Emma & Ben… Far From Home

18th – 22nd May 2017

For our first night in Tokyo, we decided to book ourselves into one of Japan’s famous capsule hotels. Normally used by businessmen who have to work late or by those looking for somewhere to crash after a few beers, guests basically rent a small box in which to spend the night. If you have a fear of being buried alive in a coffin, it’s probably not for you.

There aren’t many capsule hotels that cater for both men and women, but we managed to find one. Men and women are on separate floors, so Em and I left each other about 10pm and went off to our own little pod. I actually thought the amount of room in the pod was more than adequate, and got a pretty good night’s sleep.

In the morning, there were certainly a few guys around looking worse for wear after a night on the sauce. Whilst showering, I heard the guy in the cubicle next to me throwing up in his shower. Despite this, the capsule hotel was a fun experience and I would recommend it to anyone heading to Tokyo (it’s also pretty cheap).

 

Tokyo is a pretty massive city. There are lots of different districts, and over the course of 4 days we tried to explore as many as we could. On the first night we visited Shibuya, home to the busiest intersection in the world, lots of neon and the memorial of Hatchi, the world’s most loyal dog. The story of Hatchi has been turned into a film starring Richard Gere; Em thinks it’s one of the saddest films she’s ever seen in her life (yes, even sadder than Up!).

To get around, we used the subway. I’ve spoken about the train systems in Japan on the other blogs, but I’d say it deserves a special mention. It’s very busy (unsurprisingly), efficient (of course), occasionally confusing, something that isn’t helped by the fact that unlike London, there are two companies running the different lines around Tokyo. Tickets aren’t transferrable between companies, which makes it a lot trickier to plan how to get across the city. Also, some of the subway stations are enormous, and it’s often difficult to know where you are going to pop up when you do finally surface. Sometimes it’s a huge distance from where you want to be; the good old Maps.Me app saved us on a few occasions.

As our capsule hotel was located by the famous Tsukiji fish market, we decided to have a look at it before we moved on. It’s the busiest fish market in the world, and has become extremely popular with tourists. So much so, the tourists started becoming a real problem, getting in the way and annoying all the fishmongers trying to work. There are now specific times tourists are allowed in.

After checking it out, we popped back to the capsule hotel to pick up our stuff and headed to our hostel in Ueno, where we would stay for the rest of the time in Tokyo. Once we had checked in here, we walked around the local park, and in a spur of the moment decision, decided to visit the zoo there. There were 2 reasons for this; 1) it was cheap – ¥600 (about £4) each 2) they had pandas.

The zoo had a huge amount of different animals, including lions, tigers, polar bears and kangaroos. There wasn’t much in the way in English signage, so we didn’t get to learn too much about them, but it was still nice to see them all, especially the pandas and polar bears.

After the zoo, we went to have a look around the Senso-ji temple, one of the largest and most famous temples in Japan. When we got there, we found there was a big festival on, and teams of Japanese were carting shrines around on their shoulders (but we never found out why they did this). They looked ridiculously heavy, and the team members had to take it in turns carrying them around.

In the evening, we went to the top of the Tokyo Government Building. Although we had considered going up the Skytree, the Skytree was quite expensive. Amazingly, the Government Building was free and almost as high. The view from the top was unbelievable; we’d never seen so many lights in our lives.

On our third day in Tokyo, we took a trip out the city to see Mount Fuji. You can’t climb Mount Fuji at this time of year (the summit is still covered by ice and snow) but you can ascend some of the neighbouring peaks. After some research, we chose to climb Mitsutoge-san (san means mountain in Japanese. It is also used to show respect when addressing someone; e.g. Mr Miyagi says Daniel-san).

The climb of Mount Mitsutoge was described as a moderately difficult climb by the blogs, but we thought it was absolutely exhausting. It took us about 3 ½ hours to get to the top and it was pretty brutal. Maybe we are just wimps.

On the way up we got some excellent views of Mount Fuji which made the climb worthwhile. After taking a breather and snapping some photos at the summit, we started our descent. This is where it all started to go wrong.

Although there wasn’t a lot of signs in English we had followed the instructions of the blogs on the way up without much issue. On the way down we decided to take a different route, and we somehow ended up totally lost. To this day we have no idea where we went wrong.

We managed to find a Japanese local who spoke English, and he told us we were on the wrong side of the mountain. He volunteered to walk us to the nearest bus stop to help us out. He walked with us for about an hour (he claimed it was on his way home but I’m actually not sure it was) until we arrived at the bus stop, and then told us which bus to get. He left without even telling us his name; whoever he was, he saved us; God knows what would have happened if he hadn’t been there. He was our hero.

Although the bus took 30 minutes to arrive, and although the rather hot tempered bus driver shouted at me for getting out my seat to check directions, the bus eventually got us into the town of Kawaguchiko where we could catch the train back to Tokyo, about 3 hours later than planned. We were very relieved to say the least!

Our last day we spent time in the districts we hadn’t visited yet. The first was Akihabara, the “geek district” with lots of electronic shops and the centre of the world for anyone interested in anime and manga (Japanese cartoon/comics).

We popped into a video arcade, where I got to relive my youth playing some classic coin-op machines and rummaging through the retro games section. I probably could have stayed all day.

We also visited the AKB48 store, more out of curiosity than anything else. AKB48 are an all girl pop group with 60 (!) members that were designed to appeal to some of Japan’s geekiest boys, but have transformed into a massive pop phenomenon. In the cafe, we sat and had a coffee whilst waitresses dressed like the girls served us, and the videos of the songs played on giant screens. Our coffees came on a coaster bearing the face of one of the girls.

It was really weird. It was almost exclusively men in there, ranging from 15-50. As we left I gave my newly acquired Sakura Miyawaki drinks coaster to a young lad who had a t-shirt on with Sakura’s name. Although a bit confused at first, once he realised what I was giving him he got very excited and would not stop bowing to me.

From Akihabara we went to the Harajuku district, famous for its fashion. We were hoping to see some of the cos- play (costume play) kids dressed up as their favourite characters. We did see some weird fashion but no cos-play. In the evening, we celebrated our last night in Japan with drinks in the Golden Gai.

We had loved Japan; it was quite possibly our favourite country we had visited so far. The people are so polite and respectful, and although naturally quite reserved they are always willing to help and very friendly if you talk to them. There are massive cultural differences, which never cease to surprise. It’s a weird and wonderful place, which we would recommend to anyone. We will certainly be back (one day).

(Posted by Ben)