We awoke to find ourselves docked in Tokyo. We awoke early, which was usual after we set our clocks back an hour. We were required to vacate our stateroom by 8:00 AM so we went down to the Vista Lounge to await our group being called to disembark (Blue 23, for you excruciating detail lovers). We were supposedly going to be called around 8:50 but things were delayed, as they kept telling us. They had called Blue 8 and Blue 13 and then a long time passed with nothing happening. They kept saying that the Japanese Immigration people were checking everything and there were delays. I expected to wait several hours but our number was called at 9:10, not too late.
I won't bother to fully describe the chaos in the immigration area. Suffice it to say that there were 30 numbered desks with long lines and many thousands of people and the time spent in front of the immigration agent was long because you had to place the index fingers of both hands on a fingerprint reading machine and for almost all the passengers it took forever for the machine to decide that it had read your fingerprints. For some people it never did succeed and the immigration agent finally, after several minutes, allowed them to go anyway. The fingerprint machines were a major bottleneck.
We got a taxi at the taxi stand and a very helpful taxi stand manager helped us indicate our destination to the driver and assured us that he would accept credit cards. About half an hour later we were at our hotel. The hotel, The Hotel Metropolitan Tokyo Marunouchi, was on the 27th through 34th floors of an office building which was only a few feet from one of the entrances to Tokyo Station, a major transit hub. We took an elevator to the 27th floor lobby. Our room wasn't going to be ready until 3:00 PM, so we dropped off our bags and went out.
We first wanted to take pictures of the pretty front of the Tokyo Station even though the sky was overcast, so we wandered around inside the station looking for the way to the front exit. The Tokyo Station is huge, complex, and full of stores and restaurants. There must be dozens and dozens of little tiny eateries and hundreds of stores. The corridors, more like major shopping streets, were numerous and seemingly endless.
Two famous parts of the station that we read about were Character Street and Ramen Street.
Character Street, an area in a lower level, contained about thirty stores selling items related to Anime characters and other famous characters in popular culture, such as a Star Wars store, a Pokemon store, a Studio Ghibli store, a large number of stores dedicated to Japanese pop culture characters we never heard of, and there was even a Snoopy Store.
Ramen Street, on the other hand, contained ten small famous and highly regarded Ramen restaurants.
We wended our way through the giant maze of the station until we found the Marunouchi entrance which is the old part of the station which opened in 1914 and was rebuilt several times over the decades, the last renovation was in 2012.
On our walk back to the hotel we stopped at a very fancy, modern Starbucks in the middle of a garden plaza. It had a large, very nicely decorated seating area with some comfortable chairs, and although it was crowded we did manage to get some good seats and we relaxed for a while with some surprisingly good Starbucks coffee. Then we went back to our hotel.
Our hotel room was small, but we were expecting that. What we hadn't expected was some oddities. There were no drawers, only six hangers in the closet - for two people, and the double bed had one side against the wall, requiring the person on that side to crawl into and out of bed from the foot end, and of course there was no nightstand on that side. I'll let you guess which person slept on that side. It also took two elevators to get to the room or back to the street, one from the street level to the 27th floor lobby and a completely different set of elevators on the other side of the building to get to the 33rd floor where our room was located.
On the other hand, the hotel was very modern, of course very clean and quiet. The view from our room was awesome, looking out at the Tokyo skyscrapers and the Tokyo Station train tracks where you could watch the Shinkansen high speed trains coming and going. It was also very conveniently located. We could get anywhere in Japan from Tokyo Station. If we wanted, we could also do all our eating and shopping in the station also. We could also spend hours there getting lost.
The hotel lobby even had an elaborate model of the train station and some other Tokyo landmarks, with moving trains and lights.
After resting for a while we went back into Tokyo Station for dinner. We wandered the many, many, many corridors and levels. It's impossible to describe how big the station is. Finally we found a tiny place that sold Tonkatsu - breaded pork cutlets with sauce and a simple salad of shredded cabbage. It was very good.
It was a grey, overcast day, with rain threatening, so we chose to visit Ginza which is the high-end shopping district but which had a couple of things we wanted to see. One of the main attractions for us was the Kabukiza Theater. I had always wanted to see Kabuki.
Kabuki is a classical form of Japanese theater, combining stylized dramatic performance with traditional dance and even acrobatics. It began in 1603! Most shows are many hours long but fortunately the Kabukiza Theater sold single act tickets so you only saw a small part of the show. We went online and bought upgraded tickets, which were on the second floor of the theater instead of the fourth. Sometimes I like to splurge - like on very long trips.
