Tokyo 2

After an overnight stay in Osaka we arrived back in Tokyo on the Thursday with a few days to kill before our late night flight on the Sunday. We were determined not to be defeated by the sprawling metropolis at the second time of asking, so after dropping our bags at the hostel we had booked just out of the centre of town we headed out into it. What you read below is a basic overview of the following 4 days.

Thursday - If you have been keeping an eye on the blog you may already know that we headed out to the World Trade Centre in Hamamatsucho to get our eyes around the amazing panoramic views available from the 40th floor. At risk of repeating myself i'll leave that tale there and instead regale you with stories from the remainder of the evening.

After getting back to ground level we stumbled across a promotional live performance/signing by an upcoming J Pop star which was an experience we weren't expecting. The only thing of note here was that the ENTIRE crowd listening to this plastic girly pop music were middle aged men. Questionable in the extreme, or maybe not, the jury is still out.

With no major plans and a lot of ground covered in the earlier parts of the day we decided to check out our new neighbourhood of Asakasubashi. Now mine and Nat's approach to travel is less religiously refer to a Lonely Planet guide and follow each recommendation to the letter and more get a cheap bottle of wine from the offy and doss around the back alleys looking for something entertaining. Never were we more vindicated in this approach than Thursday night, when after plodding endlessly about Ghost Town and on the brink of giving up and going home we heard a raucous noise emerging from a little doorway. It was difficult to see what was going on inside through the window as it was largely covered but the people inside must have seen our inquisitive stares from the other side and soon dragged us through the aforementioned doorway. What we were greeted with inside was a tiny Kareoke bar with a couple of tables full of rowdy Japanese people ready to welcome us with discount beer because I was "cool, and she is pretty". The "Tory" beers came out and it wasn't long before we were being cajoled into trying our hand at the Kareoke.

I suggested I sing "Sweet Love" by Anita Baker and Nat offered to get up for one of Fleetwood Mac's greatest hits but they just weren't having it. Apart from one lone voice that wanted "Time After Time" by Cyndi Lauper everyone else insisted that as I was from Manchester I HAD to sing Oasis, or O-ash-eeees as they pronounced it. Now I have never been a fan of Oasis but it even surprised me how quick I was up and swaggering my way through "Don't Look Back In Anger". It must have been a decent rendition too as in addition to all the high fives I doled out I got a kiss from one of the locals, which thankfully for me was caught on camera by one of our new mates.

A few more beers and a few more songs and it was time for us to attempt to get home, which we finally did with the assistance of the other revellers, pictured here.

Friday - Was spent sleeping off the worst of the previous nights excesses and feeling smug whilst being told by one of our dorm mates that he had been at a fish market at 5.30am after reading in his Lonely Planet that it was one of the Top 5 things to do in Tokyo. Despite the fact that in his words "It was just a bloody fish market" his major grievance was that he got kicked out as non-traders weren't allowed until 9am anyway.

Once we had finally roused ourselves, we got the train out to Shibuya where I took a tour of the local record shops and Nat got some food in a lovely little cafe called Art & People. The interior was really nice and cosy, which I haven't really captured in the image below.

Saturday - One complaint that Nat had with our stay in Tokyo was that it was in some ways indecipherable from other large cities. She wanted to see the future, the technology that Japan was famed for. In short she wanted to see the Robots and so we travelled to the International Robot Convention for the day with our new mate from the hostel Tom, a 22 year old metal head from Stoke who had just arrived from New York. As well as the robots we walked back over "The Bridge Of Dreams" which didn't really live up to expectations. If your going to give yourself such a billing you have to, in my opinion break the boundaries of bridge making, which they just didn't do.

We left the convention a little upset after the most impressive machine, a cybernetic robot called Mim was kept screwed in and not allowed to do her thing.

As night drew in we went to meet Nat's friend Michaela who is in Tokyo teaching English. Thanks to her local knowledge we ended up in a 4 storey bar where we had the cheapest and best food/beer of our stay.

Sunday - We had been told to go to Harajuku on Sunday day as it is where youths go to show off the latest trends and costumes. We got off the tram and were welcomed instantly by this character.

At this point we thought we were in luck and would now be inundated with the weird and the wonderful but it turned out we had arrived too late to see everyone in their pomp. We walked down Takeshita St (haha) and over to the park to see what else we could see.

We didn't see exactly what we had been promised but if skateboarding dogs, pissed up faux Romany Gypsies dancing and 50s Rock and Rollers jiving away are your thing, then this is the place to be. The best/most perturbing thing we saw was on our way back to the train station where we caught this woman doing what we will call Interpretive Dance to be kind to her.

And that, bar food and airport talk is our time in Japan wrapped up. I have been trying to coax Nat into getting involved in what was supposedly our shared blog to no avail. However, after concerted pressure she has buckled and agreed to give her Top 10 observations from our time out East.