The Aftermath
The typhoon hit Tokyo in the night between the 8th and 9th September. Japan is equipped for these kind of severe weather, however, they kind of underestimated how long it would take to get everything running again. The usually pretty reliable public transportation had massive delays and cancellations and the Tokyo residents had to queue up in front of the station for several hours before they finally got into a crammed full train. Even at 11 am it was still a complete shit-show and the residents were completely pissed and rightly so. At least they fixed all problems during the day and everything ran smoothly again in the evening. That was definitely an experience.
The Zojoji Temple
The Zojoji Temple is located near Tokyo Tower, as can be seen in the pictures. The temple is both from outside and inside stunning and the main entrance and the small garden are beautiful. There is also a graveyard next to the temple. To its side there are probably a few hundred statues of cats standing upright. They wear knitted caps and have a little windmill next to them. These statues are, according to Japanese Buddhism, protected by the Buddhist monk Jizo. He is the guardian of children, in particular children who died before their parents. The statues are reminders for dead children, as well as stillborn and miscarried babies and aborted fetuses.
The Proud Kingdom of The Soy Sauce
There is nothing screaming āAsianā more than a good bottle of freshly pressed soy sauce. So in order to see where and how this liquid, brown gold (damn that sounds wrong) is made, I went to the Soy Sauce Kingdom. It is located in Sakado near Kawagoe, where they have a museum and a cafe. Its main purpose is to educate the people about the production of soy sauce, show soy sauces with different flavors and various produces that are made from or with soy sauce. The highlight of course being the soy sauce ice cream. Although it sounds nasty, it tasted pretty good. The best comparison would be lightly salted caramel ice cream. Mhmmm.
However, my personal highlight was my lunch at the Soy Sauce Kingdom. As always in Japan, I just looked at the pictures and the prices and chose one of the menu items. The cashier selected the item, repeated the name of the dish and told me how much it costs. I paid and then sat down at the table. And then it hits me like a motherfucking truck. She said something with āNattoā. Fuck. I did want to try Natto at some point in Japan, but that was a bit too sudden and I wasnāt mentally ready for it. In case you donāt know what Natto is, it is basically fermented soy beans. Yes, you read that right. There is also something sticky on the outside of the Nattos. It is so sticky, when you take some out of the bowl the sticky stuff stretches over a fucking meter. That stuff looks like spider eggs in a spider nest and not something you should or even could eat. But oh well, here we go, I tried it. Andā¦ it actually tasted like nothing. At first, then the intense āflavorā spread across my mouth. It is, to put it mildly, absolutely disgusting and I will never in my life eat that shit again. God only knows how I actually managed to eat like half of the small bowl in front of me. Even drenching it in so much soy sauce that I thought my heart was going to explode didnāt really work out. Suffice to say, I left the Soy Sauce Kingdom hungry and traumatized. However, I do encourage anyone who visits Japan to at least try Natto once. Mainly because I donāt want to be the only traumatized person.
Kawagoes Warehouse District Street
The main place to visit in Kawagoe is the Warehouse District Street (Kurazukuri no Machinami). The buildings in this street are preserved from the Edo-era, which is basically the type of architecture you see in Movies and Anime when it comes to traditional Japanese architecture. This also explains the nickname for Kawagoe āKo-Edoā which means āLittle Edoā. There are also a lot of people running around in Kimonos or Yukatas, which adds to the traditional feeling of the street. Most of the buildings here are used as shops and they usually sell souvenirs, merchandise or some kind of food/snack.
The Wet Dream of Every Nerd Ever
When it comes to games, manga and electronics, there is no better place to go than Akihabara. The relatively small district, consisting of one main road and a smaller sideroad in parallel are full with stores selling figurines, merchandise and electronics of any kind. The figurines here are of really high quality, highly detailed and more often than not very expensive. They start at around 1000 Yen and go up to 100,000 Yen (~8ā¬ - 800ā¬). So the only thing left to do for me is sell both my kidneys so I can even fucking afford these things. Also at least half of the figurines are from One Piece and Gundam and the other half are half naked anime girls with disproportionately big boobs in various different poses. I also kind of forgot to take pictures of those, because I wasā¦ uhmā¦ kind of distractedā¦ ahem.
Anyway, there are also a few stores here selling cards for various Trading Card Games like Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh, baseball cards and other cards I didnāt even know existed. If you got enough skill or luck, you can try to win something from the claw crane machines. The prizes include figurines, plush Pokemon and even electronics. Typically these cost around 100 Yen (~0.80ā¬) for a single round and there are always money change machines there, just in case you only carry stacks of 10,000 Yen bills like a true drug lord.
Lastly, there are a lot of maid cafes in Akihabara. Here, girls dressed in maid or, albeit rarely, guys in butler outfits serve you your tea or coffee and bring you mediocre food. Also the maids find customers by standing at the main road and talking to the people passing by. At some parts of Akihabara there is a maid every few meters who tries to lure you into their business, which can be a bit of a nuisance. Although the most common outfits are maids, there are also some girls dressed in police or military uniforms, warrior attire or even guys cross-dressed as female maids. There is something for every fetish here.
Ueno Park
After strolling through Akihabara I just walked into a random direction and randomly found a park. Turns out that this random park is called Ueno Park and it is pretty huge. There were, as expected, a lot of temples here and a lot of noisy cicadas. Iāve come to enjoy their chirping by now. It makes you forget that you are in a huge city and kind of takes away some stress. Also it turns out that this park is adjacent to the Tokyo National Museum. I didnāt go in as it was already pretty late in the day, but I definitely plan on going there at some point in the future.
What an exiting and productive week this was. I visited a lot of the places I planned on visiting and actually got stuff done. I have one more free week until university starts, so there is probably going to be more sightseeing next week.
And lastly an update to my website: you can subscribe to my newsletter on the right of the site so you get notified whenever there is a new blog post.
Thank you for reading :)
Ash