We decided to take the subway to Ginza. The subway corridors are spotlessly clean, and endless. To get to the correct platform and later to the subway exit we needed seemed to involve miles of walking. Over the next few days we would realize how true this was.
We went past some of the shops in the Ginza, little-known places like Cartier, Gucci, Prada, Versace, Armani, etc. We went into the Mitsukoshi department store which was huge and also carried a lot of very high-end merchandise. We wanted something to drink so we went up to the 9th floor which had a cafe and we had some cold beverages. We also noticed that the 11th and 12th floors had restaurants so we went up to investigate. There were at least a dozen small restaurants on the two floors, mostly different kinds of Japanese restaurants, but also Korean and even Italian and Spanish. In the good old USA department stores seem to be a dying breed - not so in Tokyo.
We then decided to go down to the basement level where there was supposed to be a food hall. It was indescribable. The food hall was monumental. There must have been over a hundred counters with every kind of food you could possibly imagine, many with fascinating looking Japanese dishes, but also meats, fish, cheeses, chocolates, pastries, you name it. It went on forever. The displays were gorgeous. We wanted to taste everything. It was much bigger and better than the famous food hall of Harrod's in London.
We then discovered that we were near to another place we needed to go, the Sanrio store, because one of our family members secretly loved Hello Kitty and had requested that we bring her some Hello Kitty merchandise from Japan. Sanrio is the company that created Hello Kitty and other characters and sells tons and tons of Hello Kitty merchandise. We found the store in a kind of indoor shopping mall, and fortunately for me they had a few benches so I could sit while Donnie shopped.
By this time it was past 1:00 and we had 3:00 tickets for the Kabuki show so we wanted to have lunch soon and quickly. There were a few restaurants on the same floor of the shopping mall as the Sanrio store, so we went into the Chinese restaurant and had some Dim Sum.
We walked a few blocks to the Kabukiza Theater which was a beautiful old style building and waited until it was time to go in. There were a great many people outside waiting to go in. Most were Japanese, and some of the women were even wearing Kimonos. We later found out that most of the people waiting outside were there to see the entire play and were outside during one of the several breaks because of the length of the performance.
The full play started at 11:00 AM and ran until 9:17 PM with 3 half-hour intermissions during each of the three parts and three longer breaks between the parts. presumably for people to have lunch and dinner. Not including the intermission or break times, the actual performance ran for approximately seven hours! The whole play has five acts. We only saw a one hour long part of act three.
The theater was very large and beautifully decorated. The stage was huge and even had a very large turntable which was used to change sets. The costumes were gorgeous. The show was magnificent. The acting was very stylized but emotional, and there were some sword fighting scenes that were a combination of ballet and acrobatics. I was enthralled. Photography was not permitted during the performance which drove me crazy because I could have taken dozens of pictures of the marvelous costumes, makeup, and sets.
Another plus, we rented English translation tablets, which were only about $7 so we could follow the plot. Unfortunately, just when we had to leave, the samurai Kokingo had just died of a sword wound and the sushi seller Yazaemon, after stealing Kokingo's clothing and his sword, was about to cut off Kokingo's head with Kokingo's own sword. Poor Kokingo. At least he was already dead when Yazaemon cut off his head.
"Yoshitsune Senbon Zakura" or "Yoshitsune and the Thousand Cherry Trees" was the name of the play we saw part of. It is one of the three great classics of the kabuki repertoire, originally written in 1747 for a puppet theater.
Photo from Internet
Photography not allowed during performance
We took the subway back to the hotel, which again involved a lot of walking in the subway corridors, and arrived a couple of blocks from the hotel, when it started to drizzle. Later we went back into Tokyo Station, picked one of the hundreds of tiny restaurants, mainly because it didn't have a long line, and had a Japanese dinner. Another interesting thing - every restaurant we had been in, even Starbucks, had little carriers under or next to your seat for you to put your bags in - so they didn't have to touch the floor - amazing. The Japanese seem to think of everything.
It was another cloudy, misty day. We went out to Starbucks which was nearby in the train station. We got three "triple espresso lattes" and took them back to our hotel room. Two were for Donnie, one for me. They were quite good, better than any coffee we had in an American Starbucks, so we continued to do this on most days in Tokyo.
