Shibuya
Today’s plan was to wake up early, taking advantage of jet lag, to visit Tsukiji fish market. Jet lag is a difficult beast to control, and when the alarm went off, we hit the snooze button.
By the time we were ready to leave the hotel, we decided it was too late for the fish market.
Trying to fight insomnia during the night by reading guidebooks, I had decided that what we had wasn’t sufficient. We needed a tourist information office, and we needed an import bookshop for more guidebooks.
We took the train to Tokyo station, and went to the Tokyo International Forum in search of the TIC. The Forum is a handsome glass ship-shaped building.
The TIC was closed, so we killed time by getting a bagel for breakfast at the “Royal Cafeteria” in the Forum. Below us, some sort of careers fair was going on.
The TIC was full of Japanese leaflets, and was of no use whatsoever. Later I learned that what I had assumed was the Japan Tourism Board (JTB) was in fact the Japan Travel Bureau (JTB), who make transport bookings and little else. Had we looked harder, we would have found the Japan National Tourist Organisation (JNTO), which might well have been more useful.
We proceeded by train to Shibuya. Shibuya is on the Tokyo must-see list, but our main reason for doing it now was the English language book department at Tower Records.
Stepping out of the station, we realised that Shibuya was crazily busy. I have seen Oxford St. busier, but only during the pre-Christmas rush. The area was full of young girls trying to outdo each others’ costumes, and sometimes succeeding. The third spoke we tried from the station was the street for Tower Records, and we came away with a Lonely Planet Tokyo guide, and an AA guide to Osaka. We browsed the CD section, just for fun.
We bought coffee in Starbucks. This is not something I’d usually do (because traditionally, their coffee isn’t as good as their competition’s), but this Starbucks had a view of Shibuya’s astonishingly busy pedestrian crossing. You’ve probably seen it speeded up in music videos — huge throngs of people accumulate at the lights, then all the lights turn at once, and they surge across dodging each other as they pass.
We went in search of lunch, which we eventually bought at the top floor of the Shibuya 109 building. This building is where many of the outlandish girls’ clothes are bought, it seems. We spent much time trying to work out what food we had bought (beyond the obvious, rice meat and vegetables). We now think it might have been Korean, and that mine was Bimbimben. Whatever it was, it was nice.
The coffee and the meal had given us time to study the Tokyo guide book. We walked up to see “Love Hotel Hill”. The Love Hotels we saw weren’t as elaborate on the outside as we had been led to expect. We didn’t get to see the inside, apart from the photographs at the doors.
Another reason for visiting Shibuya was to see the bus terminal, to see how much it was like the first level of Jet Set Radio. The answer is… a little. It has very similar pedestrian walkways, but the overall layout is different. We amused ourselves noting the jumps that are possible in the game but are clearly impossible in real life. In real life you don’t have jet powered roller skates, and grinding along rails doesn’t speed you up…
We accidentally found ourselves in a department store food hall. These are endlessly fascinating places.
To get back to our hotel, we took the Yamanote line the long way round, to get an idea of the areas it passes through. This is the overground Japan Rail route that circles the city, passing through most of the areas a tourist expects to visit.
You could tell something about the areas by the kinds of people who got on and got off. Mostly we saw the inside of railway cuttings, and tower blocks.
We rested our tired legs in the hotel.
The time came for an evening meal. We strolled aimlessly around the Akihabara/Kanda area. Finally, we settled on the “Gourmet Floor” at Yodobashi. Yodobashi is a huge electronics superstore. It’s sort like Dixons, only it has eight floors, and it’s very busy at 8:00 on a Friday night, and it has a restaurant floor.
We picked a restaurant with tasy looking plastic models in the window. We thought we’d been promised a 2 minute wait, but when 15 minutes later there was no sign of movement, we sloped off. I’m glad we did, because instead we went to a conveyor belt sushi bar, where we feasted for little over 4,000 yen between us (about £20), and it was all delicious.
We browsed in Yodobashi’s toy and game floor for a while — it was astonishing. A large part of the floor was dedicated to capsule vending machines. 200 yen gets you a plastic sphere containing a mystery prize. The music dept. had electronic grand pianos for Y1,900,000 (about £10,000).
We came away with some frivolous Nintendo DS accessories. We were too sleepy to continue exploring the shop (this is probably for the best). We bought some vending machine beer on the way back to our room, to help us sleep. This time, we want to make it to that fish market.