Another beautiful day in Tokyo, with sunny, mild weather, and Lori, Nick, and I did quite a bit of sightseeing today.

We’ve discovered that Tokyo is a late-rising city for the most part. Even the cafes open later in the morning, around 8am, and the French patisserie around the corner from the hotel only opens at 10am. With our jet-lag we’ve been waking up early, and it’s lucky that our hotel puts out coffee and pastries because we haven’t had much luck finding early-morning breakfast places in town.

Nick’s been a sweetheart, and has gone upstairs to fetch coffee and pastries every morning we’ve been here. We divide the booty and have a light breakfast in our room, and then usually pick up a mid-morning snack somewhere on our way.

Our major sightseeing plans for today were the Edo-Tokyo Museum and a night tour of Tokyo. The museum wasn’t open until 9:30am, and we were awake, dressed and ready to go by 7:30am, so we decided to hop on the train to Ueno Park and walk around a bit before heading over to the museum.

The park dates from the mid-19^th century, and has a variety of buildings on the grounds: a zoo, several museums and art galleries, and several Shinto shrines. The museums and galleries were closed, and most of the people we saw were either the homeless who live in the park, or commuters or students cutting across from the train station to various destinations on the other side of the park.

Ueno Park has lots of trees and a number of hills, so we climbed up and down for a while, discovering interesting corners—a beautiful old shrine tucked away on the side of a hill, with kitsune (fox) statues clad in faded scarlet bibs guarding the entrance; a vast pond covered with giant water-lilies, each of the leaves the size of an umbrella; an avenue of large stone lanterns placed in the deep shade of tall old trees.

We walked around for about an hour, then returned to the train station (which is located conveniently across the street from the park), and transferred trains a couple of times to reach the museum. The rail system in Tokyo is extensive, easy-to-use, and very convenient. We can use our rail passes to go nearly everywhere (and where the train doesn’t go, the Tokyo Metro does), and both the signage and the announcements are in Japanese and English.

The Edo-Tokyo Museum is a fascinating place, chronicling the history and everyday life of the city from establishment of the Tokugawa Shogunate in the 1600’s to the post-WWII reconstruction.

Located inside a huge modern concrete structure that resembles a sports stadium, it contains a number of full-sized model of houses, theaters, and public buildings from different eras of the city’s history, as well as extensive displays on the social, political, and physical history of the city—everything from the 18^th-century aqueduct and sewage systems, to municipal fire brigades, to life-sized models of a Kabuki theater, an 18^th century tenement, 19^th century newspaper office, and early 20^th-century middle-class houses. 

We were given a personal guided tour of the Edo half of the museum by one of the volunteer docents, a charming elderly lady who pointed out some fascinating details about the layout of the shogun’s Tokyo residences, including Edo Castle, and the old city.

After finishing our museum visit around lunchtime, Lori, Nick and I returned to our hotel to drop off a few things and change shoes. Then we split up for the afternoon—I picked up an obento (boxed) lunch at the train station, and headed to “Electric Town” in Akihabara, while Nick and Lori enjoyed a nice lunch in the hotel restaurant and then went shopping.

I’m a huge fan of the obento shops, and am determined to sample as many obento as possible while I’m in Japan.

Available in most train stations, they’re inexpensive, beautifully-arranged, and delicious, offering tiny portions of many different dishes.

Today’s obento was a seafood obento—it had a portion of roasted vegetables (pumpkin, lotus root, carrot), sautéed spinach, pickled radish, two small pieces of grilled fish, a tablespoon of sautéed mussels in a tangy lemon sauce, a piece of calamari fried in a seaweed-laced batter, ginger pork sliced paper-thin, and a scoop of rice topped with some kind of minced shellfish in a sweet-and-sour sauce.

Akihabara is known for its many electronics shops and being a destination for geeks of all stripes. I was surprised at what a small area the famous “Electric Town” actually covered—only 2 city blocks. It was definitely geek heaven, though—dozens of tiny shops lining alleys, crammed with every bit of high-tech stuff you can imagine. One shop seemed to specialize in nothing but power cords and surge protectors of various kinds. Another was nothing but MP3 players and earphones. Yet another was “build your own PC” place, with large plastic tubs overflowing with motherboards, fans, memory chips, and other odds and ends.

The district was crowded with young men—the only other women I saw were store employees, and a few elaborately-costumed girls handing out flyers for a “maid café,” where all the staff were apparently pretty young women costumed as maids.

I made a circuit of the area, poked my head in a few stores looking for a couple of accessories for my Sony Walkman, then the loud and competing music blaring from each store started to overwhelm me. So I headed back to the train station, ravenous and footsore.

Once back at the hotel, I ate my bento lunch, and contemplated venturing into the vast, maze-like underground shopping mall that branches off from the train station. I needed to find a bank and exchange some money. The underground mall proved to be a bewildering complex of fluorescent-lit, marble-paved corridors lined with upscale restaurants (all with plastic food displays, including a gourmet pizza shop that featured a pizza topped with an egg, sunny-side up and two strips of bacon) and expensive boutiques for clothing, luggage, shoes, etc.

Mission completed, I met up with Lori and Nick again, and together, we took a train a couple of stops away, to take a Tokyo By Night bus tour. It was quite nice—we started off by driving over the Rainbow Bridge and having a Japanese dinner at the top of a hotel built on one of the artificial islands in Tokyo Bay.

The view over the black water and colorful downtown skyline was spectacular, and it was good food.

We started off with an appetizer, which consisted of various pickled seaweed and vegetables served in tiny dishes placed in black lacquer boxes, served with a tiny glass of plum wine. Then our dinners arrived, also prettily arranged in small dishes and bowls placed on lacquer trays: Lori and Nick had the sukiyaki served in a cast-iron skillet, and I had the sashimi tray, which came with a side salad of shredded cabbage, spring greens, cold steamed broccoli, and sweet corn; red miso soup; two pieces of nigiri sushi; and a selection of sashimi—tuna, hamachi, salmon, and a barely-cooked prawn.

For dessert, we were served a cup of fragrant Oolong tea and a tiny scoop of green melon sorbet, which was delicious and very refreshing.

Then it was on to our next stop, Odaiba, which is another artificial island in the bay. It’s a popular place, with lots of hotels, shopping malls, amusement parks, the Fuji TV station, and a giant Ferris wheel brightly lit with multicolored neon. We made a photo stop near a replica of the Statue of Liberty, which afforded us a wonderful view of the skyline and Rainbow Bridge, plus a number of brightly-lit party boats dotting the dark waters of the bay. It was a very mild, humid night, which made walking around very pleasant.

Our last stop of the evening was at Roppongi Hills, which took us through the brightly-lit Ginza District as well as the nightclub-studded Roppongi District.

Roppongi Hills is a very posh, ultra-modern high rise building with a shopping mall and art museum, among other things, and an 360-degree observation deck on the 52^nd floor that offers an amazing view of the city, spread out in lights as far as the eye can see. It was here that I really got a good sense of Tokyo’s vastness. The observation deck is also apparently the place to take a date in Tokyo—the benches were crowded with couples looking out over the city lights.

Tomorrow morning, we check out of this amazing hotel (the service is absolutely unbelievable, and there were countless small touches, like the fresh fruit placed in the elevator lobbies daily, that really added to our stay here).

We’re planning to take the Shinkansen (bullet train) north to Nikko, which lies in the mountains and has many sights of historical interest. I’m not certain about Internet access at our next hotel, but we’ll be staying two nights at a mountain inn that features an onsen (Japanese baths fed by natural hot springs).

Then, it’s off to Kyoto after that…