Wherefore Art Thou Tokyo
[Answer: "east capitol." Back when it was called "Edo" (think Istanbul vs. Constantinople), that meant "inlet gate."]
Interlude: Papers, Please
Despite its vaguely techno-Orientalist reputation back home for being futuristic, Japan's version of futurism isn't synonymous with "digital." While many tourists - myself included - spring for the JR (Japan Railways) Rail Pass, granting one unlimited hypothetical access to both shinkansen (bullet trains) and local transit throughout a countrywide network, it has long been impossible to claim your pass or make actual reservations on particular trains for a particular day without, upon your arrival in the country, going in person to a JR Visitor Center and standing in line for an agent to process your paperwork and reservations manually. So my first full day in Tokyo began with a trip to the Ueno train station to claim mine.
Feeling victorious, I pocketed my printed trove (it's impossible to reissue them if you lose them, so guard them with your life!) and ducked across the way to a little cafe to grab some caffeine and pastries. It's a tiny land of contradictions: a traditional Japanese bakery, in which you grab a tray and a pair of metal tongs and circulate around to little bakery cases, loading your tray up with as much as you want before proceeding to the cashier. And yet this particular cafe is also Swedish-themed, plastered with picturesque landscapes filled with leiderhosen-modelling Austrian (?) milkmaids and cheerful signs proclaiming the virtues of Hygge. Half the pastries are Japanese, the other half French thanks to some sort of August promotion - a lone pastry I don't dare try is labelled as a "Dutch baby."
As I approach the cashier to pay, he greets me cheerfully in both Japanese and English and asks me haltingly, "Where are you?"
Looking around at the barrage of international influences, my first thought is, I don't know, man. I really just don't know.
It takes a second to realize he means "Where are you from."
Tokyo, it has been said to death, is a city which combines the old and the new in sometimes surprising ways - ways that often remind me of the Burger King in the building older than America on Cornmarket Street in Oxford. Sensible people - people who aren't jetlagged to all heck and on the back foot - arrange their itineraries carefully to experience an artistic flow from "Old Tokyo" to "New Tokyo."
I am not a reasonable person.
So here are, in no particularly sensible order other than chronological, the seven neighborhoods I managed to experience in Tokyo during my whirlwind 48-hour stay.
1. Ueno
I had the good fortune of being in Chicago not long ago to see an old college friend, and was delighted there, as an avid museum-goer, at what was advertised as the city's "museum park" - a vast open green space in a prime waterfront location wherein all the city's major museums (natural history, aquarium, etc.) were located. Ueno Park is that for Tokyo - a long vertical strip of grass and walking paths winding around fountains and the majestic facades of the city's many art museums, traditional and contemporary.
While I would normally start any city visit with a trip to the local history museum to contextualize the place before I start romping around it willy-nilly, the much-lauded Tokyo-Edo Museum is closed for renovations until 2025, a common theme among many of the city's major sights. Half of them closed during COVID, hoping to take advantage of the time of low traffic to complete renovations with as little real disturbance as possible; others were hit hard by a lack of ticket sales and folded for good. So I instead begin with the Tokyo National Museum, something like the city's Met, with collections of objects all ostensibly of primarily artistic value, but across a wide range of genres (chief among them paintings, swords, and clothing from throughout the ages).
A single fast fact about each of these eminent collections:
The museum has few to no permanent exhibits, particularly when it comes to paintings, and instead constantly cycles in new exhibits curated around a particular seasonal theme; in deference to summer, the painting collection currently on display is a series of naturalist illustrations documenting thousands of different kinds of insects which go back over a century.
The large swords in the museum fall into two major categories - swords used on foot versus swords used on horseback. The former are worn perpendicular to the hip, with the blade facing down, while the latter are worn with the blade facing up. Swords in the museum are displayed curving up or curving down as an indication of which type it is and how it would have been worn.
Among the summery kimono and yukata on display were several touted to be "fire-resistant" - apparently the city catching on fire was such a persistent problem in the Edo period, particularly noble houses decorated with lots of intricate lacquered wood, that the wealthy would splash out for flame-retardant pajamas. (I personally wouldn't wear these things up Death Mountain in Breath of the Wild or anything, but hey, if it helps you sleep at night...)
