Tokyo - day two

Jane had an interview and a couple of important calls to prepare for today, so I set out on a 'Chris Day of Fun' alone.... 

I headed to the Edo Tokyo museum which charted the history of the city, and was actually really cool. Moving from feudal Japan and the importance of the region, to the progression of society with western influence, the major earthquakes, and then the effect of WW2. And I got to sit in a palanquin.

Also, I found that there used to be an important ceremony involving floats and thousands of people, with this giant chicken structure being one of them.... I need helpers to recreate this at Nottinghill next year.

After a couple of hours of exhibits and being shoved by dozens children on school trips, I left and set off for Akihabara. And I wasn't disappointed... At the station there was a model company's stall showing how interesting it was to build their new models. It was interesting.

I carried on into 'electric city', an area crammed full of pachinko halls, slot machines (which pay out token coins, which you still swap for prizes... So it's definately not gambling then..ahem...), and arcade machines. The last of these sections were the most interesting, not least because at 2pm on a weekday, they were rammed full of 20-something guys playing floor after floor of arcade game. Most of these games I hadn't ever seen, and involved arriving with a pack of collectible cards and placing them on a special surface. The surface then scanned and recognised them, and you could move your football players, armies, or whatever else the cards represented, around depending on the game type. A lot of these guys were in suits so I guess they had somewhere they were supposed to be.

Having wasted time and money on another pachinko session (never again), and some cool arcade games, I had a look around the manga district. I wandered around one six storey building for 10 minutes before being told it was a women's comic store; men's was the 8 storey building next door. Despite this neither had anything in English, which was a shame.

I got back on the shrine tour and finished by seeing the Confusious temple. What stuck me was how the surrounding buildings fitted around the temples, but didn't obstruct or stifle them; each could have been in Koyo or Nara, but it was an island of peace in Tokyo.

I bought a 7 eleven lunch and was looking for somewhere to sit when I found this view, halfway across a road bridge. It was its own world and reminded me of someone's giant model train set. I stood, ate my lunch, and watched this miniature world for fifteen minutes.

Further on my wander I found what looked like a military equipment store, but while the scopes, helmets, clothes where all real, the guns were fake (bb-guns). And the shop model was a horse.

I finished my wander as it was getting dark, but I was ready for another day of Tokyo discovery!

Chris