We went out about 11 AM and, after walking the mandatory several miles through the Tokyo Station maze we caught a train to Ueno Park. Our first destination in the park was the Tokyo National Museum.
We went to the ticket window to buy tickets but the lovely Japanese woman in one of the ticket booths asked if we were over 70, which we hesitatingly admitted to and she told us that admission was free and all we had to do was show some ID at the entrance. We did and it worked. We spent the next hour wandering through both floors of the museum.
There were a lot of very beautiful objects but two of my favorite displays were some Netsukes and some wood block prints by Hiroshige. Netsukes were originally small and intricately carved toggles usually made of wood or ivory, used secure a purse or container suspended on a cord from the sash of a kimono, because the kimonos didn't have pockets. They have evolved into a magnificent art form and are prized objects, some of great value.
Even though the sky was overcast and it seemed to be constantly threatening rain we spent the next two hours wandering around the huge park. Ueno Park has several museums, a zoo, a number of Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples, a lake, and many beautiful trees. We accidentally stumbled into some amazing sights including the Ueno Toshogu shrine also called the Golden Shrine, which is said to have been built in 1627, rebuilt in 1651, and has remained intact since, surviving earthquakes and wars. In 1627 it was dedicated to the memory of Tokugawa Ieyasu, the founder and first shōgun of the Tokugawa shogunate of Japan, more about him later.
We also accidentally found the Hanazono Inari shrine and the Gojoten-jinja shrine which were near each other and were entered by a downward path through dozens of small red Torii gates. Late in the day we stumbled upon the Kiyomizu Kannon-do temple, just as it was closing. Shrines are Shinto and Temples are Buddhist. We even found an exhibit of dahlias in a garden with dozens of colorful Japanese parasols.
It was getting dark and we were very tired, so we negotiated the complicated Ueno Station and just managed to catch an express train back to Tokyo Station, and only had to walk the now familiar several miles through the station maze back to our cozy (i.e. tiny) hotel room, where we collapsed. We had hoped that the sky would clear and the sunlight would help us take better pictures of the park, the shrines and temples, the many beautiful trees, etc. Since the light was so poor we instead took many bad pictures of the beautiful park. All in all, however, we had a great if tiring day in Ueno Park. One unusual thing about the very large park - there were no places to sit, anywhere - no park benches - very strange.
Another interesting thing is how we used the trains. The turnstiles use something called IC cards, two of which are called Pasmo and Suica, which are like prepaid credit cards in that you must fill them with money before using them. There are machines in the train stations that will let you do that. You tap your IC card at the turnstile at your origin station going in and tap it again at your destination going out.
It was a sunny day! - a miracle. We were anxious to get out into the sunshine and visit some outdoor sights that we would love to photograph, but we were well aware that it was a very bad idea to get on a train during rush hour. So, in the late morning we took a train to Asakusa. Asakusa is a district famous for the Senso-ji Buddhist temple complex, a tourist mecca. Exiting the Asakusa subway station, we walked a couple of blocks to the giant Kaminarimon gate.
The Kaminarimon gate is the outer of two very big entrance gates leading to to the Sensō-ji Temple. It's almost 40 feet tall and 37 feet wide. It was originally built in 941, but was rebuilt in 1960, after the previous gate was destroyed in a fire in 1865. A giant red lantern hangs under the center of the gate. It's about 12 feet tall and weighs about 1,500 pounds. It is at the entrance to Nakamise shopping street, a long pedestrian street that leads straight to the temple complex.
As we were walking down the Nakamise shopping street, I realized that we were near to the Mokuhankan print shop which sells beautiful Japanese woodblock prints.
It took us a little while to find the shop but when we went in I was surprised to see Dave Bull himself sitting at a little table right near the entrance, working on something. I greeted him and we chatted briefly. We bought two prints, one an older print, its label reading "Postwar" and one carved by Dave Bull himself and printed by his staff, both, however, were made from drawings by the now world famous artist, Hiroshige. This is typical. Works by Hiroshige and other famous Japanese woodblock artists have been reprinted and re-carved many times over the decades. Hiroshige just made the original drawings, the woodblock carving and printing were done by artisans who worked for the publisher, who may have reprinted the artwork many times.
The staff wrapped them carefully in a very stiff cardboard folder inside a very heavy-duty plastic bag and we left the shop, saying goodbye to Mr. Bull on the way out.
