When we awoke there was mostly blue sky with some clouds, but by the time we were ready to go out it was overcast, so we chose to just visit the Imperial Palace East Gardens which were within walking distance, about a half mile. The Imperial Palace itself is still the official residence of the Emperor of Japan, and there is a large part of the complex that is off limits. Nobody is allowed into the palace. The East Gardens, however are open to the public.
When we went through the Otemon Gate, after our bags were checked by security, we walked between very tall, very imposing stone walls made of immense dark stone blocks fitted precisely together with no mortar. We saw some very beautiful pine trees but as we continued to walk through the extensive garden we were a little disappointed - there were no flowers, no exotic plants, just trees and grass, but beautifully maintained. We did see a few old buildings, such as old guard towers.
After about two hours it started to rain, so we worked our way back to the Otemon Gate and out, heading back toward the Tokyo Station and our hotel. Since it was raining we wondered if it would be possible to go down into the subway corridors to walk back. Surely enough we found an entrance, went down, and found ourselves in the corridor for the Otemachi subway station, where we had ended up a couple of days ago. This station is huge and has many, many exits to the street. When we got off the train in the station we had to walk from exit C1 all the way to C10 and then from B1 to B8B. Guess what we had to do this time?
When we got to our friendly Tokyo Station we discovered that it being Sunday, the station was deserted - hah - fooled you! It was mobbed - more crowded than on a weekday. We wanted to have lunch, but the familiar food areas we had seen on previous days were packed with long lines. Then I noticed that we were in front of the Daimaru Department store, another large department store which is connected directly to the station, and when we checked a store directory we discovered that there were restaurants on the twelfth floor. We caught a tightly packed elevator to the twelfth floor and wandered among the many tempting restaurants. Most had lines and signs saying they were currently full, but as we stood in front of one looking at the menu and the ever-present display of plastic models of the food, an employee came out and indicated that we could go in.
We later found out that this restaurant, Shinbashi Torishije, specialized in chicken dishes. I ordered a set menu consisting of chicken broth ramen and gyoza dumplings and Donnie had yakitori - char-broiled chicken pieces on skewers along with rice and miso soup. There were a few skewers, including chicken breast, chicken thigh, chicken meatballs, chicken gizzard, chicken skin, and last but not least, chicken tail. Fortunately, Donnie doesn't mind that kind of stuff. I would have stopped at the chicken breast.
When my ramen arrived I remembered something I had heard of before the trip and now it made sense to me. I had read that you had to slurp the ramen noodles, both because it was considered the polite thing to do, and also to cool off the noodles, and now I remembered that ramen is always supposed to be served boiling hot. The ramen I had been served the previous night and the ramen I was just served were actually boiling, and the ceramic bowls kept it that hot for quite a while. The noodles swimming in the broth were too hot to eat unless you slurped them and blew on them at the same time. Once again our meals were scrumptious.
We went down to the basement floor of the department store, discovering that it too had a huge impressive food hall, and then went back to our hotel. Once there, Donnie insisted that we add another amazing accomplishment to our ever growing list - we figured out how to use the very sophisticated, automatic, combination washers/dryers the hotel had in a room off of the lobby. It did take a while to figure them out. Note that when I say washer/dryer I am not talking about two machines side-by-side or one-atop-another. It's one machine that does both. It also automatically dispensed the detergent from inside - we didn't have to supply any. I was even able to pay using the Suica card in my iPhone wallet.
While waiting for the clothes to get cleaned we went into the station to one of the Gashopon stores where there were dozens of machines vending all sorts of toys, pop culture characters, miniature appliances, small models of everyday objects, etc., all dispensed in little plastic ball capsules about the size of a baseball. Each machine has a different set of items, but you don't know beforehand which item in the set you are going to get. Many people try to collect every item in a set, thus spending extra money because they get duplicates. They are sold by the millions in Japan. There are Gashopon machines everywhere. Some dedicated stores had hundreds of them.
I bought a little scene of Japan, sort of a little plastic model of a Hiroshige print. The one I got cost a whopping 200 Yen - $1.33.
For dinner, we went back into the station again, of course, and went to Sushi-Go-Round, one of those newfangled places where you sit at a counter or table and there's a tablet in front of you where you place your order and then a track delivers your sushi directly to you, except we were sitting directly opposite the sushi chef, so he went low-tech and handed us the sushi directly. Even so, the sushi was delicious, better than anyplace at home, and I also had some warm Sake, which I enjoyed.
