depths to clouds

today was a doozy. i stepped out the door at 7:30 am and returned at 8:30 pm. i took over 300 pictures today (of which i kept 143). they will not all be posted in this blog, but they are all posted on the /gallery/ page, which i have reorganized. Spoilers, but this will be a long post. and i should also preface this by saying that this entry has a pinch of sass.

i started off my day ready for round 2 against the tokyo transit system. i don’t consider myself a genius, but i also don’t think i’m an idiot. tokyo has 14 million residents, and most of them use this train system every day. it had to be something i can figure out. and i did. i rode 6 trains today, and i was able to figure them all out, thanks to my airbnb host shinobu-san and my corporate overlords at google.

part one - morning walk through shinagawa

i had a ticket for the maxell aqua park when it opened at 10:00 am, but i did not trust myself to successfully navigate the transit system, so i left at 7:30 am to give myself plenty of time to make mistakes, but not nearly as early as when i went to ginza and arrived like 4 hours early. i took the ikegami line from hatanodai station to gotanda station and then got on the jr yamanote line, the same as the ginza trip. but this time i got off at shinagawa station.

this went perfectly fine, with one thing to note: the yamanote line is a very popular line because it does a circle around the main tokyo area in exactly 60 minutes. and i got on it around 8 am. which means i got on it at the same time as a ton of people probably headed to work. it was crammed. i probably had 8 people touching me at all times. i’m glad i am not claustrophobic, but i felt so bad for taking up space people going to work needed.

i arrived at shinagawa station at around 8:20 am. very early for my ticket to the aqua park, but that just gave me time to get breakfast. today ended up being a day of opposites. my morning and afternoon activities could not be metaphorically further apart. and similarly, my breakfast and dinner could not have been more different. i stopped in a breakfast place called royal host. i would compare it to denny’s in america, only with less (zero) meth heads and much much much much cleaner. i ordered pancakes, and discovered that japan has lemon and melon flavored coca cola. this was part one of my list of things today that made me angry at america.

🚨 we interrupt this blog post to bring you a rant about america 🚨

i bet nothing radicalizes people like seeing how other countries have it. this sentence seems hyperbolic when it’s about lemon coca cola, but experiencing the transit system in tokyo made me so mad at how apathetic most of american cities are about public transportation. this is the second largest city in the world. it is 12,520 square miles (san diego county is 4,526 square miles). its ridiculously huge. (photos later down will really put that into perspective). and yet apparently there are only 0.32 cars per household in tokyo. two thirds of families in tokyo do not own a car. i can’t find a similar figure for san diego, but voice of san diego said in 2014 that over 90% of homes in san diego owned at least one car, and that less than 5% of san diegans used public transit. i don’t blame them, because the public transit in san diego sucks. we keep adding lanes to freeways when we could take thousands of cars off the road every day by just having efficient transit systems. just one more lane bro. just one more lane and the traffic will totally go away this time bro.

🚨 we now return to your regularly scheduled blog post 🚨

anyway so i got breakfast at japanese dennys. it was decent.

i think america makes better pancakes than the royal host in shinagawa. maybe that’s the tradeoff for bad public transit. woah there, almost veered back into the rant.

after getting breakfast, i stepped out of the restaurant to discover the wind had picked up significantly, and nearly froze to death instantly. i am a california boy. colder than 65 degrees fahrenheit (18 degrees celsius) is the antarctic tundra.

i still had about an hour to kill, and i needed to get out of this frozen hellscape, so i walked around the nearby mall and found a 7-eleven. i don’t think i have mentioned this on the blog yet, but japanese 7-eleven is incredible. it’s like if you scrubbed all the grime out of american 7-eleven and added just a tiny pinch of grocery store to the mix.

note: i only have pictures of the candy section because my friend wanted pictures of the candy section.

my dad always says if he didn’t have my mom, he would do all his shopping at 7-eleven. you could actually do that legitimately here. at least, more successfully than in america. but they don’t have skippy peanut butter at japanese 7-eleven, so my dad’s out.

i continued walking around the shinagawa area and got a couple cool pictures on a bridge:

it was about 9:45, so it was time to head over to the aqua park.

