September 22, 2002
Wes Ehrlichman

Christina and I spent our last day exploring Tokyo. We took the subway to central Tokyo and went to the palace. This is Tokyo station:

And this is the train that we took there:

The subways in Japan are unbelievably efficient. It costs anywhere from $1 to $5 for a one way ticket to anywhere in the city. And it's a huge city. This car in particular had nothing but GAP ads for the entire length of the car.

We arrived at the Tokyo station and headed toward the Imperial Palace. On our way there we walked past this fountain area and it hit me that I had been there before. When I came to Japan five years ago the Imperial Palace was one of the places that we went to.

The thing that sucks about the Imperial Palace is that no part of it is open to the public and you can barely even see it from within the grounds. Determined to get some kind of interesting pictures from our trip we took pictures with the little bit of the palace that was visible from the outside.

To the right of Christina's head is Tokyo Tower.

Apparently it is a warp portal to either ancient civilizations or the demon relm, depending on the Japanese Anime you happen to be see it in. Our hotel was very close to it, and the night before we actually sat around at its base for a while, but it was too dark to take pictures so you've got to settle for this one taken from the Imperial Palace.

When we left the palace we decided to go to the Sony building and see some cool technology. The Sony building is located in Ginza, a classy commercial district near central Tokyo. The walk was sort of far from the palace, but there were so many cool looking stores that it never got boring. On the way we saw this strange looking clock and I had to take a picture. Check out the expression on the guy's face in the corner too.

Shortly after, we found the Sony building.

I was so excited, it looked so cool! When I first laid eyes on the big banner for the video game Auto Modelista hanging from the side I knew it was going to be cool.

It sucked.

Ok, I guess it wasn't that bad, but I wasn't in the mood for it. I can't even explain why it wasn't fun. It just wasn't. Something about the design of the building, the way things were set up, the way you could touch stuff but really not do anything cool with it. It just turned me off.

Even the Playstation floor was a partial let down. On the Playstation floor they have a bunch of little booths where you can play games. They aren't just demo units of the latest games though. How it works is you go to the receptionist desk and flip through one of around 10 books that list every title that's ever been released for a sony system. Then you write your name down on a sign up sheet, along with the index of the game you want to play and they sift through their library of games and pull out the one you want to play. It's really a cool idea, and I definately think they should have this implemented somewhere, just not in the Sony Building. Most people are going to the Sony Building to see the latest and greatest in technology, not a library. I guess I was also wierded out because most of the people on the floor were 10 year old kids.

When we left the Sony store we went to a coffee shop and walked around a bit more, then we went to a huge toy store. The toystore was awesome! It definately made up for the lack of fun in the Sony Building. The prices weren't so great, but they had everything you would ever want. The bottom floor was little trinkety stuff, the second floor was stuffed animals, the third floor was videos and action figures, and the fourth floor was video games, video game toys, and a few arcade games. We stayed in there for at least a few hours and I still wanted to go back later!

These guys were on the stuffed animal floor. Who wants a $500 stuffed Totoro?

This was the store's security camera.

Would you believe that they had a TON of Monchichi toys? Even modern ones like Ichiro Monchichi. Wierd. These things were gone by the early 80s in America.

When we left the Toystore we were really hungry, so we looked in the tour book and found a place called farm grille or something like that. It said that there was a buffet of American food and we wanted to go. When we got to the place though it ended up being an American style bar with no buffet at all. We were too hungry to question it though, so we sat down. The food ended up being really good and actually fairly cheap (for Japan). What was strange though, was that the whole time we were there they had not one customer other than us. I didn't get it so I did some investigating. You see that big TV screen in the picture that is playing "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon?" Well behind it is a restaurant full of people and an American Buffet. Oh well, our food was really good and we probably ended up spending less money than we would have at the buffet.

When we finished eating, we headed home to try to get some pictures of the Tokyo Tower. It started raining though, so we didn't get any good ones. Oh well. That was the last night in Tokyo for a while.