2. Yanesen
This cluster of neighborhoods just northwest of Ueno is touted as "Tokyo frozen in time." As a silly tourist, I assumed this meant "Tokyo frozen circa the Edo period," but it turns out that for that, you need to go to Asakusa (more on that later) or even Kyoto. Instead, it means "Tokyo frozen circa the 1980s," which, to be fair, is by local accounts when the city peaked as a destination, drawing international crowds curious about the newly revitalized economic superpower. It's cute - a maze of one-way streets so tiny they would be zero-way streets in the US, clustered around a sprawling old cemetery with beautiful headstones and offering areas - but I give it just a little more than a quick meander.
Interlude: Beating the Heat
Every day of my journey so far has begun with a heat warning issued by the Japanese weather service that the temperature outside would be hovering in the truly horrifying range between 95 and 100 degrees Fahrenheit - numbers I have not experienced regularly since I did a stint in Hong Kong in the summer of 2019. So how does one keep from collapsing in the middle of the Shibuya Scramble on the way to work?
Fans, some traditional folding paper, some battery-powered, some which hang around your neck and funnel air upwards to free up your hands.
Decorative handkerchiefs to wipe the sweat off your face (demurely, of course).
Parasols - they're not just for lolis, cosplayers, and the queen!
Cool water mists - some in handheld bottles, others spraying from the entryways of shops and department stores.
Perhaps the most puzzling of all... covering up in layers! Surely the sun can't make you hot if it can't reach your skin? That seems to be the logic here.
3. Akihabara
This is where all the "Old Tokyo, New Tokyo" themeing falls down, because Akihabara, affectionately nicknamed "Electric Town," is a region just north of the river known for being a nerd mecca, boasting wall-to-wall neon, arcades and gaming parlors, maid cafes, and block upon block of electronics stores. It's not unusual to see pilgrims out and about in full cosplay, and one of the neighborhood's most popular experiences involves driving go-karts down the narrow sidewalks in a real-life recreation of Mario Kart. It's bright, it's loud, it's complete sensory overload... and it's delightful.
Knowing I had only about an hour before I had to scurry back to my hotel to take cover from the frenetic craze of daily commute rush hour (during which it is inadvisable to be on or anywhere near a subway), I eschewed the neighborhood's more outrageous experiences and instead spent some town browsing at Mandarake, a single shop dominating a full eight floors of mall offering nerd collectibles, figurines, manga, shoujo, pop group merch, and games. While there was less k-pop stuff than I'd imagined (though j-pop and k-pop carry on a bitter rivalry), I still managed to locate some BTS paraphernalia for old times' sake.
4. Asakusa
My post-dinner evening destination was the oldest part of Tokyo by far, a northeasterly neighborhood whose primary draw is Senso-ji, a 1500-year-old Buddhist temple which stubbornly remains despite being ringed on virtually every side by modern hi-rises. The leadup to the temple entrance is flanked by little shops reminiscent of carnival stands, each selling some subset of the obligatory trinkets and souvenirs all Tokyo travelers seek. By the time I went, though, all these shops were shut... which actually turned out to be a good thing, because - aside from the crowds being much more tame in the post-sunset period - each shop has a street art mural painted on the outside of its security screen, creating a beautiful corridor scene in the evening hours.
Senso-ji itself is everything you might expect a Buddhist temple to be - massive, beautiful (particularly at night when lit from below by hidden spotlights), impeccably maintained, and popular amongst folks looking to test their luck, particularly on the first day of the new year.
If you find yourself with bad luck on your doorstep, you can always invest in one of many charms or blessings sold by the temple's miko (shrine maidens) during daylight hours.
Interlude: Are You Feeling Lucky, Punk?
Got a big exam coming up? Wondering if you'll get that promotion? Want to check if it's a good time to embark on a journey, a marriage, or a new business venture? Head to your nearest Buddhist temple and get yourself an omikuji (a fortune)! Just find the omikuji counter, slip a small coin in the slot, pick up the hexagonal metal container, shake it around a bit until you're feeling lucky, and then upend the container until a small wooden stick with a number comes out the small hole in the lid. Find the drawer with your number on it and bam! You've got yourself an omikuji.
Omikuji come in a number of forms, but particularly at the larger and more popular shrines, they are presented as printed predictions on paper received in exchange for an offering and a prayer. The heading at the top will immediately inform you whether you have good, regular, or bad luck overall, and then a series of somewhat abstract statements imply, like the best of horoscopes, roughly what will and won't happen to you in the near future. The good news is that even if you get a bad fortune, you can "leave it behind" at the temple by tying it to a nearby rack. Each morning, the miko go through these fortunes and offer prayers that they will not come to pass.
