Let’s try this one last time. Welcome back to my blog about my experience in Japan this summer. I am now home from my trip, but we can’t leave the story unfinished. Today, I’m going to talk about my last week in Japan.

    We left off in Kyoto about to head back to Tokyo. This Shinkansen trip was probably my favorite as it took us right past Mount Fuji. By “right past” I mean that we passed through the cities that are closest to the mountain, but they’re still about an hour-long bus ride from the base of the mountain. It was close enough, and we got a great view.

Mt. Fuji from Shinkansen

    This time around, we were staying in eastern Tokyo in Asakusa. This is home to Sensoji Temple, the oldest in Tokyo. It was originally constructed in 645 AD but was destroyed multiple times by earthquakes and fires over the years. It was most recently reconstructed after it was destroyed in an air raid during World War II. Although Sensoji was cool, it’s hard to beat the temples we saw in Kyoto. It did have a nice shopping street as part of the complex that was nice but very crowded. Because it was only five minutes from our hostel, we walked through the temple area a couple times.

Giant balloon at Sensoji Temple

    Our first day back in Tokyo, after visiting Sensoji, we headed towards the tallest building we could see, the Tokyo Skytree. Let me correct myself, Tokyo Skytree is not a building; it’s a tower. Buildings are meant to have people living or working in them, while towers are tall structures that use their height for other purposes such as for broadcasting or meteorology. Standing at 2,100 feet, the Skytree is the tallest tower and the second tallest completed artificial structure in the world, just behind the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. At the base of the tower, there is a mall called Skytree Village where we ate lunch on our first day. Although we didn’t try it out, we passed a virtual dodgeball place where everyone was in VR headsets and ran around throwing energy balls at each other and blocking them with virtual shields. It seemed pretty cool, but honestly I don’t feel like it would be any more fun than regular dodgeball. Anyway, having the Skytree right near our hostel was awesome because we saw it lit up every night when we were walking home.

Tokyo Skytree

    After the Skytree, we headed to Shibuya where we planned to go to one of the other tallest structures in Tokyo, Shibuya Sky. Even though it is the tallest building in the area, Shibuya Sky is only about a third of the height of the Tokyo Skytree. It’s all about what you compare it to. Even though it isn’t the tallest observation deck in Tokyo, Shibuya Sky has something else going for it. It is right on the Scramble Square, the world’s busiest pedestrian intersection. All of the pedestrian traffic lights turn green at the same time and the square fills with people. It was crazy. Unfortunately, the tickets to go to the top of the building were all sold out so we weren’t able to go. Instead, we went to the Tokyo Nintendo Store and then Tower Records. But before that we stopped by the statue of Hachi, the dog who came back to pick up his owner from work in Shibuya every day for nine years after his owner had died. There’s an American movie based off of Hachi that I loved when I was younger so I was really excited about that.

Statue of Hachikō

    I personally didn’t find the Nintendo store to be particularly impressive, but I’m sure if someone really liked Nintendo games they could spend hours there. There was merch for every game they’ve made and then some screens you could play on. It was also right next to a huge Pokémon store. Tower Records was really cool though. It’s one of the biggest music stores in the world, spanning nine floors. At first, I thought there would be cool musical instruments or something, but it was just vinyls and CDs. They had headphones set up around on each floor, so you could listen to some of the albums. I had fun listening to some Studio Ghibli scores, some Beach Boys, and some of Mozart’s Requiem, among other things. After Tower Records we headed back to our hostel.

Tower Records

    The next day, after making crepes in the hostel’s kitchen, we headed back to Shibuya to go to the Ota Memorial Museum of Art. The museum had an exhibition on Utagawa Hiroshige, an ukiyo-e artist. While Hokusai is famous for his series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, Hiroshige is famous for his series The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō. It was interesting to see the difference in style between these two famous artists. I feel like Hiroshige’s work was more realistic while Hokusai’s was better at capturing the life in his subjects. This was especially clear with their depictions of water. I, unfortunately, was not allowed to take any pictures of Hiroshige’s work, so you’ll just have to trust what I’m saying, or you could use Google; that works too.

    Anyway, as we were viewing Hiroshige’s depictions of mountains, bays, and valleys, we heard the crack of thunder. We were just about ready to go when the sky filled with clouds and rain came pouring down. While it didn’t rain very much while I was in Japan, the rain that day is some of the hardest I’ve seen. As lunchtime ticked by, our stomachs rumbled, but we were stuck inside. At last around 1:00, the rain began to calm down and we raced across the street to a shopping complex where we got California Burritos. They were very good although substituting fries for the rice is an interesting decision. Our plan for the rest of the day was to explore the Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden and the area around it. On our way there, we passed a guitar store which Ryan found very interesting so we ended up spending 40 minutes there, Ryan trying out different guitars, me doing the New York Times Tuesday crossword puzzle.

Guitar with Hokusai art on it

    After that, we walked through Yoyogi Park and then the Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden. Yoyogi had a more woodsy feel and is built around the Meiji Jingu shrine, while Shinjuku Gyoen was absolutely stunning. It was a huge park that had some cool trees and a nice green area. It was 250 yen (about $1.75) each to enter, but was definitely worth it. It’s a very nice break from the urban expanse of Tokyo. While we were at the park, our portable WiFi router ran out of battery. Because we were near Shinjuku, a station that we had been to a bunch of times, I was pretty confident that I could get us home just fine. Ryan wasn’t so sure, so he plugged the router into the portable battery charger we also brought with us. It was a good thing he did that, because if we had walked the 20 minutes to Shinjuku we would have had to transfer lines, instead of taking a direct route from right nearby. Before we headed home, we stopped at an Indian restaurant to get some naan, curry, and a mango lassi. For some reason, the Indian food in Japan is really good and also really cheap. They also always have vegetarian options which Ryan was a fan of.

