Shibuya

For our last day in Tokyo we finally got to Shibuya, which has a Times Square-like atmosphere, neon televisions on all the buildings, and multiple crosswalks where hordes of people cross all at once - it's either cars going or people going, but the effect is impressive. There are also people shouting on megaphones - I have no idea what - it sounds like old movies set in Communist countries where someone is spouting propaganda in an unintelligible language, but I saw one guy with a sign that said "Good News" so I assume he was preaching. Shibuya is also very popular with young people, and we saw the coolest, most cutting-edge fashions there yet. I believe this crosswalk was featured in Lost in Translation, and at rush hour just the sheer number of people streaming by is mind blowing.

There's a dog statue at the subway station with a touching story - back in the 1920s, the dog waited for his owner, a professor at a local university, every day. When the professor died, the dog continued to wait faithfully at the subway each day until he himself died several years later.

We went to the basement 'food hall' of a department store called Seibu and made a sort of picnic dinner of their sushi, chicken cutlets, potato croquettes, yakitori, etc, which was fun. Walked around admiring the architecture (many of the buildings are narrow yet tall, which David explained was because originally, people parceled out land into very narrow areas, but that then it was difficult to get land out of the family, so if developers wanted to build something big and wide, they'd have a harder time acquiring and tearing down neighboring properties to do so), watching the people cross again and again, and checking out a capsule hotel, where guests (usually male) can rent a tiny space atop other tiny spaces, pull a curtain shut, and spend the night. We went to another department store, Tokyu Hands, in search of a playground for Sofia, but it did not materialize. However, she played contendedly for awhile in the kids' section, with other Japanese children, and more people oohed and ahhed over her cuteness and asked to take her picture.


I thought I might pick up some Hello Kitty souvenirs for her but they were outrageously expensive - try $50 for a Hello Kitty picture frame, for example, no bigger than four inches in height, or $60 for a little plastic piano where people pop up when you hit a key. I did manage to find a deal on a pair of these special, supportive Tsukihoshi sneakers for my friend Ryan's little boy, though they didn't have much in the same brand for little girls.

And that brings us up to speed on our last night in Tokyo. My overall impressions are that Tokyo is amazing, clean, beautiful, packed with people, and exhausting. It is fairly straightforward to get around on the subway but it can be confusing at first. At rush hour it's unbelievable how many people pack into subway cars, and though we avoided rush hour as much as possible, sometimes it was unavoidable, and then I noticed there were absolutely no children except Sofia. The trains and subway cars are also impressively silent, with no talking. Cell phones are forbidden. Everyone is texting, reading, or sleeping. How nice it would be if Americans turned off their cell phones in public spaces and just shut up for once, and you didn't have to listen to people's mundane or self-important chit chat. People move fast here and don't seem to take up as much space. There are no fat people. No one is screaming at anyone, no one is visibly angry about anything. But the pace is just relentless - you feel like you can't really linger anywhere without getting run over. Everything is stylish, slick, futuristic, and expensive. Tomorrow we go to Ito, a hot spring (onsen) resort town, where Japanese people go to relax. So it should be a polar opposite of the Tokyo experience, but we'll see. Certainly we feel like we need some rest after all this ourselves.