A fun fact I learned when researching omikuji - some shrines stack the deck and make "good luck" outcomes the most likely option... but people perennially tend to prefer shrines with an equal distribution of lucks (good, regular, and bad) because it makes good luck feel all the more earned!
Feeling the need for some divine intervention on my behalf to reverse the fortunes of my trip, I went ahead and got myself one to see what the rest of this boondoggle would be like. The results were... mixed.
[Travel "well." Hmmm. And it looks like things are a little shaky in my relationship (news to both my partner and myself, I'm sure). No matter - according to this, we can patch things up with a "luxurious movie night."]
5. Tsukiji
Dawn of my second day saw me hopping on the subway the minute the commuter traffic cleared out in an effort to get to Tsukiji Market before it became a zoo (or, given it has historically been the city's main fish market, an aquarium). Tsukiji's history stretches back to 1935, when it was established to replace a market destroyed in an earthquake almost a decade earlier. For a long time, it was the largest and most preeminent fish market in the world, famous for moving five million pounds of seafood every day and playing host to the famous daily "tuna auction" when, at the green hour of 5:30am, restaurants, wholesalers, department stores, and even just incredibly rich dudes would fight one another to shell out between $100,000 and $200,00 for a single, massive, primetime bluefin tuna that had come in that morning. Controversially, however, Tsukiji was closed and reopened as a transit center for the 2020 Olympics, and the lion's share of the fresh catch wholesaling (including the tuna auction) has instead moved to the newly constructed Toyosu Market.
Tsukiji is still alive and kicking, however; the premises is now almost entirely taken up by restaurants and street food stalls selling seafood that just came off the boat that morning (presumably). Like most markets I've visited in this part of the world, it's a complete sensory overload - the smell of not just fish, but also vegetables and spices, wagyu and frying tempura; signs posted on every square inch of usable space advertising meal deals, specials, takeout options, what's fresh that day; the sounds of proprietors calling orders, people shouting their requests, barkers trying to get you to sit down in their establishment and not the one next door, etc. But the most common sights in Tsukiji were, surprisingly, two different kinds of signs: instructions about where to eat, and signs prohibiting photos and video.
Another of Japan's contradictions is that while street food and on-street dining of many kinds is plentiful, even core to the food culture of its cities, you are absolutely not allowed to eat on the street or while walking around. Got yourself some takeout? Good for you! Hop on the subway and hope you can get it home before it goes cold. Grabbed some portable food from the conbini? Brilliant! You can't eat it once you leave the store. (You also can't eat it in the store at a lot of locations.) And if you do somehow find a place to eat it in public - perhaps hunched over on some corner bench facing the wall to hide your sin - you better stick your wrappers and leftovers in your bag for later because there are no trash cans to throw out whatever remains. Disposing of trash is expensive in Japan, and most establishments don't want to have to deal with any more trash than they themselves unavoidably generate; it is incredible rude, unheard of, to walk into an establishment to throw out some kind of bottle or wrapper that you did not acquire there.
You can imagine, then, the complexities involved in getting food at an open- air fish market.
I circled the stalls for about forty minutes, eyeing some sushi, but thinking better of eating raw seafood of unknown providence and instead opting for a panko crusted fried salmon steak on a stick slathered in brown curry sauce. Then I got the heck out of there because good lord there were so many people.
5. Harajuku
Having survived through to around lunchtime despite the best efforts of the Tsukiji crowds, I hopped the subway again to - this time the city-center-circling Yamanote Line - to a place synonymous with fashion and kawaii, the beating heart of an unlikely countercultural movement in a society with tremendous pressure to homogenize. Harajuku is best described as a cross between an alternate universe in which rainbows are the default color of everything and a 5-year-old horse girl's sugarhigh fever dream. It is home to a number of minority fashion movements, perhaps the most famous the eponymous "Harajuku girl" look characterized by maximalism, loud prints, neon colors, and, most importantly, pink. A lot of pink.
Shops that sell clothing and accessories to support this style, as well as others (loli, steampunk, regular ol' punk, and goth, to name a few) are concentrated around a single Harajuku Street - Takeshita (pictured above). The energy of this street is indescribable - something between adorable and absolutely deranged. I managed to spend around twenty minutes wandering around it before I had to tap out.
