KyleLibra.com

This past weekend Hamby and I took a bus to Tokyo from Nagoya. We stayed with a family he knew. This was the first and last time I will take a bus instead of the Shinkansen. In Japan it is unheard of to drive for hours on end without getting out of the vehicle. Our bus would stop at every single rest stop to give the passengers and mainly the drive a break. It added a lot of unnecessary time to the trip.

Tokyo is considered by most to be the largest city in the world. Its size is totally overwhelming at first. I’ve never been to a place with so many people everywhere at all times. Shinjuku station is the busiest station in the world. About 3.6 million passengers pass through the station every single day. During peak hours they have people who have the job of literally pushing more people into the subway cars to alleviate congestion. Shibuya crossing is the busiest pedestrian crossing in the world. Over three million people pass through the crossing every day. Many people believe the Starbucks is the most visited in the world. Hamby and I stopped in to grab a coffee (or in his case a hot chocolate) and watched the crowds pass through the crossing. I took some video, but I’ll have to wait to post it when I get home. Without the video it really isn’t possible to express how many people are in this area at one time.

Here is a photo of the crossing at night (not taken by me):

Another very interesting place we saw was the Akihabara district. This is known as electric town, where the otaku (Japanese nerds) hang out. In this area of Tokyo you can literally buy any electronic component you could want, playing any video game you could want or visit a maid cafe (more on this in a minute).

We visited the Sega store, which is actually just an arcade six stories tall. Some of the more interesting video games include a giant horse racing simulator (video coming eventually) and a fully enclosed robot fighting game. The horse racing game features about 20 seats of people with small monitors in front of a giant 10 foot screen that displays the horse races. From what I can gather these men sit there for hours smoking cigarettes and drinking tea. They have virtual horses they train and then race against each other. It was something I had definitely never seen before. The robot game has the fully enclosed pods you get inside of to play. Inside the pods there are giant screens, huge arm controls, pedals, speakers and a headset. They are linked to thousands of players across the country. The game was really expensive (about $5 USD for 2 minutes of play). We played a quick game to see what it was like. If fighting robots really existed, these would be the closest simulators to being in the real thing.

The final part of Akihabara that was very different were the maid cafes. All along the streets there were young girls dressed as maids handing out fliers. The family we were staying with explained that the otaku (Japanese nerds) will pay these girls to hang out with them. They are dressed like maids and other people anime characters because that is the type of girl the otaku would want to talk to. There isn’t any sexual side to it at all. Apparently you go in to one of these places and eat and drink and then pay a girl to eat a drink with you and listen to your problems. I think it would have been funny to experience first hand, but it was very expensive and apparently (like everywhere else) none of the maids would have spoken English. Here is the wikipedia article explaining in more detail. Definitely a uniquely Japanese phenomenon.

The family we stayed with was really great. They cooked a different, authentic Japanese meal every night for us. It was very interesting to experience the home life of a real Japanese family and eat real Japanese food a family would eat. Our ultimate goal in going up to Tokyo was to be able to climb Mount Fuji on the way back down to Nagoya. As I mentioned before, that didn’t really work out. Overall it was a lot of fun exploring Tokyo with Hamby.