We then went to the Senso-ji temple complex itself, passing through the huge Hozoman gate which houses two statues, three lanterns and two large sandals. It's 74 feet tall and 69 feet wide. Senso-ji is an ancient Buddhist temple and is Tokyo's oldest-established temple. It is the most widely visited religious site in the world with over 30 million visitors annually. Several gazillion of which were there that day. Interestingly many of the women were all decked out in rented kimonos and sandals, a popular thing to do in the area.
We wandered around, taking pictures of the temple, the gates, the five-story pagoda, and also visiting the nearby Asakusa Shinto shrine. Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines are frequently right near each other. Many Japanese adhere to a mixture of both religions.
We also got our fortune from one of the many o-mikuji stalls all over the complex.
We were hungry so we went to look for a place to have lunch. The Nakamise street stalls run down the middle of the street but behind the stalls on both sides are side paths and other stores and restaurants. We wandered down one of these paths to avoid the crowds and saw what looked like a nice traditional restaurant. We couldn't read any of the signs but like many Japanese restaurants their window had displays of plastic versions of the food they served and the items looked good.
Our waitress, in her kimono, took a cover off of the round burner in the center of our table and placed a round, flat pan on it and turned on the gas burner underneath. She then brought over two little bowls containing a raw egg each, two other small bowls she placed in front of each of us, a large pot with a spout containing some kind of savory sauce, a set of two long chopsticks, and a big plate containing vegetables, noodles, tofu and several big very thin slices of Wagyu beef.
After the pan was hot she proceeded to pour in some of the sauce and cook two slices of the beef and when they were done she placed one in each of the little bowls in front of us and signaled that we should eat while she cooked some more. This happened several times. We had the beef, some grilled leeks, noodles, grilled tofu, and Enoki mushrooms. She had asked at the beginning if we could eat raw egg and we declined, so when we were done with the beef and veggies she took the two bowls of egg and put the eggs in one bowl and whisked it with her long chopsticks and then poured the egg into the pan and added some sauce and gently scrambled the egg and served half to each of us. We later learned that traditionally the raw egg is used as a dipping sauce for the beef, but she understood that we were foreigners. The whole experience was elegant and a lot of fun and the food was delicious. We really were very lucky to have stumbled upon this restaurant.
We then decided, since it was a beautiful day, to visit another of the outdoor sights on our must see list, the Meiji Shrine, but we got on the wrong train somehow and were going past stations we didn't recognize until I saw that the next stop was magically one near our hotel, so we got out and went back to our hotel to drop off some stuff and chill for a while. This was the only time we made a mistake using the trains.
In the early evening we want back out and took a complicated multi-train ride to another of the sights on our list - Shibuya Crossing. On the way, we ticked off another item on our list of accomplishments, one that we had hoped to avoid. We rode the Tokyo Subway in the rush hour. We didn't actually experience the part that we had read about where uniformed attendants, wearing white gloves, push and shove people into already tightly packed subway cars. Our car had plenty of room - there was at least a quarter of an inch between people. At every stop nobody got off and a few people got on - ouch. We were wondering how we would get off through the packed crowd until I heard a welcome announcement - our stop was the last stop, and also, luckily, the door on our side of the car was the one that opened. When it did, we quickly got out and ran to the other side of the platform to let the mad rush happen behind us. Did I mention that Shibuya Station is one of the busiest in the world?
Shibuya Crossing is the world's busiest pedestrian crossing, with up to 3,000 people crossing during a single green light cycle. The lights are set up so that all roads are stopped at the same time and people cross in all directions at once. We stood at the curb, waiting for the stoplights to change, along with a few thousand others, and when it did, instead of crossing we took lots of pictures of the giant crowd crossing in every direction.
We wanted to get a better view, and we had read that there was a good view from the Starbucks on the second floor of one of the buildings right on the intersection. We went up and even though the Starbucks was crowded, we managed, after waiting a couple of minutes, to find room by the window to take a few more pictures.
We walked around the immense Shibuya shopping district. Imagine Times Square multiplied by ten in size and ten in glitz. There were another gazillion people in the streets, mostly young people dressed in every imaginable style, and some unimaginable. We were very thirsty and went walking around looking for a quiet, comfortable place to sit and have something to drink. We couldn't find one until Donnie noticed a sign for the L'Occitane Cafe, a cafe on the second floor of the L'Occitane cosmetics store.
