Akihabara Electric Town! To many of the people reading this, Akihabara needs no further introduction, but to the other few (i.e. my parents) Akihabara is the world mecca of nerd-dom, the haven of otakus, the home of all things electronic, game-related or animated. I first visited Akihabara Sunday evening, and they had the entire main street in the area, Chuo-dori, closed down to traffic, so it was packed with gamers, electronics buffs and otakus of Tokyo, the vast majority of which were under the age of 30. Akihabara has everything though - countless shops selling ipods, computers, cell phones, cameras, 8 floor towers selling just manga (and their 18+ equivelants), video game stores with multiple floors each dedicated to a single gaming system, back alley discount electronics sold out of milk crates, figurine shops, cosplayers, restaurants where the waitresses are dressed up as cat maids... yeah....
I didn't buy anything, mostly because I had no money, but it was a great place to hang out and check out all the games. I went back a few times over the next few days, and it's much more organized during the day when the streets aren't closed off, but that first chaotic evening was the best.
The only part of Kokyo open to visitors is the east gardens. When you enter, they give you a little token that you need to return when you leave. The garden itself was nice, but not up to the standards of many of the gardens from Kyoto. There are quite a few signs giving information about all the places of historical significance in the palace, which probably would have been more interesting if I had known much about Japanese history to relate them too. It was a nice relaxing walk though, and in a very central location right around Otemachi and Tokyo station, so easy to get to and from, and a good launching pad to the livelier nearby areas.
Tokyo Bay Area
My main purpose in going to the bay area was to visit Miraikan - the Japanese Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation. There is no subway nearby, so I took one of the private train lines to get there, which was an experience in itself. The train winds itself between the towers of Tokyo, 4-6 stories in the air. It's a spectacular view of the city, and going by train above parts of the bay itself is amazing. Miraikan itself was only a short walk from one of the stops, and I got a ticket for both the regular exhibit and the special exhibit themed on the underground. Many of the exhibits had really interesting parts, but a lot of the hands-on stuff was targetting a younger audience. I especially found the areas on emerging technology and life science to be interesting. The emerging technologies one had an interactive drawing board where people could draw pictures alongside the AI of the computer, so that as you drew, the computer would take what you were drawing and add too it based upon what you were doing. It also had a display of a fish pond with fish swimming around on the floor, and you could add boundaries that the fish would be unable to swim through by standing in their path on the floor, or moving cushions to block off areas. The life sciences area had big sections on genetics and brain activity, both of which are areas of great interest for me for my programming, and both which ended up giving me a bunch of ideas for new project ideas. One of the big centerpieces of the museum is a giant electronic globe hanging from the ceiling. It's made up of a large number of LCD screens, and displays realtime pictures of weather patterns, ocean currents, etc all over the world.
After the museum, I decided to go for a walk along a path running along the water. There were a lot of small parks along the way, and I spent some time just watching them unloading ships coming into the bay. There was a museum of maritime science along the way, but I wasn't all the interested, so I passed it up.
Tokyo has the world's largest transit system, and the Tokyo Subway was how I got just about everywhere during my visit. For the most part I went with the 1000 yen one day unlimited tickets, since I was moving around a lot each day. For the most part, the subway was always busy (sometimes very busy), but unfortunately I never got to experience being squeezed into a car so that you couldn't move. There is a vast underground system in Tokyo, where often subway stops would connect to underground malls or other tunnels or basement levels of department stores, so that you could easily get just about all you need to live without every going outside. Because sometimes there would be 4 or 5 subway lines connecting at one station, sometimes you'd need to walk almost a km underground just to get from one line to transfer to another. In general though, the entire system is very organized and very fast to get where you need to go.
Various Other Places
This is by no means a complete list of all the places I went. Some others of note include Ginza, where I visited the Sony Building. It has a display of all new and upcoming Sony products to look at and try out, and a full sony store at one of the upper levels. I checked out Ikebukuro, which is one of the busiest stations in Tokyo, and has a lot of shopping. On my way out to Narita Airport I spent quite awhile in the Oshiage area wandering around and candy hunting. I'm sure there are many other places I wandered through quickly, but this as good as I can come up with for a general overview!
After Oshiage I took a train on the fairly length ride to Narita, and after a few hours of waiting got on my plane back home. The Narita airport had a huge shopping area and was really organized despite its large size, which just made O'Hare in Chicago seem even more hellish. After multiple delays, rude workers and insane lines, I managed to run my way to the plane for Toronto just before it took off. It's crazy that it should take about 4 times as long to just transfer planes at a station than it took to be processed at the original station... Anyway, eventually got back to Toronto, had my luggage delayed for 45 minutes, and eventually got out. It's been an interesting trip, and obviously I have mixed feelings about how it had to end (and the finances resulting from how it had to end), but I got a lot out of it that I wanted to get out. Now it's time to find a normal job and get some debt paid off, and in another couple years maybe I'll try again, either in Japan or elsewhere (I got a lot of really good reviews about China during my time in Japan....) Still undecided as to whether to keep the blog up and still use it on a less frequent basis, or just let it sit and gather dust. Either way, thanks for reading!
-Richard
2 comments:
Glad to hear you had a good experience with all that Japanese madness - trips like those will stick with you forever. Good luck job hunting!
I think with your talent and problem solving skills that "normal" is not the kind of job you should be looking for.
I also think you should keep your blog...It's interesting and gives you the impetus to keep doing interesting things and keeping people who care in touch. (And there will be other trips to add!)
For those who don't know about it or don't care don't really matter.
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