After that we went to the GBL store, which is the store that sells Studio Ghibli merchandise geared to adults, like jackets, etc., most of it very expensive. It was right next to the regular Studio Ghibli store, but it was late and they closed the line to that store. However, in the GBL store I did manage to buy a small Totoro. I will not explain Totoro. If you don't know Totoro, you'll have to look him up. If you have never heard of Studio Ghibli I won't explain that either. I feel sorry for you.
It was raining. Various weather-predicting devices had said it might. I rarely trust them anymore. Weather forecasting has improved greatly over the last several decades. It used to be vague and inaccurate. Now it's very detailed and inaccurate.
We had figured that we would go to one of the museums on a rainy day. Little did we realize that the first really rainy day we would encounter would be a Monday. The museums are closed Monday. In fact, the second museum on our wish list after the Tokyo National Museum was the Nezu Museum. Not only is it closed Mondays, it was closed the entire rest of the week. We'll have to come back to Tokyo to see it.
So, umbrellas at the ready, we chose to go to the Nezu Shrine, reportedly the most beautiful shrine in Tokyo. Our navigation apps (we have three) told us that the only way to get there was to take the Chioda subway line, however as we were reading the directions a message popped up indicating that the Chioda line was experiencing "Service Interruptions". We figured that if it took us a little extra time to get to the shrine it wouldn't matter - and then the message changed to "Service Discontinued". So we had to find an alternate method. We had to take a different subway line and then change trains. We discovered that taking the required train involved going down, and down, and down, and down, and down, and down - sometimes using very long escalators but other times using stairs. At one point I was sure I saw a dinosaur bone sticking out of the wall.
When we got to the designated train stop we had to walk through some narrow streets in a residential neighborhood, and then down a steep hill, which we weren't looking forward to going up on the way back, but we finally arrived at the Nezu shrine.
In answer to your obvious question - YES - It was very probably the most beautiful shrine in Tokyo. I say probably only because I haven't seen them all. There were the usual stone Torii gates at the entrance, a beautiful shrine building, some other very nice outbuildings and - a long, long path completely covered by hundreds of small, red, wooden Torii gates, each about a few inches from the next, and small enough that I had to duck to get through. We had seen something similar in Kyoto on our previous trip to Japan, but the gates were bigger and there were large crowds of people going through them. These were almost deserted.
There were also a large number of small statues of dogs scattered about the complex, all wearing red cloths around their necks. The pond and river running through the scene had large turtles and Koi fish. There were a lot of beautifully manicured trees and shrubs. Another wonderful feature of the shrine was the fact that it isn't on the usual tourist must-see lists, so there were very few people there and it was consequently quiet and peaceful, unlike Senso-ji.
After enjoying the quiet, peace, and tranquility we came up with the idea of continuing on that theme so we went to a different subway station, thankfully avoiding the hill we came down to get there, and went to Ameyokocho - the largest street food market in Tokyo.
When we finally made our way to the end of the street we realized that we were only a few steps from the Ueno Train station and therefore only a few steps from peaceful, tree-lined, sane, Ueno Park. Yes, we went there, found a little restaurant called Everyone's Cafe to have lunch in, and then took a commuter rail train back to Tokyo Station, without having to walk miles through subway corridors.
After we got back to our home away from home - not our hotel room - Tokyo Station, Donnie requested that I accompany her to a nearby Hair Salon so she could make an appointment to have a haircut. It was located on the fourth floor of a big, glass modern office building across the street from the old-style side of the station, along with many other very upscale-looking, expensive stores. She made an appointment with the very pretty and helpful receptionist, whose English wasn't great and so she used Google Translate to communicate.
Since I accompanied Donnie, I asked her to accompany me, so we went to the Ghibli Store in Character Street in the station. On the previous time we went past there had been a long line to get in, but this time the line was shorter. I bought a keychain with a little figure of No-Face dangling from it, and two fuzzy Soot Sprite pins. If you don't have a clue what I'm talking about, find a streaming service or Blu-Ray or any other video source for "Spirited Away", the absolute masterpiece by Hayao Miyazaki the world famous animator and one of the founders of Studio Ghibli. You won't be disappointed. It is widely considered to be the best animated movie ever made.
For dinner we didn't eat in the Tokyo Station - we ate in the Mei-sen tonkatsu restaurant in the Daimaru department store twelve floors above the train station.
