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Japan: Tokyo, Pt. 1

Cherry blossoms, friends and food. Lots of food.

By Very Long Weekend

April 26^th, 2017

Harajuku

After living in the tropical jungle of Bali in March, April in Tokyo was a big change. As Craig Mod said, early April's cherry blossom season put Tokyo in "peak tourist" mode...I include us in that bucket.

The upside of this: many of our friends were in town. It's pretty cool being on the other side of the world from home and seeing familiar faces.

We took Julie's brother, Dylan, who was in town for his birthday to some of Tokyo's quirkiest neighborhoods. The Harajuku neighborhood is famous for its insane (to our eyes) fashion sense, alternative clothing stores (see: tie-dyed kitten shirts below) and pastry/sweet shops.

There seems to an obsession in Tokyo with french patisserie treats, and it seems even more hyper-focused here in Harajuku. You can get any flavor of crêpes or waffles (for waffle aficionados, these are more commonly the Liège waffle kind rather than the more geometrically shaped Brussels waffle... #wafflepro). People spend hours lining up at the most popular spots - which coincidentally are all pink. We're familiar with french patisseries, so instead we went to a cotton candy shop. We weren't disappointed with the result: a giant, multicolored ball of sugar.

Suitably sugar-high, we headed to 'Kiddy Land' - a toy shop with a rather disturbingly translated name. Having said that, what a cool shop. On 5 levels, you'll find all the toys you can think of - the usual Western brands are here - and there's an entire floor of Hello Kitty. But more interesting are the toys targeted at the Japanese market: miniature DIY models with intricate life-like detail: houses, restaurants, mini sushi bento boxes...

Dylan and the giant cotton candy (aka candy floss)

I've never seen Julie so happy to eat a giant cloud of sugar

SHINJUKU

Next: Shinjuku. Our SF friends Christophe and Milène (a.k.a. Cricri et Mimi) were in town before heading down to Kyoto. We opted for a night out in Shinjuku with drinks in the Golden Gai district (a pedestrians-only grid of alleys lined with tiny restaurants and dive bars) and Shabu-Shabu.

For drinks, we ended up in a tiny bar called Albatross, where you sit on the second floor just above the bar, and open a trap door to place your order to the guys below. The novelty didn't wear off. It was great...perhaps we're an easy crowd.

Our Shabu-Shabu dinner was at a fully-booked restaurant called Kisoji. Somehow Mimi managed to hustle our way in without any fuss. We ended up with a private room where our waitress helped us make our shabu-shabu beef, see photos - glorious.

Hundreds of tiny restaurants line the alleys of the Golden Gai

MEIJI JINGU SHRINE

The weather got better and better during our stay in Tokyo, perfect timing for us to go and explore the shrines and temples in the city's parks. First up: Meiji Jingu Shrine (in Shibuya). Built in the early 1900s in an iris garden, the shrine is devoted to Emperor Meiji. It was partly destroyed during the Second World War and rebuilt in the late 1950s.

The shrine covers a huge area of Yoyogi Park and is well worth going to see despite the number of tourists in the Spring.

Even the maps here are beautifully drawn

Before entering the shrine you must purify yourself with water. Naturally, some tourists thought you should drink it. No.

桜 - sakura - CHERRY BLOSSOMS

Ueno Park was next on our list. And we had a special guest: Trudy! 👋🏼

In town and on vacation from SF, Trudy had requested that we spend the afternoon together in Tokyo "verylongweekend style". We basically spent the whole time walking around and catching up, and it was great.

The sakura celebrations in Japan are a big deal, everyone was out. Locals were gathered on picnic blankets eating and drinking beers.

If Tokyo was in "Peak Tourist" mode, then Ueno Park was in overdrive. I don't think there was any other place where we saw quite so many people. Nonetheless, the benefit of being here to see cherry blossoms is that you spend most of your time looking up.

A reunion with Trudy, in Tokyo of all places!

We spent time walking around Ueno Park and visited Toshogu Shrine - a shrine built in the 17th century to honor Tokugawa Ieyasu, the founder of the Edo Shogunate (the last feudal military government of Japan).

The path to Toshogu shrine is lined with market stalls selling freshly prepared food...anything from okonomiyaki to rice cakes.

The light in this part of the park was beautiful, and the colors made for great photographic contrast.

Inside the Toshogu shrine complex, we saw more cherry blossoms, and a memorial to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The story behind this memorial is fascinating:

After the US dropped the A-Bomb on Hiroshima and later on Nagasaki, claiming hundreds of thousands of lives, Tatsuo Yamamoto went to Hiroshima in search of his uncle. There he found a flame of the atomic bomb burning in the ruins of his uncle’s house. He brought it back to Hoshino-mura, his hometown in Fukuoka prefecture. He kept it burning in his house as a memento of his uncle and an expression of his resentment.

As the years went by, the meaning of the flame turned into a symbol of his desire for abolition of nuclear weapons and for peace (it was the symbol of a 30-million signature petition for the abolition of nuclear weapons). Hosino-mura village built a torch and transferred the flame to it on August 6, 1968.

Since then, the flame has been transferred to this memorial in Ueno Park.

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We spent all day walking around Ueno Park, Shibuya and Daikanyama. We'd built up quite an appetite for dinner.

Our friend Nao, who lives in Tokyo, had arranged for Trudy, Julie and I to go for a delicious Yakitori dinner. We would never have found this place if it hadn't been for Nao - it was glorious. Julie and I actually ended up going back on our own.

Sorry we didn't get a picture of all of us together Nao - we'll be back! 🤗

Trudy and Nao set off for some hiking and R&R in Osaka, while Julie and I continued our stay in Tokyo.

Want more cherry blossoms? No problem.

This is Chidorigafuchi Park, a huge park in central Tokyo. Fortunately this park was a bit less crowded, which meant we could take our time admiring the views.

We took Dylan to yet another cherry blossom spot at Inokashira Park, a little further out west of Tokyo.

This park has a large lake, over which the cherry blossom branches grow. The lake also had pedalos that looked like giant swans. Julie was extra keen to get on one of them, so we did...

Inokashira Park is also home to the Ghibli museum. Studio Ghibli is essentially The Walt Disney Co. of Japan, they, along with legendary writer/director Hayao Miyazaki have produced the top 10 highest-grossing anime films in Japan - quite the feat considering the size of the market.