part two - maxell aqua park

i was the first to arrive, but not by much. i was quickly joined by 5 or 6 other people and a group of around 15 kids, who i think were kindergartners on a field trip. they all had bright green hats on and followed their chaperone (teacher?) in a very orderly line holding hands. it was very cute. I think they were probably 5 or 6 years old.

the doors opened at exactly 10:00, and i was off on an undersea adventure. I’m not going to include every single photo i got at the aqua park in this post, because there are about 70 of them. they’re all in the gallery page.

i bet this guy is much more intimidating from any other angle

the thing the aqua park is famous for is the dolphin show. it was amazing.

i got a video of a part of the show. it was my first time recording video on this camera. it turned out ok. squarespace wants $25 per month for the right to embed youtube videos on a page, so the best i can do is link it.

part three - tokyo skytree

i was supposed to visit tokyo skytree yesterday, but my legs were killing me and jetlag caught up to me so i decided not to go. i added it to my day today instead. and i am so glad i did. it was breathtaking.

but first, i had to get there.

tokyo skytree is connected to a massive shopping center with its own train station, called oshiage station. there is a train line from shinagawa station (where i already was) that stops at oshiage station, so i took that straight there. easy peasy.

once i got there, at around 1:15, i went to buy a ticket for the skytree, and was shocked to discover the soonest available ticket wasn’t until 3:30 pm. so i had some more time to kill. i walked around the shopping center and saw a few interesting shops:

one of the first shops i noticed was the pokemon center. and it was kind of a disappointment. i don’t think anyone reading this was a pokemon kid, but growing up, the pokemon center was like a playground myth. i think they used to / maybe still do promotions with the games where you could get event exclusive legendary pokemon if you brought your gameboy / ds / 3ds / probably nintendo switch to the pokemon center to get them. there was always talk about how jealous we were that we didn’t have a pokemon center. i think there is one in new york city too. and i don’t think this is the only one in tokyo.

but it was kind of a disappointment, because its basically just a store to buy plushies of pokemon and thats it. i don’t really know what i expected, but it was not the stuff of childhood legend that i had expected it to be.

there was a jump! store, which sells merch from various shounen jump anime. since almost everyone reading this has no idea who this is, this is monkey d luffy, the main character of one piece, which is probably the most famous anime/manga of all time. it has been ongoing since 1997. it recently got a netflix live-action (as in not animated) adaptation. it is wildly popular worldwide. the tv screen next to him is a very iconic scene from the early seasons. it’s even in the netflix show.

i went in here because my coworker wants a souvenir of something featuring a character from this show named jinbe. i have not seen very much of one piece, so i am not super familiar with that character. i used google translate to ask someone working there if they had any merch of jinbe from one piece, and they read it and then replied in perfect english that people ask that all the time but they don’t. that was pretty funny. was i supposed to just assume like a stereotypical american and ask them in english? what was the right move there?

there was also a hello kitty store. this was convenient because there are 4 people who wanted souvenirs from the sanrio family of products, so this was an efficient stop.

finally, after 3 days i found a place i can smork.

the smorking zone was the perfect spot to get a video of the tokyo skytree and how gosh dang tall it is.

i found a studio ghibli merch store. because most of the people reading this are my family - studio ghibli is a very very famous producer of animated movies. they are some of the best films of all time, and i highly recommend watching some of them. if you are taking recommendations, “spirited away” and “howl’s moving castle” are some of the greatest pieces of art i have ever seen. the english dub of howl’s moving castle has christian bale in it. not even as the main character. these movies have reach far beyond the typical anime audience and i guarantee you would like them. give them a shot. i think they’re on disney+? but if you get really into them, do not watch grave of the fireflies, unless you are ready for the most devastatingly sad piece of media ever created. it is very very sad.

i did not expect the most american thing i have ever seen to be located on the opposite side of the world from america, but take notes joe biden - japan is out-america-ing america.

i found the kirby cafe! i wanted to eat here, but it was reservation only so i could not.

i got this drink from a vending machine for ¥170 ($1.12) and it was so delicious. i will legitimately have these shipped from japan to america regularly. 10/10 drink.