We were at a loss as to what to do this day. It was very overcast and much cooler. Outdoor activities seemed less interesting. I found two potentially interesting museums, one of which had been on my list of sights to see in Tokyo, although not one of the priority items. So first we took a train to the Fukagawa Edo Museum. It was in an out-of-the way residential neighborhood, and from the outside seemed small and uninteresting. On the contrary, it was a fantastic place.
It mainly consisted of one giant room containing life-sized authentically built reproductions of an entire Edo period neighborhood - houses, shops, workshops, a teahouse, all filled with the everyday objects that would have been in them way back when.
The admission fee was a whopping 400 yen or $2.66. In the lobby was a drinks vending machine. We noticed that a small bottle of Coca Cola cost about 80 cents and a larger bottle was $1.20 - unbelievable. In New York they probably would have been $5.00.
The Fukagawa Edo Museum was a wonderful place and for some strange reason wasn't on many lists of the best places to visit in Tokyo. It's now on my list.
To get to the other museum we took a train back to Ueno Park. This was our third time there this week. The second two times were not by design. We were hungry so we had lunch at Le Quattro Stagioni - not a Japanese restaurant. We had pizza. It was really good pizza. We sat outdoors and people watched.
Then we tried to find the Shitamachi museum. We had three apps on our iPhones that help us navigate, and one of them, Apple Maps, had been doing an excellent job so far, but this time it failed miserably. We followed its directions from the restaurant and it dutifully took us right to the entrance to the Ueno Train Station, which was not a museum. The other apps seemed equally confused, sending us in different directions. Eventually, after almost giving up twice, we found it.
It was a small museum - a very small museum, basically just about the history of the Shitamachi neighborhood from the 1940's through the 1960's. From the windows on the second floor we looked out at the Shinobazu Pond, a very large pond in Ueno Park which is divided into three parts - a duck pond, a boat pond and the part we were near, called the Lotus Pond, which was huge and completely filled with water lilies and lotuses, completely covering the water. The leaves were gigantic, at least two feet in diameter. Calling it a pond was misleading since it looked like a very large lake. The Lotus Pond alone covered 55,000 square meters.
We were tired and started back to our hotel, on the way to the train station we passed yet another Sanrio store. Donnie couldn't resist. She bought a set of Hello Kitty Chopsticks. Once again we took a quick commuter rail train back to Tokyo station. We are really getting to know Tokyo Station. Later, once again in the station, we had ramen for dinner at a place called Noodle House Laundry. Why it had the word Laundry in the name I don't know.
At one point we wandered into the kimono department which astonished us with many very beautiful kimonos and fabrics for custom made kimonos. We had been told that real silk custom made kimonos were expensive. We looked at the price tags on the off-the-rack ones - they were very expensive - several hundreds to thousands of dollars. I can't imaging what a custom-made one would cost.
As we wandered around we saw many other beautiful but expensive items. Just to have bought something at Takashimaya, Donnie bought stickers as a gift and I bought a pen.
Donnie had to go to a haircut appointment she had made a couple of days earlier. While I went to the fancy Starbucks just across the street from the Imperial Palace complex. I got there just before heavy rain started and after only a few minutes managed to glom a comfortable seat. I even got another triple espresso latte.
After about an hour Donnie met me at the Starbucks and we walked a block in the rain to the entrance to Otemachi station to catch the Marunouchi subway line to the Shinjuku train station.
Why, you might ask? Because one - it’s the busiest train station in the world and two - it has over two hundred exits. How could we not add that to our list of places we had been? When we got there it was much crazier than our friendly Tokyo station and much less attractive. There was a lot of construction under way. It was so crazy that we couldn’t find anything we wanted to see so after wandering aimlessly among the bustling crowds of commuters for a few minutes we got on a JR line commuter train and went back to Tokyo station and then to our hotel. Whew! At least we can say we've been to the busiest train station in the world. Did I mention that it sees over 2 million passengers A DAY!? I think they were all there when we were.
Donnie didn't want a big dinner nor did she want to deal with the craziness of the restaurants in Tokyo Station, so we looked online and found a dim-sum restaurant just outside the station, or so we thought. A dim-sum dinner would allow her to get as much or as little as she wanted. We went out in search of the restaurant but couldn't find it. We then tried to see if perhaps it was on a lower level, and went down some stairs, and, as if by magic, we were smack dab in the middle of the craziness again, but - we did find a Chinese restaurant that had a pretty extensive menu including a wide variety of dim-sum. The only downside - it was chock full of very noisy people who were talking loudly and continuously. Anyway, after waiting only a couple of minutes we were seated. It was a nice but hectic end to a hectic day.
