40,000 Steps Through Tokyo

 They say that the average tourist walks 20,000 steps per day when visiting Tokyo, and they are exactly correct!! On each of our two days we both hit the 20,000 step mark on the way back to our hotel room after dinner.

This sign is actually on the International Cruise
Terminal building, but it looked like a fitting
introductory photo

Firstly, we were staying at the Conrad Tokyo, a very nice hotel that takes up the top 10 floors of an office building in the Shiodome district with fantastic views of Tokyo Bay from one side of the hotel. Luckily we had booked a room on that side, and had this lovely vista whenever we looked out the window.

The custom in many good Japanese hotels is to even provide pajamas, which was fine for me, but they were a little small for Larry. Very comfortable!

It took us all three nights in the hotel to finally get used to the time difference of 13 hours from home. On the first night, Wednesday, we were in bed and asleep by 8:30, but awake before 5:00. It got a little better, but even on Friday night we were both asleep by 9:30 and awake around 6:00. Now that we are on the ship, we actually managed to stay up until 11:00 last night - Saturday - but I started writing this blog post at 7:30 in the morning!

On Thursday we had our first of two days of touring with our guide, Sakiko. We got a recommendation for a tour company from a fellow guest on our Crystal cruise last summer, and booked our Tokyo tours with them. Sakiko picked us up at the hotel at 9:00 in the morning - or should I say 8:55. There is an unspoken '5 Minute Rule' in Japanese society. This means that you are always 5 minutes early for an appointment, ready to start. We reviewed the plan for the day, which she had already emailed us, and set off.

There is a lovely large park right across from the hotel, called the Hama-Rikyu Gardens. It dates back to the mid-1600s when it was used by the Tokugawa shogun ruling family as a 'beach residence' which had been reclaimed from the sea. Subsequent shogun rulers created the gardens and ponds as we see them today, and the gardens were given to the City of Tokyo in 1945 and opened as a public garden in 1946.

There are a number of tea rooms in the park where 
visitors can enjoy a cup of matcha and eat a Japanese
wagashi sweet treat

The Sakura, or cherry blossom time, is really
already over in Tokyo, but there are still many
trees around with some blooms.

The Azaleas are coming out now

and so are the Wisteria

There is a Pine Tree in the gardens that was planted about 300 years ago to commemorate some restorations done by the 6th shogun Ienobu. It is so large now that the branches need to be propped up to keep them from breaking. 

After leaving the Hama-Rikyu Gardens, we headed over to the Tsukiji Fish Market. This part of Tokyo, being close to the sea, was always populated by fishermen, and this has not changed. The Tsukiji Market holds the big daily fish auctions, but also has stalls for smaller companies and fishermen to sell their catch. The Outer Market is also known as the place to get the freshest cooked-while-you-wait fish and seafood. We were planning to do a little grazing, but it was already so busy before 11:00 that we skipped that idea and asked Sakiko to take us somewhere for lunch where we could try another traditional Japanese dish. We did manage to get some photos, though:

Ever seen Wasabi straight from the field???

We also visited the Namiyoke Inari Shrine. This Shinto shrine was erected when land for the Tsukiji market was being reclaimed from the sea. It is said that the waves that kept impeding progress finally subsided when an image of Inari Miyogin was floated on the sea, so once the work was done, a shrine was erected to ensure continued protection from the water.

Fishermen will come here to pray for safe voyages and successful catches, and there is an annual festival also known as Shishi Matsuri (lion festival) that celebrates the shrine's bringing continued safe voyage, aversion from misfortune and good luck. The lion heads that represent this are carried around town to preserve the tradition.

There is a process of cleansing the hands and the mouth
before going to the shrine to pray, which is 
done here

One of the two lion heads that are
carried around during the festival

People come to this table after cleansing
their hands and mouth, offer a coin and
submit their prayer to the deity.

After our visit to Tsukiji, we walked into the Ginza area where Sakiko was going to take me shopping for some art supplies at the famous Itoya stationery shop. But first she took us to a lovely traditional restaurant on one of the side streets, in the third floor. It was very quiet, and she joked that she didn't want to tell anyone about it, for fear of it getting too busy.

We chose to try something quite different - Sukiyaki! As Larry jokes, it isn't just a bad song from the 1960's. The set meal consists of a bowl of rice, a bowl of miso soup, the cooked sukiyaki plate of beef, tofu and vegetables, and a raw egg. You mix up the egg and dip the sukiyaki plate items into it before you eat. The little bowl on the side is pickled vegetables. It may sound a little odd, but it sure was tasty!

