A Day in Tokyo

On the way back from Vietnam, we were going to have to break our journey somewhere for a few hours in an airport to swap planes.  I saw a flight that gave us a 10 hour break in Tokyo, and figured that it might be a nice daytrip on the way home to Toronto.

After hopping off the plane at 7am Tokyo time, we caught an hour and a half train from Narita Airport to Tokyo.  The train system was fantastic although the ticketing machine wasn't the easiest to understand - you needed to know what kind of train took you to your destination, which is a bad choice of order.

Our first stop was Shibuya Square, which is commonly referred to as the Times Square of Tokyo.  As we were only there during the day, the effect of all of the billboards and neon lights is kind of lost, but here it is.

Shinjuku is home to the statue of Hachiko.  Hachiko is an Akita Inu (a bigger version of Jax).  The story goes that Hachiko was adopted by a Japanese professor, and used to meet him at the train station each day to walk home together.  One day the professor died during the day, so he didn't come back to the train station.  Hachiko waited for 9 years at the train station, arriving at the exact same time when the train was due every day.  His story is famous as a symbol of loyalty.

Shibas are a Japanese breed, and I was hoping to see some while we were there.  The closest we saw was this advertising for Softbank, who have a white Shiba like Jax in their ads.

Unfortunately our timing was kind of off for most things - I am guessing that Tokyo is a better destination in the afternoon and evening, and we were there in the morning and early afternoon.  This is Akihabara electric town - the nerd district.  There weren't many nerds around at 10am.

The Tokyo subway system was pretty awesome.  There was so much advertising everywhere though, including these ads that hung from the roof!

After our non-event visit to Akihabara, we visited Asakusa district, which is home to Tokyo's oldest temple, Sensoji.  I was hoping to see a Shinto shrine as well as the temple, as they are often co-located in Japan - people tend to rely Shinto for life-things and Buddhism for death-things, so they co-exist quite happily it would seem.

The street leading up to the temple was a market full of little items.  This was more like the Japan I was expecting to see :)  We bought chocolate-filled fish-shaped pancakes from a little store, which were tasty.

The temple gate, with giant paper lanterns and the guardian figures (in the box to the right behind the mesh).

The other side of the gate.  It was huge and really busy!

We decided to get an omikuji fortune while we were there.  This is a Shinto tradition and is probably the origin of fortune cookies.  We put in 100y and chose a random stick from the stick-shaker.  You then match the number on your stick to one of the little drawers, and take out the piece of paper in that drawer which contains your fortune.  My fortune was unfortunately a kyo - bad luck / curse.  Stephen had more luck with his and drew a middle-sized blessing.

After reading our blessings, we tied them to the scaffold - apparently doing this causes your bad luck to be blown away or your good luck to come true.  I don't remember anything particularly bad happening, so it must have worked ;)

The Shinto shrine - you can tell from the Torii gate and also because people worship differently inside them.  In Buddhist temples you mostly see just bowing (or the use of prayer wheels, although I didn't see any in Japan so that is probably a different form of Buddhism).  In the Shinto shrines, you ring a bell, bow twice, clap twice to attract the deity's attention, bow again, and then make an offering (small amount of money).  It was very cool to watch the ritual.

The pagoda - very cool architecture.  Pagodas are Buddhist, not Shinto.

After this, we took the train back to the airport and settled in for the long flight home.