We had difficulty this morning trying to decide where to go. All of the high-priority items on our list of things to see in Tokyo we had seen. We finally decided to visit the Nihon Minka-en Japan Open-air Folk House Museum. It was on our list, just not a priority. Most web sites that talked about the best things to do in Tokyo omitted it entirely.
It's a collection of old Japanese buildings built between the 17th and 19th centuries from different parts of Japan and in different architectural styles. Some were from wealthier owners and some just poor peoples farmhouses. They had all been moved to the museum, lovingly restored and maintained and placed in a stunningly beautiful wooded, hilly setting.
We took the Marunouchi subway to Otemachi station again to board the Chioda line for a long ride to the museum. On the way we caught a glimpse of Mount Fuji out of the train window but there were too many buildings beside the train track so we only saw it very briefly.
After a long ride to the outskirts of Tokyo we arrived at the station nearest the museum but it was still a long walk to the museum. Since it was lunchtime and we were hungry we debated having a small lunch in one of the restaurants on the way to the museum. Fortunately we didn't. Our first sight of the old, beautiful, well crafted, well restored buildings was fantastic, but we were hungry and we read that there was a Soba restaurant in one of the old buildings, the Yamashita house. It was a Gasho style house which is thatched roof style of construction with sharply pitched roofs. It was built in the early 19th century and actually used as a restaurant starting in 1950.
We had to remove our shoes to enter and we had to sit on the floor on tatami mats. None of the staff spoke any English but they were very friendly and helpful and endeavored to help us as best they could. Even some of the Japanese customers offered some help but nobody spoke any English. We were the only non-Japanese people in the restaurant. The other customers seemed surprised and pleased to see us.
We had to place our order at one of the now familiar ticket machines with pictures of the food on the rectangular plastic buttons, but this one had no English. Fortunately one of the staff handed us a plastic-laminated menu with a little English on it and we were able to figure out which buttons to push. There was a menu outside, but for some reason we weren't able to use it - possibly because it was in Japanese.
We had soba noodles. Donnie had cold soba noodles with vegetables and I had a large bowl of soba ramen. Both were delicious. It was a very authentic experience. The cost of the meal for two people and the unforgettable experience - $13.
After lunch, we went into many of the old buildings. Some houses required that we remove our shoes to enter. They were all fascinating and beautifully preserved. Some even had volunteers sitting inside by a fire and they greeted us and invited us in to sit with them, in Japanese of course. One of them, a woman, gave Donnie an origami figure of a grasshopper, not folded from paper but folded from some kind of grass. It was so nice.
Behind one of buildings was a rest room area and two of the ubiquitous vending machines that are everywhere in Tokyo, and I mean everywhere - on the streets, in the subway stations, right next to shops and restaurants, there must be a hundred thousand of them. Almost all of the ones we saw sold beverages, all with their over-the-top gaudy labels in big Japanese letters. We figured out that some were tea, some were fruit drinks, some appeared to be alcoholic and some appeared to be coffee drinks. I bought one from the machine in the folk museum. It came in a can and was cold coffee with milk and sugar. It was quite good.
It was starting to get dark, and since the museum closed at 5:00 we started back on the long walk back to the train station through Ikuta Ryokuchi Park which was a large wooded park which contained the Open Air Museum, along with other museums. It even had a grove of redwood trees and an old steam locomotive. Even though we were tired, we got the crazy idea to head back to Asakusa to take pictures of the Senso-ji temple lit up at night - ok - I got the crazy idea and Donnie indulged me. We realized that this was probably the only opportunity we would ever have to do this.
We took four different trains to get to Asakusa even having to change trains in the madhouse of Shinjuku station again. We even somehow, maybe by magic, avoided the rush hour crush and got seats in every train.
Senso-ji at night was beautiful - all lit up and much much less crowded. It was a completely different experience from when we were there in the daytime. We took lots of pictures and then, exhausted we went back to our hotel. We dropped off our stuff and then went for dinner at Papa Milano, again not Japanese, but having the important advantage of being in the same building as our hotel and not in the madness of the restaurants in Tokyo Station. We assuaged our guilt at not having a Japanese dinner by deciding that the marvelous very traditional, very authentic, very adventurous lunch more than made up for it.