For dessert, the set included this matcha pudding with a few fried beans on top. It was tasty, too.

After this lovely and quite filling lunch, we headed around the block to G. Itoya. The G means it is the Ginza location, and the largest one. It covers 8 floors, selling everything from paper, cards, wooden stamps, which are a really big thing in Japan, stickers - yes, these are huge, too - to crafting and art supplies, pens of all shapes, sizes and price ranges, and even some home furnishing accessories and storage options. Unfortunately I wasn't as successful as I had hoped in finding the Japanese watercolour paint I was looking for, but there was a similar brand so I took a chance and bought a set of those.

Once we finished at Itoya, we went to another smaller, over 100 year old shop nearby. Here I bought a Stamp Book. No, this one isn't for stickers and wooden stamps, but is used to mark a more spiritual journey. In Japan, each shrine or temple will write into the visitor's stamp book the name of the place and the date you visited in beautiful calligraphy so you have a record of all of the spiritual sites you have been to. This is not just for tourists; it is also popular for native Japanese to have these memories of their visits. I started using it the very next day, as you'll see later.

From here, because our feet were starting to get tired, we chose to take the subway to the Imperial Palace area to visit the gardens there.

Larry and Sakiko looking up information on
where to sit in the train to be close to certain exits.
See the gates on the other side to keep people from
crowding the platform and falling on the tracks.

This was a bit of an adventure. The Tokyo transit system seems mainly to run underground, and it is a spaghetti bowl of subway lines and trains going in all directions. As if that isn't bad enough, various of the lines are owned by different companies, so when you buy a ticket it determines what lines you can take to get to your destination. The ticket machines are quite easy to operate once you've figured out what station you need to get to and which coins are what value. They don't take credit cards!! We left that part to Sakiko, and even she got a little confused once or twice.

Fortunately our first trip was not too crowded. We left the fun part for Friday when we used the system quite a bit.

So we got to the Imperial Palace gardens. There is very little left of the actual Imperial Palace; just lots of walls and foundations, but the gardens are large and peaceful.

The mythological fish sculpture near the 
entrance. It doesn't have any imperial
significance, but it is an interesting subject

There is still an Imperial Palace, but it is in the western part of the grounds and the Emperor, Naruhito, and his family live there. Much like Buckingham Palace, there is a ceremonial entrance to the private section which is used for visiting monarchs, politicians and other dignitaries, but that is not open for public viewing.

The double cherry blossoms were still out on many trees here, too.

And the azaleas were also starting to come up in bright colour.

The ponds are home to turtles and particularly pretty carp with graceful flowing fins.

On the way out we came across a 'field' of Japanese Irises. These are quite small flowers, but have a lovely delicate colour and design.

That was about as much as we could take for one day, so we took the subway back to the hotel and put our feet up for a bit before showering and heading to one of the hotel restaurants for dinner.

I had a Grilled Seafood Platter which was quite delicious

Larry had a Wagyu Steak Sandwich for his dinner

That was it for Thursday, and Sakiko was ready at 8:55 on Friday morning for Tokyo, take 2!

This time we used the subway quite a bit to get to the places we wanted to see. And we started out early enough to catch some of the rush-hour crush, though not enough for the 'pushers' to still be out.

A new addition to the itinerary was a visit to Nezu Shrine in a more residential ward. Along with the 1,900 year old shrine, there is an azalea garden to end all azalea gardens. The original garden was planted 300 years ago and has been expanded to fill every inch of the available space! The Azalea Festival runs the entire month of April, so Sakiko suggested that we might want to see it as the garden was at its peak.

The gate to the shrine. You can already 
see the azalea bushes

There are large houses up on the hill behind the garden. Just imagine the view from that side while the azaleas are blooming!

I found some lovely purple irises just
starting to bloom, too.

Closeup of some of the pink ones

and this interesting combo plant - pink,
white and varying stripes and dots

The inner gate of the shrine

Our 'we were here' photo!

This is a shorter version of the 1000 Torii
Gates in Kyoto

The shrine with lion statue standing guard

What an amazing display that was! And quite popular, too. We arrived at about 9:45 and had very few people ahead of us in line. When we left an hour and a half later, the lineup to get in stretched beyond the first gate and quite far down the street!

Our next stop, after another subway ride into the Shibuya district, was Meiji Jingu, a shrine to Emperor Meiji. Every Emperor takes a name as he ascends the throne which becomes the 'era name' for his reign. This emperor was in power from 1867 to 1912 and was responsible for bringing Japan away from the isolationist philosophy of the Tokugawa Shogunate, replacing it with the democratic political system and trading economy that we still see now. This took place during his whole reign and was known as the Meiji Restoration. Just for interest, the current emperor since 2019 is Naruhito, whose era name is 'Reiwa', meaning beautiful harmony.