And then, for something completely different, I went to another Buddhist temple nestled deep in the woods. No, really - the city's biggest and most popular temple, Meiji-jingu, is tucked away in a park right across the street from the entrance to Takeshita. A long pathway lined with trees meanders through the park, twisting and turning and ducking beneath several massive torii gates before opening out onto the temple itself. Meiji-jingu is particularly popular during exams period each year and on New Year's Day, when an estimated 3 million people attempt to visit to test their luck for the new year. This time, I didn't seek a fortune; I just sat and admired for a while.
After a delightful little lunch at a cafe just off the path to the shrine - tempura with fixin's and uji matcha ice cream slathered in fruit which, to my dehydrated and starving brain, was among my finest - I headed down the street a couple of blocks to my final stop of the day - the Ukiyo-E Ota Art Museum. Ukiyo-e refers to a form of traditional and popular Japanese art - illustrations of landscapes from around Japan by master artists transformed into woodblock prints. Because woodblocks can be mass produced (with "mass produced" being relative - many ukiyo-e prints contain more than ten layers of color and texture, each of which must be applied separately and manually), they were a relatively cheap form of art widely enjoyed and collected by people from all walks of life. They also tend to be the most common type of Japanese art to persist, since there were typically many copies, giving them a greater chance of surviving to be documented.
The Ota Museum is based on the holdings of a private collector who just really, really loved ukiyo-e. Like the National Museum, the Ota cycles out themed exhibits each month; this month's featured prints were from Hiroshige, one of the two most famous ukiyo-e artists of all time. (No, he didn't do "The Great Wave" - that was Hokusai, the other most famous ukiyo-e artist of all time.) Each of Hiroshige's illustrations are paired with an entry from his journal as he visited each place; part of the allure of an ukiyo-e was a kind of hometown pride that people all over the country would get to see your little hometown, or the mountain pass you grew up next to. As someone currently on the road myself, I felt some kindredness reading them.
[One of the prints I saw, illustrating a hillside in Hakone - where I'm headed to next!]
Interlude: Five Ads from the Tokyo Subway
A young woman in a chicken suit showers confetti over a young couple to celebrate their saving money on their phone plans.
Stingrays, tropical frogs, and butterflies shake with intensity against a neon-splash background, each appearing in turn in a way that implies that they are competitors in some animal kingdom Deadliest Warriors contest that the butterflies seem doomed to lose.
A fantasia of high-end diamond jewelry gives way to a crown logo and the rather unfortunate brand name "Royal Asscher," which my brain cheekily autocorrects to "throne."
A silver fox of a salaryman dons a set of black cokebottle specs. A set of stats for him appear, each rocketing from lower numbers to "100%" - brand, position, looks - promising you'll get that promotion if you buy them.
Canon brags about the release of a ceiling-mounted camera which, seemingly through facial recognition, can detect interlopers in the workplace. As a supervisor watches with glee, a hapless trespasser is highlighted by a red laser and hauled off by security to an unknown fate.
7. Shinjuku
Shinjuku was not so much a destination for me this time around as a place to transit through - I came here to buy my ticket to Hakone on my second day in Tokyo, and then returned the next day to actually hop that train. Shinjuku is a groovy, happening kind of place; aside from the transit stations (and there are many), it's a sea of restaurants and izakayas (Japanese pubs / taverns), many of which come alive mostly at night. It's a popular place to stay for tourists because of its centrality and ease of transit, and I'll be coming back to explore it more on my last day in Tokyo, when I'll be doing just that.
This time around, the most exciting thing I did was seek out some souffle pancakes - that prized pinnacle of Japanese patisserie (move over, cheesecake). Sliding into the vinyl booth at Pancake House, I felt both a) like Leslie Knope and b) like, for a moment, I was in a diner back home. It felt appropriate to order a tall stack for breakfast as I waited for my Hakone train to depart. They. Were. Glorious.
*****
And by Jove, I think I've finally done it! This post took WAAAAAAY longer to put together than I thought it would, so I have actually, at time of writing, completed my equally whirlwind trip to Hakone and am currently winging my way to Kyoto via shinkansen. I'll catch you up on Hakone as soon as I can - it looks like rain this weekend in Kyoto, so I may well have plenty of time to sit in a cafe and write...