William Reardon’s Blog

After the Olympic onsale, Rick & I decided to hit Tokyo for a few days instead of heading straight back. Before I started traveling more, I used to think I like living in America. After traveling, I know I like living in America and there are few exceptions on anyplace else I’d rather live. Rome was the first. Tokyo is now this second.

I don’t know how to put this into context other than if I wasn’t walking wookie, I would suspect that my parents had stolen a Japanese baby at birth & raised him as their own. It’s like a special city was made just for me.

You can see all my photos from the trip, or Rick’s, but I thought I’d pull out some highlights.

It’s funny — when I asked a few friends about their travels to Tokyo via email, days went by & none responded. When I pinged each one again, all came back with the same response: There’s just so much to write, we haven’t finished yet! Not only do I now understand, but a similar phenomenon happened with this blog entry. But, without further delay, let’s get started…

Shibuya

My hat’s off to Rick for selecting an excellent hotel location. We stayed at the Shibuya Excel Tokyo, right in the middle of Shibuya. You may recognize its famous intersection, allegedly one of the busiest in the world.

I also made a small movie of the scramble crossing in action, as viewed from my hotel room, and uploaded it to YouTube:

Akihabara

On our first full day, we decided to start off by visiting Akihabara, aka “Electric Town.” AMAZING. Aside from storefronts reminiscent of a puking Radio Shack, it was also home to the wonderful, wonderful Yodobashi Akiba. I’m not sure, but if you live a good life, I think when you die you get to live in Akiba. For CA residents, the closest I could compare it to would be Fry’s. Only imagine nine Fry’s staked vertically on top of each other. And with no suck. (Okay, well, sense I can’t speak Japanese, I don’t know if Akiba sales folks are more helpful than useless dolts at Fry’s, but it sure looked like they were helping people.)

Sadly, I was too busy shitting myself to take any pictures. Sadly for you that is.

One the other hand, I did get a picture of a kid playing the original Super Mario Brothers, with his cosplay girlfriend dutifully watching.

Video Games!

Eventually we wandered into the first of many Sega & Taito Stations, home of multi-floor arcade splendor.

Each floor had a theme of sorts — e.g., crane games were often on the first, fighters on the 2nd, and so on.

It was really interesting to see gaming in Japan. Group-play & social interaction seem to be much more prevalent. It wasn’t uncommon to see a young couple on a date. Each station had at least a few machines that 8-12 people could all play at once. I also saw some crazy game that involved moving trading cards (a la Magic) around a horizontal screen while the game played out on a 2nd vertical one. It looked like some variation of an RTS, but I couldn’t make heads or tails of it & players didn’t seem to like observers.

Sumo

On Sunday, we headed over to the Ryōgoku Kokugikan arena, for the first day of the Summer Grand Sumo Tournament. It was cute watching little japanese kids run into the aisle to get a good view & cheer on their favorite wrestler.

Apparently the final match was a bit of an upset, after which the crowd went crazy, flinging their seat mats towards the center arena.

I captured another video of one of the earlier matches.

Sushi

So far the million question question everyone has asked me was “Did you eat Sushi!?” First off, I’m not as picky an eater as a lot of you think. Second, I’ve already tried sushi a million times. I already know it sucks. Third, for the love of God, YES, I tried sushi in Tokyo. And not just once but twice. On the final night, we visited what quickly became Rick’s favorite restaurant, the Standing Sushi Bar, close to our hotel. I’ve included the menu just to make all you sushi lovers jealous. Rick basically emptied a fish tank for $10.

I still prefer a good steak, but fresh salmon sushi ain’t bad.

Goodbye, Tokyo

On the final night of the trip, I went over to the rub the head of Hachiko. Hachiko was a real life dog, the pet of a Tokyo professor. Hachiko would accompany the master on his commute, walking with him to the train station in the morning and awaiting his return in the evening. Even after the professor passed, Hachiko continued to show up each evening to wait for his master. He followed this pattern for 11 years, until Hachiko himself passed on. There’s a bronze statue dedicated to him by the train station, a popular meeting place today, and rubbing his head is supposed to bring good luck.

Tokyo must have sensed it was our last day as well, and decided to hug us.

Goodbye, Tokyo. I kiss you.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 17th, 2008 at 11:52 pm and is filed under nerd-ness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.