Holiday in Tokyo

Taking my New Years holiday in Tokyo was awesome. We simultaneously picked a great and terrible time to go. The city was full of people and the neighborhoods were jammed packed, it was great. Unfortunately, we went during a national holiday, so many of the museums and government run sites were closed. In spite of this we found plenty of ways to have fun.

We spent a good deal of time walking around and just looking at the neighborhoods. Some highlights include:

• Shibuya, full of young people. We saw some sort of protest with lots of yelling, Japanese flags and fliers of some political figure photoshopped up as Hitler.
• Electric Town, with tons of towering buildings and neon signs. We checked out a huge arcade full of young men and boys sitting at video game consuls mashing buttons.
• Asakusa was the part of town our hostel was in. Near our hostel was the Senso Temple. In Japan, it is customary to visit temples on/around New Years, make offerings and have your fortune read. Surrounding the temple was a whole lot of small shopping booths and food vendors (imagine the International Bazaar at the MN State Fair, but 157 times cooler). On New Years day, Laura, Ryan and I went to the temple to take pictures and see what it was all about. There were huge masses of people visiting the temple, but we still made it through the crowds and saw the temple. Laura and I also had our fortunes read. Her fortune predicts "good fortune" in many facets of her life in the coming year, where as I will have "regular fortune."
• Harajuku is the hip shopping district in central Tokyo. We decided to go on what was considered the "Black Friday" of Japan. The streets were packed with hordes of people shopping and store employees in the streets yelling about the great sales they were having. We went to Meinji-Dori, a street famous for shopping in Harajuku, and there were so many people on that one street that you didn't walk, you were carried with the crowd.
• Ginza is the 5th Avenue of Tokyo. Lots of upscale stores and oddly enough there was a 5 story Abercrombie and Fitch with a queue almost 100 people long waiting to get in. We visited a really cool toy store (4 stories tall) that was full of action figures, dolls, stuffed animals and Legos. On the top floor there was a really big slot car track that you could race cars around. I challenged Laura to a race and I hate to say it but I don't think there was a clear winner, it seemed to me that we both were pretty terrible at it and kept crashing our cars.
• Roppongi. "Since the end of WWII, Roppongi has garnered a notorious reputation as a den of sin." Or so says Lonely Planet. I'm not sure that Roppongi was a "den of sin" but it was the part of town we spent New Years Eve in. It was our night to go all out and live it up. No meal was too expensive, no bar to classy, and what did we decide to eat that night? Mexican food and it was awesome! Drinks were not cheap, but luckily after midnight, at the bar we were in, there was free sake. Overall a great place to be on New Years.

One last thing that I will mention about my trip to Tokyo was something I noticed after New Years Eve. As we were walking around or near temples I saw all kinds of people standing around with tall signs in Japanese. These people also had speakers strapped to their backs blaring something in Japanese. My suspicion was that it was some sort of Christian evangelism. I wasn't positive and when I tried to talk to one of these people, she looked around and blinked (apparently the Word could not be transmitted between a native English speaker and a native Japanese speaker who could only communicate through pantomime). I did get a Japanese-English copy of the New Testament from this woman. I was later told on the plane by someone that they were indeed proselytizing.

While my trip to Tokyo was short, it was amazing. Good food, cool places, great people to travel with, and a sweet version of the New Testament to put on my shelf, I could not have asked for more.