On the way to the shrine, you pass by a wall of empty
Sake barrels on one side and French wine barrels on the other.
Apparently Emperor Meiji really enjoyed both!

The emperor and empress enjoyed writing poetry, and they wrote in the 'waka' style, which uses 31 syllables in a particular cadence. They also wrote in an old version of Japanese, so now the boards displaying some of their works are translated into modern Japanese and, thankfully, English for tourists. Considering how short the poems are, these two described their themes in a beautiful manner. Here is the translation of the empress's poem:

Colourful flowers may well beautifully adorn the hair of a woman, but fragrance of sincerity is the heart's real elegance.

We continued walking through this urban forest until we finally reached the third gate and the shrine itself. All of the trees along the path through the gates were planted according to a plan, and have been there since 1920 when the shrine was opened. The buildings look a bit more modern than traditional, but that might have been a nod to the modernization that Meiji brought to Japan throughout his reign.

The shrine is rather large. This is only one side of
it!

Our next stop was for lunch, and Sakiko took us to a small ramen shop called Afuri not far from the shrine. This was the only place we had to line up, but as she said, if there's no lineup outside, that ramen shop doesn't serve good food! We waited for about half an hour, and had lots of time to decide what style of ramen we wanted to eat.

This was the menu card in the window.

It was very interesting. Once you've decided on the ramen bowl you want - what kind of broth, noodles, meat and heat - you order and pay at a machine. Then you wait some more for the staff to get you a seat at the bar, and then they bring you your ramen bowl....and a bib for messy foreigners!

Here's my bowl. it comes with your choice of broth, size of noodles, some greens, a slice of BBQ pork belly, a half an egg, and a piece of nori, or pressed seaweed.

Here's Larry just starting on his, with Sakiko looking on.

This is the size of the whole shop. The lineup is still going around the side of the building, so we decided not to sit around too long after we were done.

After lunch we headed to the famous Shibuya Scramble Crossing. Isn't it amazing how an intersection in a big city can become a world-wide tourist attraction? It is always compared to Times Square in New York City, but we think it is bigger in size and has a lot fewer billboards. I did take some video, which I will try to insert here when I do the next posting tomorrow or Tuesday. But for now, here are a couple of photos:

After seeing Shibuya, we walked over to Shiba Park and the Zojo-ji Buddhist Temple. People would come to the temple to get a photo of the old and new - the old Temple and the new Tokyo Tower. But in the past few years a new skyscraper has been built that takes away from the view.

You can see how that new building takes
away from the nice composition of the
temple and tower

but of course there's a way to get rid of it!

Did you notice the scaffolding on the temple? One more photo to add to our list.

After the temple we walked over to the Tokyo Tower.

All the decorations are colourful carp, posted
for Childrens' Day at the beginning of May.

We only went up to the main observation deck at 100 metres. The tower is a total of 333 metres high, which is apparently 9 metres higher than the Eiffel Tower in Paris, after which it was modeled. You get some great views all around the city. 

Of course, they also have the glass floor panels, just like most towers like this around the world. Lots of people were spooked by them, but we had no problem walking over them. I will also post a video of my walk across the glass floor in an update.

After this visit, we headed back to the hotel, as we had a dinner reservation at 7:00 and needed to get ready. We had to get a photo of us with Sakiko before she left us. She was a fantastic guide and a very interesting person.

We had our Kaiseki set meal dinner at the restaurant Kazahana in the hotel. Kaiseki meals include a lot of different dishes, but none of them are very large. But by the time we were done, we certainly weren't hungry!

Bamboo Shoot Dumpling Soup with Deep Fried
Icefish

3 Kinds of Shashimi including tuna and squid.
The squid was kind of chewy

Grilled Fish on the right hand side, with a fava
bean puree. Accompanied by some sashimi. The 
one in front is covered with nori

Wagyu beef simmered in sauce with some tempura
style vegetable

The tempura platter included a couple of clams. The
pink stuff is Sakura - dried cherry blossom flower. It
was quite tasty!

Steamed rice with firefly squid and watercress,
accompanied by another broth

And dessert was a chocolate cake with chantilly
cream, orange and pineapple, with a cup
of green tea

It was quite the experience to have this dinner, especially as we never knew what was coming next! It was a nice way to round out our time in this very interesting city. Now, on to the rest of Japan!