Tokyo Archives - Page 3 of 5

Tokyo’s Controversial Yasukuni Shrine and Yushukan Museum

This isn’t a politics blog. But when I travel I like to learn about the history of the places I visit, and to at least somewhat get a handle on the political landscape. Fact is that politics & history are closely intertwined, and if you travel without paying any attention whatsoever to those things you’re travelling with your eyes half shut. I’ve also always found that the longer I spend in a country, the more I try to understand the politics – and there are some places you simply can’t write about without getting into the political stuff.

One such place is Tokyo’s oh-so-controversial Yasukuni Shrine, and the Yushukan war museum attached to it.

I honestly have to be careful how I write about this place – if any Japanese extreme rightwinger happens across it and takes exception, I’ll be in for all sorts of digital harassment shenanigans (just as a friend of mine was once targeted for writing about Japan’s whaling, despite his articles being very fair & balanced).

Yasukuni Shrine is for the enshrinement of the spirits of all those who die in service to the Emperor, starting from 1868 during the Meiji Period. Naturally that includes millions of Japanese who died fighting in WWII (the total number of souls enshrined is almost 2.5 million) – just as any other nation remembers its war dead, this is how Japan remembers theirs. Seen in that light it’s a somber and poignant place, and it’s a far cry from the lighthearted tourist fun you see at most Japanese shrines & temples – when I say ‘tourist’ here I’m including Japanese domestic tourists, who love to visit the famous shrines & temples of any place they take a trip to. But Yasukuni is different; it really feels like hallowed ground, and if you pull your camera out anywhere near the main altar the security guards will make it very clear you shouldn’t be taking pictures there (as my Canadian ex once experienced). The shrine’s also home to a large number of sakura (cherry blossom) trees, including the representative sakura of Tokyo (the tree by which the city counts the progress of the blossom season); when they bloom it’s a beautiful sight, and the pathways leading to the shrine are lined with food & drink stalls. And yet the mood within the shrine remains sombre – under the blossoms at Yasukuni was where soldiers promised to meet again should they fall in battle.

Which brings me to the other side to Yasukuni – the controversies and the nationalist whitewashing. Included among the millions of enshrined souls at Yasukuni are those of over a thousand war criminals, most controversially the 14 convicted class A war criminals held most directly responsible for the planning & execution of the war, men who were charged and sentenced for a range of severe war crimes – war crimes which remain a sore point in the countries most affected by Japan’s warmongering period. South Korea and especially China feel they’ve never received sufficiently sincere apology for what happened, and the enshrinement at Yasukuni of those sentenced as responsible makes it a political hot potato – the sitting Prime Minister doesn’t usually visit, but when Shinzo Abe did so in 2013 it kicked off another round of recriminations. Fact is that even though it’s by-and-large a shrine to young men sent to die in a war they probably didn’t want and certainly didn’t make happen, a tragedy which it is entirely understandable to commemorate, Yasukuni has become Ground Zero for Japan’s ultra hardline nationalist extremist groups. These are the groups of dickheads who drive around in black vans with loudspeakers yelling at foreigners to leave Japan, and who would like to end democracy and reinstate the old imperial system; on any visit to Yasukuni you’re likely to see a few of them parading around in WWII uniforms with fake guns, and possibly a black van or two parked out front with military insignia flying – I’ve even seen the flag of Manchukuo flying there (Japan’s old colony in northeast China i.e. Manchuria from 1933 to 1945). This guy was hilarious:

I was watching him do some marching drills when the machete on his rifle fell off; I had to stifle my laughter.

For these guys (these dickheads), Yasukuni is at the centre of their nationalist worldview, one in which Japan did nothing wrong in WWII and was victim rather than aggressor, in which Japan didn’t massacre hundreds of thousands in Nanjing (‘only ten thousand’ according to the repulsive Shintaro Ishihara), in which the biowarfare experiments in Harbin never happened, in which the comfort women were willing prostitutes, in which they were liberating SE Asia from Europe rather than taking it as their own domain. To see why, you just need to visit the Yushukan war museum; it lays the victimhood narrative out – Japan was engineered into attacking the US by an unfair American oil embargo (the embargo was actually enacted due to the massacres being committed by Japan in China) – while completely whitewashing the Nanjing ‘incident’. Here’s how the museum describes what happened in Nanjing:

No mention of the estimated 200,000 civilians raped & murdered.

Having been to the memorial in Nanjing, I can say it’s also guilty of being a bit heavy on the propaganda – rather than simply serving the purpose of remembering what happened there, it does seem to be intentionally designed to inspire continuing hatred of the Japanese ‘devils’. So there are certainly issues there too; but nothing as blatant as the Yushukan simply pretending nothing bad happened.

The first thing you see when you step into the foyer of the Yushukan is this locomotive engine:

With this explanation:

No mention of the estimated 100,000 forced Asian labourers and western POWs who died during construction, earning it the Death Railway moniker. This makes clear that the purpose of this museum is not to simply & honestly record what happened, but to present a specific “we did nothing wrong” narrative and thus reinforce a biased view of history.

