Tokyo is Great!

Out of all of the cities I’ve visited on this trip, Tokyo is by far the best.

Tokyo is the city that Shanghai wants to be. It has a long way to go. The big difference is: Tokyo pays attention to the details, and it keeps working at them until they are 100% correct. 99% is not good enough. Shanghai, on the other hand, often stops at 80%.

Sunday is Shopping Day

Tokyo shops on Sunday. So did I.

I had planned to see the gardens at the Imperial Palace on Sunday morning. Unfortunately, it was raining quite hard, so I had to change plans. I also bought an umbrella. It cost $3. I don’t expect it to last very long.

I headed back to Roppongi Hills. It is enclosed, so I was out of the rain. When I was there two days ago, I spent all of my time in the museum, so I didn’t really see the shopping area.

The bad thing is that I saw a frame for spectacles there that I really love. The design company is called Parasite. They did not have lenses to match my prescription, which is the only factor that stopped my from buying them.

I bought some small and inexpensive souvenir items, then headed to Shibuya, which is another shopping area. It didn’t have anything of interest for me, so I walked up to Harajuku.

Harajuku was on my “must see on Sunday” list because of:

Cos-play Zoku

Which is: Costume Play Gang.

As you can see, this spot is more popular with the tourists than it is with the zoku.

Harajuku

Harajuku is also the area for boutique shopping. There is a huge assortment of boutiques. The only theme amongst them is: expensive. I bought a t-shirt. It cost $60!

Tokyo is certainly a great place to shop. You can probably find anything, if you just know where to look.

Well-dressed

Tokyo is a well-dressed city. Even when people are casual, they still look nice. The only slobs walking around are the tourists, like me!

This is another notable difference between Tokyo and Shanghai. When men wear suits in Tokyo, they fit. In China, most men wear ill-fitting suits – almost always too big! This is surprising, since tailoring is available cheaply in China.

It was very nice to see ladies dressed in kimono at the Kabuki theatre! They were mostly older women, and the kimonos were very understated, but beautiful. I thought these must be real Kabuki lovers, who would be in the best seats. I was surprised that some of them were sitting in the cheapest seats!

Trains

Tokyo has a fantastic system of trains and subways. They get you where you want to go quickly and cheaply. You never wait more than a couple of minutes to catch one, either.

They also have a great idea: fare adjustment machines. I have no idea how much fare to pay. It varies depending on distance, transfers, etc. But, what I can do is pay the lowest fare, do my travel, then feed my ticket into the fare adjustment machine and pay what I owe.

In a couple of days, I will ride on Shinkansen (Bullet) trains, which will be interesting.

The subways have information screens, which tell you what the next stop is, and other information, which is where I learned about:

Earthquake

One of the information boards this afternoon said: such-and-such train delayed because of earthquake. The delayed train was a Shinkansen.

Sure enough, when I logged in to Yahoo, the first headline was: Earthquake in Japan.

It was outside of Tokyo, so I was safe.

Senso-ji at night

I’ll sign out with this photo, taken a few minutes ago: