Tokyo

Japan is the world’s most populous city in the world, at 37 million. But despite that, most places we saw in Tokyo had room to move. This may be due to the impressive metro system.

The exception to that was of Takeshita Street and the Pokemon store, which were arguably full of tourists. More on those later.

Our first full day in Tokyo we spent with our tour guide getting around on the metro. 

We started with the Meiji Jingu Shrine, which we got to by walking down a pretty tree-lined path which reminded us a bit of Virginia, particularly our area of Lynchburg. I think it was mostly the sound of the wind blowing across the tops of the old-growth trees. It was comforting. 

In one spot at the shrine, we could shake a bamboo tube to pull out a random numbered stick. This number led to a drawer where we got a unique poem.

Here is mine.

Then back on the metro to the Harajuku area. 

We spent a bit of time on the busy Takeshita Street. Yes, pronounce this carefully … 

There were many funky shops here with interesting fashion or colorful food, but our kids’ favorite was the numerous animal cafes.

There were the usual cat and dog ones, but also otter and pigs! 

We would have done the otter one, but the line was really long … and they only took cash. 

So we settled on the pig cafe.

Afterwards we walked through Shibuya and did the scramble crossing. Our guide said this was the busiest pedestrian intersection in the world.

Then we went to the Pokemon Center, where the kids were in heaven and I got to spend 45 minutes in line so they could buy stickers … yay! 

We headed out to dinner at a mall and got some of the most expensive and delicious food court meal of my life. It was wagyu beef, after all. 

We were pretty tired by this time, but our guide was super eager to show us a giant transformer, the rainbow bridge, and a smaller Statue of Liberty.

We did those things and then said it was time to go home. The kids were fading hard and so was I. 

We nearly fell asleep on the metro ride back. 

This is a photo of kids barely keeping it together ...

The next day we went to the Tokyo Skytree, which is 634 meters high and gives big views of Tokyo. If we hadn’t done a tower in both Penang and Shanghai, this might have been more exciting. 

And the same goes for the Sensoji Asakusa, which is Tokyo’s oldest temple. It was lovely and probably more investing to people who had not visited 20 temples in the last few weeks. 

However, we did also go to the teamLab Borderless Digital Art Museum.

We didn’t really have expectations on this, but it turned out to be a huge highlight.

We all LOVED it. So unique!

The art went from room to room and changed over time.

Much of it was interactive in some way: flowers might spring up at your touch, art figures would turn to look at you, if you touched a flying bird it might explode into butterflies. At one point we made fish colorings, which were scanned, and dropped into an aquarium the size of a room, and begin swimming around. It was so cool! 

I think this art museum really sums up what my kids were most excited about in coming to Japan, though if you were to ask them they would still probably say it was the Pokemon Center … sigh.