisingly for its location it was very tranquil.
Shinjuku is also home to the Tokyo Metropolitan building, which is basically Tokyo City Hall. It has an impressive amphitheatre like entrance
to two 48 storey towers. Apparently the design of the building is meant to resemble a computer chip! The best thing is that at the top of these buildings are observation decks which are free of charge to go up. We have to say it was well worth going up to view the city, on clear days you can see Mount Fuji (we weren’t in luck) and the panorama of Tokyo stretching out beneath us was amazing. It's brilliant that Tokyo's government keeps the observation deck as a free access attraction.
We visited Shinjuku briefly on a Thursday and then decided to pay a longer visit on a Sunday and the difference between the area on the two days was startling. We particularly liked on the Sunday that several of the roads were closed to vehicles so we were free to just wander down the middle of the road…we think what shocked us more was that the closed to vehicles rule was actually obeyed, anywhere else in Asia we would have still been in danger of being knocked over by several stray motorbikes 😉.
Yoyogi Kōen and a real highlight Typically for us, we had managed to
hit Japan in the midst of a heatwave…we are used to the hot weather as we live it every day but even temperatures of 37-39 degrees on average were a little bit too much for us! So the Yoyogi Kōen (kōen=park) was a welcome relief from the heat, with its lovely cool shade and wide paths which lead to another highlight of Tokyo, the Meiji shrine.
We had seen the Yoyogi park from the Tokyo Metropolitan building (see the huge patch of green on the panorama at the top of this blog) and were amazed that the park was so densely forested. It turns out that the forest covers an area of 700,000 square-meters (about 175 acres) and consists of 120,000 trees of 365 different species, which were donated by people from all parts of Japan when the shrine was established. The shrine was established to commemorate Emperor Meiji’s role in the Meiji Restoration. Neil had previously suggested that it was all in commemoration of the Meiji milk and ice cream company...hmmmm!
As we were there on a Sunday, we were lucky enough to see several wedding processions which were amazing. The brides and grooms were all dressed
in traditional Japanese wedding clothes and their families were in a strange mix of traditional dresses and modern morning suits! We even saw a London black cab being used as a wedding car which gave us a little chuckle…especially as the driver had a cute bow tie and neat white gloves. We dare say you wouldn’t find a London cabbie wearing that!
Harajuku…cosplay and seemingly 12 million people on the street at one time! Cosplay is short for costume play and it’s very popular in Japan, favourite sources to draw from include manga, anime, comic books, video games and films. It really is a bizarre trend and the centre for this is Takeshita Dori (Dori=Street) in Harajuku.
We were really not prepared for just how many people crowded onto the streets on a Sunday in Tokyo. We had read that Tokyo is a crowded city with a lot of people and we really saw this when we were out and about.
Harajuku is a really young and vibrant area, it was packed with young people and until this point, we hadn’t really seen that many young people on the streets of Tokyo. It seemed like everyone
had decided to come out and shop just as we were walking around the area! It was soooo busy and the shops were a mix of really high end Louis Vuitton type shops and small independent boutiques and second hand clothes shops (funnily called Jumble shops)! There were several crepe stalls which we would have loved to try but it was just so busy, so we opted for a McDonalds ice cream and iced caramel latte instead! We saw quite a few people in cosplay and they were more than willing to pose for photos.
There was even a shop called Candy-a-go-go, where a girl was dressed up in a pink nurses outfit and candy floss pink wig, handing out sweeties to passers-by. Donna couldn’t resist going to get a sweetie and have a nose around, they had a huge variety of sweets (like the penny sweets from our childhood) and the Japanese were going mad buying the pick’n’mix!
Shibuya…the crossing, Hachiko and the Evil Empire 😉 Shibuya must be the most photographed place in Tokyo. Donna insisted that we had to see the Hachiko statue; Hachiko was made famous in the West by the Richard Gere
film and who knew that Richard Gere was really a Japanese Professor of Agriculture?! 😉 After that we were free to devote our attention to the crossing and the surrounding area.
Of course, we had to walk across the crossing several times (ok, we admit it was 20!) and it was one of those surreal moments that every traveller will know and have had at least once in their lives. That feeling of having researched a place and looked at so many pictures, to actually be standing in
that spot it just hits you that you are
here and your breath catches in your throat for that split-second. Absolutely amazing.
Shibuya has a great buzz to it, high-rise buildings, big screens, the scrum of people crossing in all directions disorderly but orderly at the same time, nobody bumping into each other or cars dodging past the people on the zebra crossings.
To our great annoyance, the single best viewpoint of the Crossing from up high was from Starbucks, aka the Evil Empire; they have taken over the entire 2nd floor of the Tsutaya building. Now for various reasons we refuse to buy anything from Starbucks (just to
give two – they tax dodge and they serve over-priced syrupy caffeinated water or milk which tastes of nothing) so Neil sent the cheeky-doesn’t-care Donna to barge her way through the Starbucks queue and up the stairs where she gleefully poked the camera above people’s heads to get a few pics 😊.
Crossing the crossing again (we think this might have been the 30th time, we lost count after 20?), we spotted a group of what looked like students holding big signs offering free hugs! They were so happy and smiley, but we weren’t going to go hugging complete strangers, we aren’t THAT nuts. A couple of people were taking them up on the offer and we have to admire their way of spreading a bit of happiness. Wandering back to the other side and up the road, we came upon a free giveaway we could get on board with…FREE MEIJI ICE CREAM! Woo-hoo, that’s the very best kind of giveaway and we scoffed a couple of pots; at this point Neil was frantically searching for a cosplay store to buy some disguises to go and get more ice cream 😉.