To sum up, this was the best day of our trip so far. The Nihon Minka-en Japan Open-air Folk House Museum should be on the top of the must-see list for anyone who loves beautiful architecture, superb craftsmanship, or is just looking for serenity and peace in a gorgeous setting, and the Senso-ji temple is much better at night - prettier and not at all a crowded madhouse, however all of the little souvenir and snack stands that line the street leading up to the temple are closed at night, so if you are a shopper or a snack-a-holic, go in the daytime also.
We took two trains to the Gotokuji Temple also known as the “Lucky Cat” temple. It was yet another very beautiful serene wooded place which was quiet and peaceful even with all the tourists. It was one of the prettiest temples we had been to. Of course it started to rain after we arrived.
A Maneki-neko cat is a common Japanese figurine which is often believed to bring good luck to the owner. The figurine depicts a cat with a paw raised in a beckoning gesture. Strangely, at home they are found in many Chinese restaurants, but they originated in Japan. The Gotokuji Temple is famous for having hundreds of them around the temple grounds, most donated by visitors.
After enjoying the beauty and serenity of the temple we took a tram on the Tokyu Setagaya line to the Den-en-toshi line. The tram was an unexpected find, and we were probably the only non-Japanese onboard.
Then we walked along the Megura River to the Starbucks Reserve Roastery - a huge four story Starbucks with food and cocktails and tea.
We shared a very good fancy ham sandwich and had really, really good iced “Tokyo blend” coffee lattes. The place was very frenzied with loud music but we had fun. The fourth floor was a lounge area with even an outdoor seating area, although it was a bit too cold and rainy to sit outside on that day. There was also an area, also on the fourth floor where a machine and a couple of workers were packaging fresh roasted coffee in sealed bags. The third floor had additional seating and a bar.
It was so nice inside and it was getting close to the rush hour so we decided to get some tea from the Teavana tea room on the second floor and chill for a while. The hot tea came in a little glass pot with loose tea leaves and a built in strainer and they gave us a little electric timer to tell us when the tea was fully brewed - very civilized.
After our tea we walked to the Naka-Meguro Station and took two trains back to our hotel, again during rush hour, but we managed to grab seats before the train got full.
Again, we had a busy, tiring, but wonderful day. It was our last full day in Tokyo.
Tokyo was wonderful. We saw many great sights and had many unforgettable experiences.
Some cultural side-notes
This might be a good point to describe some things we noticed about Tokyo, Japan and the Japanese people.
Tokyo trains are surprisingly cheap. Most train fares were about $1.17, even when we changed trains from the subway to the commuter rail or even if we rode almost an hour away. Also the trains are surprisingly easy to navigate. Yes, we had to use Apple Maps on our iPhones to figure out how to go. It told us how to walk to the nearest station entrance, which train line to get on, which platform to go to, sometimes even which car to get on, how many stops to go, the name and number of the station to get off at, the number of the exit to get out of the train station nearest our destination, and how to walk to our destination - but none of that information would have been very useful except for the fact that there are signs and electronic displays and verbal announcements all over the place - in Japanese and English.
The stations are all spotlessly clean and they have markings on the ground showing where you are supposed to stand in line so you don't block the way of the people getting off the train.
Even the announcements inside the cars were clear and perfectly understandable. In the New York subway if they make an announcement it is so garbled it's impossible to understand what they said. The Tokyo trains cars all had electronic screens near every door that would display the train line, the current station name and number, the next stop, the upcoming stops on the route, which side the doors would open on, which car you were in, which direction to walk to the station exit and more - in Japanese and then in English. It was super helpful.
In fact, we must have taken at least 40 or more train rides during our time in Tokyo and we only made one slight error and that was easily corrected. Most impressively, we never had to wait more than three minutes for a train. Tokyo must have the best mass-transit system in the world.
I wish I could live in Japan!
Statistical Information - skippable if you really don't care.
We had a lot of fun using the Tokyo mass transit systems. We probably used the trains, subways and trams at least 40 times. The train lines we used included...
We did a lot of walking over the eleven days in Tokyo. We covered about 65 miles, averaging just under 6 miles a day, and we climbed 73 flights of steps, averaging 6.6 a day, most of which was probably in the subways.
And, if you really, really aren't bored, here's a list of all the sights we saw...
Copyright © 2025 by Jeff Kravitz