We walked up the spiral staircase and waited in the calm space until we were seated and had very refreshing orange iced teas while we watched the madness outside. We then made the mistake of going down the subway entrance right outside of L'Occitane. It was a mistake because that subway line's closest point to our hotel was at least a mile and a half from the hotel. This time I'm not exaggerating. When we got out at the correct station we were at exit C1. After walking for five minutes were were at exit C2. We walked for a long time until we came to C10. Then, after more walking we were at B1. The exit nearest our hotel was exit B8B. Some of the subway stations have hundreds of exits, many blocks apart.
There was some sun and some clouds in the sky. We wanted to go to the Meiji Jingu shrine. We had been there before on our previous trip to Japan and we remembered it as a very beautiful and peaceful place. It was back in the Shibuya area but I wasn't going to walk a mile and half to a subway station this time. I figured out a better route, using commuter rail instead of the subway and we arrived after about 45 minutes at a train station that was only a few feet from the entrance to the shrine.
The shrine is located in a forest that covers an area of 170 acres. The entrance was guarded by an immense beautiful wooden Torii gate. Shinto shrines all have a Torii gate. Buddist temples don't - they have more elaborate gates. One interesting thing - Shinto worshipers bow whenever they pass under the Torii gate, both going in or out of the shrine.
Once past the gate we walked along a wide gravel pathway surrounded by lovely, big trees. Eventually we came to another immense Torii and then the shrine complex itself. The shrine consisted of several beautiful wooden buildings forming a large courtyard which contained two gigantic gorgeous Linden trees, which had been trimmed to globular shapes.
The shrine building itself was raised above the courtyard and you had to go up the very wide stone steps to get to it. The shrine is sacred so no photographs are permitted of the inside. There was a little sign with the usual icon of a camera in a circle with a diagonal line through it. I knew this, but I wanted to get a picture of the courtyard from the top of the steps - not the inner shrine at all, so I walked up and turned around so I was facing away from the shrine toward the courtyard and started to raise my iPhone to take a picture when the uniformed guard, who was carrying a sign on a stick reading "Keep Quiet" ran over to me and shook his head. I pointed out that I was facing away from the inner shrine toward the courtyard. He shook his head again and signaled that I should go down the steps, which I meekly did. I saw him a few times later chasing away people who were shamefully sitting on the stone steps. He took his job very seriously.
More amazingly, three times during our stay at the shrine, some guards came out and directed people to move out of the way and a procession walked slowly through the main courtyard consisting of some Shinto priests and other officials in traditional costumes and then a bride and groom, also in very traditional Shinto costumes, followed by the rest of the wedding party, the men in black suits, some of the women in Kimonos and others in formal dresses. It was quite an unexpected sight the first time. It was even more unexpected when there were two more. We later learned that many Japanese like to be married in the traditional Shinto manner.
We were now hungry and, looking at our maps, we found a cafe in the wooded area not far from the main shrine complex so we went there and had a traditional Japanese lunch.
We decided, since we were only one train stop away, to go back to Shibuya to accomplish two things - first to take pictures of Shibuya Crossing during the day, and second - to visit the Mega Don Quijote store. That's the Japanese spelling, not Don Quixote.
After paying for our purchases, and adding a very large gaudily-decorated Don Quijote shopping bag at the register, we went out from the inner chaos of the store to the outer chaos of Shibuya. Donnie suggested we needed another dose of peace, so we went back to the L'Occitane Cafe and Donnie had another orange iced tea, but this time I had a Shibuya craft beer.
We followed the huge crowd slowly the one block back to the train station. We had assumed that on the weekend there wouldn't be a rush hour crowd in the train, We were correct - there was an all-day crowd in the train.
About seven PM we went from the hotel the few feet to Tokyo Station and down to Character Street and looked for Ramen Street. Each of the restaurants there specialized in different kinds of broth in their ramen. It was hard to pick a ramen restaurent but we went to one that had soy sauce based ramen broth. It also had the shortest line. Almost all of the little restaurants in Tokyo Station had lines outside at mealtimes. Some had lines all the time.
After a short wait we were seated at one of the common tables with six other people. Donnie tried the mushroom and soba noodle ramen and I had the soy sauce based broth ramen. I even did a very professional slurping job, which is the recommended technique. They even loaned Donnie a fork. The ramen was the best we ever had. A nice feature was that we had already paid so when we were done eating we just got up and left. Naturally, the staff said "arigato gozaimasu" to us as we left. It means "Thank you". This also happened almost everywhere we went. As I said elsewhere, the Japanese are very polite.
Copyright © 2025 by Jeff Kravitz