We somehow stumbled on another branch of
Clever vending machine
this one reads your face and tells you what to buy! the British Hub pub and hey, it was Happy Hour…it would be rude not to partake 😉. Again, going to the bar (like any other establishment we went into) the staff yelled stuff in unintelligible Japanese which we like to assume is ‘hello, welcome etc’, for all we know they could have been insulting us; but as the Japanese are
so polite we went with the nice welcome. We were seated in the tiny no smoking area and guzzled a couple of jumbo Moscow Mules again…yummy! What can we say, we are British, we like a drink and seem to sniff out these cheap places!
Our initial observations
'You Only Live Twice' Bearing in mind we landed at Haneda at 5am, we were a little dazed. We had been up since 8am the previous morning and had only a small amount of sleep on the plane, our immediate thought sprang to the 1967 Bond film ‘You only Live Twice’. Looking out the plane window, walking along the air bridges and looking out the ceiling to floor windows on our walk to Immigration we kept seeing people in hard hats and white overalls, buzzing around in little
trucks like something from the Bond villian’s lair in the film! It was a bit bizarre; especially as from that point on every single worker/car park attendant/traffic director we saw seemed to have a hard hat on - even the post men wore hard hats! Exactly what they were expecting to fall from the clear and open sky above them was completely beyond us, but safety first and all that?! The feeling of being in a Bond film was further compounded when the cute little mini monorail pulled up to take us into the city!
Music while you poo! ♫ We have to say we are missing the musical shower toilets more than we would have expected 😉. Nearly every single toilet we encountered were electronic toilets, even the public toilets in the train stations! We were disappointed and a little upset when a toilet was a bog (ha!) standard model.
These electronic toilets varied in their complexity and sometimes it was hit and miss (literally) when the control panel was all in Japanese and we had to press random buttons to figure out what to do to even flush the toilet! Our favourite toilets were the
ones with heated seats and ones which had a button to play a tune to disguise, what we are euphemistically terming, ‘toilet noises’. We extensively tried the settings, adjusting the water strength and temperature and helpfully there were two different settings for the bum washing – shower and bidet. After a while, we figured out the shower function was for men (blue button) and the bidet function was for women (pink button with a helpful stick lady picture!).
Only the Japanese could make going to the toilet such a pleasant and entertaining experience! 😊
Remember your Green Cross code! Any Brit (aged 30+) reading this will remember the Kevin Keegan Green Cross code public information adverts from the 1970’s (for the rest of you, you can
">see the advert here). The Japanese take the Green Cross code to another level; there were zebra crossings and green men signals for nearly every single road. Crossing the road when the red man is on is a BIG no-no, even if the road is empty. We got very used to waiting for the green man and being told when to cross by the helpful beeps.
and seen this sort of green man respect is Singapore. In Japan, when there isn’t a green man and there is just a zebra crossing, the car drivers even respect the pedestrians and don’t try and run you over…ok, our shock at this shows we have lived in SE Asia for too long! 😊
This kind of rule following made Japan a joy to travel around, we even witnessed one driver who was caught out by the lights and ended up trapped, blocking the zebra crossing, hiding his face in shame and bowing to the pedestrians to say sorry for blocking the crossing!
Following the rules leads us to our next observation. We had to remember we were in a polite society and instead of the usual pushing/shoving scrum getting on and off trains and the chaos of stairs and escalators, we were open-mouthed (seriously we were!) that an orderly queue formed for the stairs or escalators in
! No pushing in, no rudeness – it was heaven! The same went for getting on and off trains, people actually stood to one side and allowed people off the train before they got
on. We have to say that the Japanese are the politest people we have ever met!
Seriously, the cars and trucks here are hilariously small…tiny even. We found it highly amusing at the size of some of these cars, the largest car we saw was a Lexus! In other countries we have been to, car size is kind of a status symbol but in Japan no-one seems to care. We read that there are all sorts of tax concessions given to small car owners so this is why they are popular. You’ll see from some of the pictures on this blog and our subsequent blogs of how tiny they are – even the Coke delivery trucks are small (literally they were chin height on Neil!) and it made us wonder if Tonka has started making real life cars!
Phew, this blog has been a long one, it has covered our 3 main sightseeing days in Tokyo city proper and our next blog will detail our day trips outside Tokyo. Scrolling down you will see 3 videos from our time in Tokyo and then scrolling down further there are
Candeo Ueno-koen, near Ueno Park – closest station Uguisudani on the JR Yamanote Line. This was our most expensive hotel at ¥9000 (roughly £51, ¥174 to £1) which we expected for Tokyo! We had a range of toiletries, including posh shampoo, conditioner and body wash. Toothbrushes, toothpaste, razors and shaving cream were also provided. The bathroom ceiling was very low, if we were 5cm taller, we wouldn’t have been able to stand up straight in the shower!
We got room pyjamas and a strange on-demand TV system which was very complex but had English language films like Deep Grabity (Gravity), Snowpiercer, Steely Man (Man of Steel), Hunger Games and Kaitou Gru no Minion Kiki Ippatsu (Despicable Me 2). There was also a HUGE variety of porn!
D MJ Binkley
Dave and Merry Jo Binkley
Japan
Japan is still on our bucket list but now we can use your blog as a guide. I'd love a list of the places you stayed. It does look like your list of must do's was rather long. Great stuff. You've been successful in tasting all those wonderful foods. !