Ryan playing catch with his hat at Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden

    With our time in Japan running out, we had only really seen Mount Fuji from the Shinkansen. You can kind of see it from some spots in Tokyo on a clear day, and I think we might have seen it our first time in Tokyo from the kitchen window, but it’s hard to make out. I wanted to get a good view of the mountain, so we planned a day trip to the nearby Mishima Skywalk. With our Japan Rail pass, it was really easy. We checked Maps and found that there was a Shinkansen that stopped in Mishima leaving at 8:00 the next morning. We took the regular metro system to get to Tokyo Station and then just hopped on the train, no reservation needed.

    We had to take a bus to the Skywalk, but it was easy enough. When we got there around 10:00, we got breakfast and then walked across the bridge. The Skywalk is both the longest pedestrian bridge and the longest suspension bridge in Japan. It’s quite literally just a tourist location. Someone decided that that spot had a good view of Fuji and of Suruga Bay and so they built a bridge there. There’s also a zip line and a ropes course, but we didn’t want to pay for them. Unfortunately, there were a couple clouds that huddled around Mount Fuji’s peak so we didn’t get to see the whole mountain the entire time, but we got a couple glimpses which were really nice. Even without the view of Mount Fuji, the view of the surrounding forest and of the bay is beautiful. I’m really glad we went.

View of Mishima, Fuji City, and Suruga Bay

View of Mt. Fuji somewhat obscured by clouds

    On our way back to Tokyo, we made a stop in Atami where we went for a nice walk to a Buddhist temple and then walked along the beach. To get back to Asakusa, we had to go through Akihabara station, and because the night was still young, we decided to hit the arcades once again. I talked about them in my first Tokyo blog, so if you don’t know what I’m talking about, scroll down.

    Now, for our last full day in Japan, we decided to see some of the most iconic things in Tokyo: the Imperial Gardens and Tokyo Tower. The Gardens were nice, but to be honest they paled in comparison to the Shinjuku Gyoen National Gardens. The Imperial Gardens felt more like a historical site rather than a garden that was maintained to be super nice for visitors. I liked Tokyo Tower better. It’s an Eiffel Tower-inspired lattice tower that is painted bright orange and white to comply with air safety regulations. Now, I’m not sure why this tower had to be painted and not the Tokyo Skytree or even the Eiffel Tower, but for some reason this one follows different rules. If you couldn’t tell from my ramblings about the Skytree, I like tall structures. Tokyo Tower is the second tallest structure in Japan at a height of 333 meters (1093 feet). They had to make it just a little bit taller than the 330 meter Eiffel Tower. It’s funny how people keep building bigger things, just because they want to have the biggest thing.

Tokyo Tower

    We made a couple more stops that day: Jokanji Temple, a private collection of ukiyo-e art, and teamLab Planets Tokyo. Jokanji, also called the Throw-Away Temple, sits beside a cemetery that holds the remains of almost 25,000 women and girls who worked as sex-workers in the Yoshiwara, the legal prostitution district in Tokyo from 1657 to 1957. With only two exits, the walled-in Yoshiwara quarters were especially deadly during fires and earthquakes. Although often romanticized in ukiyo-e art, the life of a Yoshiwara courtesan was not a good one.

Yoshiwara grave at Jokanji Temple

    Speaking of ukiyo-e, that’s where we headed next. In Ginza on the 7th floor of some building, there is a small room that has a table with some ukiyo-e catalogs and a cabinet that has drawers full of original ukiyo-e prints. Ryan had found out about the place online, but this is not what we expected. We got to handle real original prints by famous ukiyo-e artists like Hiroshige and Utamaro. It was cool for me and even cooler for Ryan who knew and had studied all the different artists. It was a great find.

    Aside from meals, packing, and getting to the airport, the last thing we did in Tokyo was go to teamLab Planets Tokyo. TeamLab is an immersive digital art experience consisting of two main areas: the garden and the water area. You start by going into a locker room where you take off your shoes and then you walk through a series of different displays that use light and water to create different illusions. One was a koi pond where the fish were light displays on top of the water and when you stepped on them they turned into local, in-season flowers. The fish were programmed to swim away from people and thus the artwork was dependent on the viewers experiencing it. The whole museum had things like that. Each room we walked through changed based on the viewers movements. From what I understood, they’re trying to show us that our actions affect the world and the people around us. It was pretty neat.

Room full of floating lights

Koi pond room

    The next morning, we left our hostel at 11:00am, went to an Indian restaurant for our last meal, and then headed to Haneda airport. After layovers in Seattle and Chicago, we arrived in Syracuse at 12:30am the next day. It was exhausting, but went about as smoothly as a flight half way around the planet can go.

    One of the best days of a vacation is the first day home. While away for three weeks, I didn’t get to see anyone except for my brother and although we got along great, I’m very excited to be home. With summer winding down and school approaching, I’m going to take a break from blogging. Readers, thank you for reading and giving me an audience. It makes me very happy to hear from you. I’ll see you around.

- Justin Dunn