Before we dive into our further Tokyo activites, we need to straighten out the butchering of the pronunciation of Harajuku as Gwent Stefani has unfortunately popularized it.
It’s not hair-uh-juku, it’s harr-ah-juku. You would think that after all these years she would get this one thing right since she loves it dearly, but alas, she does not. And now that I know your inner monologues have all been corrected, we will carry on.
Tuesday, we explored Harajuku and Yoyogi, which were some of my favorite places when I lived here. Harajuku is a bustling neighborhood filled with funky fashion, cheap deals, street food, and crepes. Yoyogi is, by contrast, a peaceful oasis in the middle of big city chaos.
Since we arrived early-ish, Harajuku’s Takeshita street was not yet awake, so we went for a wander around Yoyogi park. The birds had necks here and didn’t look prone to attacking. The leaves were changing and had transformed areas of the park into yellow carpeting. It was empty this early in the morning except for the elderly, clean-up crews, and a few groups of synchronized dancing college students. If it weren’t for the sound of traffic and the occasional skyscraper poking its head above the treeline, you could easily forget you were in a big city.
After lunch, we went to the Ukiyoe museum in Harajuku, the Ota museum of art, which is home to a small collection of prints from the late 1800s. These prints were much more stylistic and advanced than the theater ukiyoe we had seen in Osaka. They had a large exhibit on Mizuno Toshikata’s works, some of which mixed ladies in Western and traditional Japanese wear. We could not take pictures inside, but I have used my powers of google to show you one below:
We decided to sync up our post-lunch food comas with sleepy cats in a cat cafe we saw from the street after lunch. Cat Cafes became a thing in Japan after I had left in college, and the only other time we had been was in Korea. Cats abound at the cat cafe, mired in sunbeams and punching boxes over like the tiny little terrors they are.
Now that it was post-lunch and post-cat nap, many of the shops on Takeshita street were hoppin’. It’s a long street filled with strange, kitsch shops selling everything from souvenirs to ugly cat shirts to lolita fashion. In the evenings and at weekends, it is jam-packed with tourists and locals, shoulder to shoulder, shuffling past merchants hawking wares and proclaiming sales loudly and strange Jamaican bouncers.
It was a weekday and only mildly crowded, thankfully. We of course went to Daiso, the giant 100 yen shop, and filled our bags with souvenirs and food.
But lo, there was a photo booth (purikura) shop across the street from Daiso. I have never done this thing before, as it was not something I spent my money on as a student. We entered a horrifically pink stairway tunnel and were greeted by over twenty photo booths. The photo booths were plastered in airbrushed women making the same kissy face and copious amounts of filtered makeup. It was snapchat filters before snapchat was a thing.
Of course we did this thing. We fed the machines our coins eagerly and decorated the heck out of our beautiful faces. Most of the booths used green screens and I forgot to take off my very green sweater for the barbie photobooth. Here are a few gems, including some misspellings of Buddha because I couldn’t figure out where the undo button was once I had made a mistake, so we had to roll with it for the rest of the sessions.
Our last act in Harajuku was to consume delicious Angel Crepes for the evening, which is the greatest creperie in Tokyo.
Oh, and we did find this thing:
We were going to ascend the Sky Tree, but its expensiveness extends to ludicrous levels and we were laden with bags from Daiso, land of the tasty and cheap souvenirs. I had the purikura photos to download, so we opted to head back to Shinjuku for the evening instead.
Wednesday was our day for East-ish Tokyo things, like Asakusa, the Imperial Palace, and DisneySea. We started at the Palace gardens in the morning. You can’t go into the palace without an appointment, which is elaborate to get and involves filling out forms as is the Japanese way. We did not have an appointment, and instead walked around the beautifully groomed exterior gardens.
After a lovely lunch with a view of Tokyo station, we headed to Asakusa and Sensoji for souvenir-purchasing and shrine-visiting.
Asakusa is the place I usually use to purchase Japanese-y souvenirs. They’re cheap and numerous and have an exceeding variety on the street in front of the shrine itself. It’s a popular destination and is always packed.
From Asakusa, we struck out for Disney, Japanesey souvenirs in tow. We planned to stash all of our things in the station and enjoy DisneySea for a few hours with the After 6 pass.
It was totally worth it. DisneySea is the most beautiful Disney I have ever been to (disclaimer: this has been two Disneylands). The themes were lovely, and we got to see the Christmas show and fireworks. Plus, a cold breeze was blowing in off the ocean so most people left after the fireworks. We assume they were freezing and died, but our strong midwestern bodies prevailed and we enjoyed the park the full four hours we had. We even got on some of the bigger rides with little or no wait!
We returned to Shinjuku very late, leaving the park after its official closing time. A drunk man coughed on me in Shinjuku station and now I swear I am getting sick. Only time will tell if I will finish strong or succumb to germs!