i walked around for about another hour just looking at shops, and then it was finally time to make the ascent.

there are two observation decks in the skytree. one at 350 meters (1148 feet), and one at 450 meters (1476 feet). i got to check out both.

i took a lot of pictures in the skytree. i won’t include them all here, but it was a breathtaking experience. you get here and you hear things like “second largest city in the world” and maybe you briefly see it out the window of your plane, but being up here really does blow you away. it expands all the way to the horizon in every direction, even from this high up. looking at it gave me this mental dissonance, vacillating between “this is the most incredible feat of human engineering and planning i have ever seen” and “look what we’ve done to the world”. i cannot accurately describe the way this place made me feel, it was truly a one of a kind experience. i think everyone who ever visits tokyo needs to see this.

as i said, i took a ton of photos. i won’t post them all here, but they are in the /gallery/.

when you get out of the elevator, the first thing you see is this wish board. you can buy a ribbon for ¥500 ($3.31) and write a wish on it, and then tie it to this display:

theres something really beautiful and human about thousands of people from all sorts of cultures and backgrounds putting their wishes in once place at the top of the world like this, looking down at this great concrete beast with hope or desperation freshly put in their mind by having to write a wish down. this place really makes you feel small. seeing your wish tied up with thousands of others just as valid as yours, seeing this massive sprawling megacity all around you so far away it looks like it’s made of legos. it’s a really humbling and beautiful thing to see.

i took many many more pictures than this. this is just the highlights. the rest are in the /gallery/.

i left the sky tree and decided to get dinner. on my way towards the station i saw this:

you may notice the sign for kura sushi. friends of mine will know that kura sushi in las vegas is one of my favorite sushi restaurants. its a simple conveyor belt sushi place, and i had to try the authentic japanese one.

part four - kura sushi

i spent the 10 minute walk to kura sushi fantasizing about the garlic ponzu salmon nigiri i always get at the kura in las vegas. upon arriving, i discovered they do not have that here. that was a bummer. but they did have plenty of delicious nigiri to choose from, seen below:

at the kura in las vegas, as you finish plates and drop them in the slot, a screen plays videos of the adventures of mutenmaru, where somehow you eating sushi is helping him in various scenes like fighting godzilla or lasso-ing a scorpion who stole his wasabi recipe. it is very cute.

in this kura sushi, mutenmaru does still exist, but it works differently. after every 5 plates, you have a chance to win a prize. the video that plays either ends in failure or victory depending on if you win. i happened to win, which gave me a qr code to scan on my phone. when i was done eating, i held the qr code up to a machine and this happened:

if the ball falls in the little moving box at the bottom, you get two prizes instead of one. alas, i only got one prize:

i don’t really know what it is, but i got it.

side note: i am actually quite surprised i have a quarter. i don’t know where it came from, but i don’t recall entering the country with any coins on me, and i obviously wouldn’t have gotten it here. it may have been left behind by the previous airbnb guest?

secret bonus part 5 - the journey home

so by this point, my legs are beyond dead. i have been pretty much constantly walking since 7:30 am, and it is now close to 8 pm. i load up ol’ reliable google maps and figure out how to get home. there is an elevator right outside kura sushi that goes down to oshiage station (where i arrived to visit the skytree).

i need to take the asakusa line from oshiage station to gotanda station, and then the ikegami line back home to hatanodai station. there isn’t much to really tell here. it was really easy. i have become familiar with gotanda station at this point because it is the launchpad for anywhere i go in tokyo, i always have to go from hatanodai station to gotanda station first.

the new part was exiting hatanodai station and walking home. this is the first time i have done that, and it surprised me to learn that there is a very busy shopping street on the exit side of hatanodai station, and that part of walking home includes a long upward slope. fun! i crawled my way back home, got in the door at 8:30 pm, and immediately began editing photos and writing this post. it is now 12:52 am and I am finished. that was a 17 hour day. goodnight! おやすみなさい!

if you stuck around through all of this novel of a post, i appreciate it. as thanks, you get to see the only photo of me that will ever be posted on this website. me trying to smile while also contemplating the insanity of what is right behind me.

じゃあまた明日!