Back to Tokyo, the polar opposite of slow, quiet, tropical Okinawa. It’s cold here, there are millions of people, and there are more than two stoplights. We are practically on another planet.
We arrived in pouring rain and managed to find our way to our surprisingly roomy ABB, and we also found the rest of our traveling party despite a station mix-up. We then struck out for our first destination: the Pokemon Center, a magical place that will take all of your money in exchange for glorious Pokemon goods.
The center I usually went to was in Hamamatsucho, and was easy to find from the station. That one is closed now 🙁 The new mega store is in Sunshine City in Ikebukuro, which I have only been to once. It’s not close to the station. It’s raining seriously. We expected many pokemon themed signs in the environs, but there were none – we found it anyway through my powers of persistence and walking generally in the right-ish direction despite crazy GPS.
The megastore is filled with giant sculptures of pokemon, many pikachus in a multitude of costumes, and tourists and tiny children alike, hands gleefully clutching merchandise (present company not excluded). There were many seasonal flavors of costumed pikachus: currently, Christmas and New Years. I also picked up an Alola mug.
Such majesty we beheld, and lo what money we did give to Nintendo. It was glorious and worth it. The Pokemon Center was, of course, a PokeStop.
It was beginning to get crispy cold in Tokyo. It had snowed a few days ago and news stations around the country had been losing their collective minds on it. We were even receiving reports on delayed Tokyo trains in Okinawa – whatever good that would have done us on our tropical island!
For all its focus on energy conservation and innovation, Japan skimps on home insulation if you don’t live in Hokkaido. We were reminded of this after our Sunday night in our ABB. It was very lovely but quite drafty around its surprisingly large windows, as many Japanese homes are. Some caulk around the windows would be a huge improvement. It. Is. Cold.
On Monday, we headed to Kamakura, which is just southwest of Tokyo. It’s got cute gardens and beautiful temples and a big buddha – which is excellent for the other half of team Tokyo that wasn’t with us for the beginning two weeks of our magical journey.
We started at Hachimangu, dedicated to the god of war (Hachiman). Hachimangu has many small adjoining temples and ponds, and you can wander at your leisure.
We were interviewed by a tiny herd of children who needed to practice their English on foreigners. They told us their names and something famous about Japan, and in return we told them something famous about America. I struggled to not say something sarcastic and I told them “burgers.” We took our picture with them and they gave us origami before cutely scampering off.
After children, we went to a small, peaceful portion of the park that looked like it was off the set of The Birds. There were birds perched on the roof, on the trees, and everywhere in the pond. Watching. Waiting. Pooping. Some of them were so fat that they didn’t have necks, and they seemed to have no fear of people. Clearly, these birds were well-fed.
Then, two foolish humans came and started feeding the birds. They attempted to withhold food from the birds. The birds attacked them. The people fled into the building and the birds followed. We hoped they lived and fled the scene before the birds got funny ideas about other humans.
From Hachimangu, we went to fancy curry lunch, followed by taking the Enoden (Electric train) to Hasedera and the big buddha.
Hasedera is my usual source of charms, and it has a lovely garden and a view of the ocean from on top of the hill.
There were no attack birds here, but it did have a little cave you could duck into to view statues of boddhisatvas while trying not to bang your head. We banged zero heads. Success!
The big buddha is just up the way from Hasedera. He was cast in the late 1200s and has withstood tsunamis and earthquakes for centuries. In the 60s and again in 2014 they did maintenance on him to make him more sturdy.
We saw our children from Hachimangu at Daibutsu. They became really excited and piped “hello!” cheerfully at us again, eagerly tugging on the sleeves of their classmates to prove we were real. The teacher got them in line for a class picture in front of the buddha just as we were leaving their presence for our own picture.
With one fateful selfie in front of the Buddha, the Buddha Buddies were born.
On the way back, we stopped at the Ghibli store near Kamakura station. I purchased the world’s softest and most expensive blanket, partially because we were cold and partially because it was so cute.
It was rush hour on our return to Tokyo, and train delays abound. Fun fact: When the trains run behind, google can’t even figure out what train we’re on, so mostly we were going off of my wild guesses because the train we were on was crazy. We puttered back mostly correctly, and the trains we were on had to stop twice because someone had hit the emergency button at the platform just ahead of ours. In the year I lived here, I don’t think I ever encountered that – but I was also adept at avoiding the trains when it was rush hour in the evening.
After an hour and a half of standing, we made it back to collapse into sleepy heaps in our ABB. My heap became softest heap with the addition of the totoro blanket. Yes!
Tuesday: Harajuku and Yoyogi!