Years before I ever went to Japan, I’d been up to Kanchanaburi in western Thailand, where you can visit the famous bridge over the River Kwai and even ride a portion of the Death Railway itself:

The bridge over the River Kwai, Kanchanaburi, Thailand — River Kwai, Kanchanaburi, Thailand

Death Railway Hellfire Pass Memorial, Kanchanaburi, Thailand — Death Railway Hellfire Pass Memorial

There you can also visit the Hellfire Pass Memorial, a beautiful, poignant memorial to those who died there with an informative, matter of fact museum; by comparison, the Yushukan is basically a giant ‘fuck you’.

Having a shrine to commemorate your war dead is one thing, but having an attached museum which whitewashes all these war crimes is quite another. Hence the controversy surrounding the place, and the batshit crazy ultras parading around in their ridiculous WWII cosplay outfits.

So should you visit Yasukuni while you’re in Tokyo? Sure, especially if you’re interested in history or politics. It’s definitely an interesting place, and quite different to any other shrine you’ll visit in Japan; but don’t take the Yushukan at face value.

More Tokyo posts here, and check out my quick guide to Tokyo; for more Japan posts see here

An Ode to the Crows of Japan

Japan, Kyoto, Tohoku, Tokyo, Wildlife

One time while living in Kyoto… “I went for a midnight stroll around Mt Inari, the red gates picked out against the snow, and with the sounds of the city muffled to nothingness, the night deathly quiet and utterly still save for the flakes tumbling silently down, I was in my own little magical winter wonderland. There were no footprints other than those I made as I went, and though I knew where I was going it truly had a dream-like quality; I was half-expecting to turn along an unfamiliar footpath and find myself in Narnia, or perhaps a Murakami novel… and then, lo and behold, I saw a footpath I couldn’t recall having seen before, leading back into shadow. The only thing morning had in store for me was work, so I figured I wouldn’t mind vanishing off into some spirit world and so down that mysterious path I went. The main trail is well-lit at night, but not this little corner I was now treading softly into; the only sound was the snow crunching underfoot. My eyes adjusted to the small amount of ambient light, aided by the reflective snow, and then I saw it, a strange dark figure looming before me, a statue, but looking somehow almost demonic; for some reason I was reminded of the opening scene of The Exorcist. I swear, I could actually feel it looking at me, fancied I momentarily saw a flicker of light reflected in a pair of eyes regarding me coldly from that darkened visage…

I don’t believe in ghosts, in angels and demons, but I have to admit it, I was spooked; what was this creepy statue standing silently here in the snow, seemingly almost alive, watching me, somehow calling me forward? I edged towards it, aware of my heart beating a little too fast… and then, with a piercing shriek, the statue suddenly sprang to life, lunging straight at my head! I raised my arms in defence and let out a shriek of my own…

A crow! A fucking crow had been perched there on top of a Buddha statue, and had indeed been watching me approach; it took flight and flapped straight past my head, and I absolutely shat my pants and screamed like a little girl. It was just a crow! Haha… I let rip with a torrent of expletives I’m glad no-one was around to hear (though the statues may have blushed), and with my peaceful walk through the enchanted forest thus thoroughly shattered I made my way home.” (from my Fushimi Inari post)

That was yours truly getting the shit scared out of me at Kyoto’s mysterious Fushimi Inari shrine in the small hours of a snowy night a few years ago. Little bastard! Well, not so little actually…

They’re a common sight there, regarding you with beady eyes from their perches atop the shrine’s red torii gates (torii literally means ‘bird perch’) or wheeling around in the air currents above you; on one occasion I witnessed a murder of hundreds, if not thousands, circling the skies over the shrine, making such a cacophony as you’ve never heard as though they knew something we didn’t about the imminent end of days.

Called karasu in Japanese, they’re remarkable creatures really. Survivors. In fact not just merely surviving in the urban environment of Japan’s sprawling concrete jungles, but thriving; roaming bands marauding their ways through the city streets, calling to each other from rooftop to rooftop, here! an uncovered garbage bag! and they descend, their enormous beaks tearing through the thin skin of plastic to get at the goodies inside, the shiny bits of plastic that catch their eye so, the scraps of food they partially live off… and all the bag’s other contents dispersed all across the street, strips of packaging and shreds of tissue strewn across the narrow road like someone set off a trash bomb.

And thus they earn their bad reputation as early morning noise polluters and rubbish bandits, despised as pests by most of the human population they share their territory with. But even though I’d curse them when their caaaawing woke me at 5am (making me want to apply the alternate meaning to murder of crows), I can’t help but admire them. Their intelligence, their boldness, their zero fucks given attitude.

Just north of Ikebukuro Station there’s a grimy pedestrian overpass over Tokyo’s iconic circular Yamanote Line, the green paint flaking and peeling away, the rust bleeding into the concrete from decades of rain, a revolving selection of mould-ridden discarded furniture pieces lining the way, one of those surprisingly gritty corners of that great city where the multi-levelled urban environment completely surrounds you as though all the world must be so; the trains thundering beneath your feet, the elevated highway rumbling overhead, the horizon defined by skyscrapers, the rows of apartment blocks hemming it all in from the sides. I used to cross it when walking from my apartment to the shining neon pastures of Ikebukuro, and it was such a striking spot; yet I never paused there to muse or ponder, as it was a favourite haunt for the boldest crow in all Tokyo. Those brave or foolish enough to cross (rather than taking the long route around on the other side of the intersection) did so with a wary eye on the infrastructure above, searching for that ominous black form perched on a lofty fire escape or road sign. And when it was there, you could only hope it allowed you to pass – the greatest danger was when it watched you from on high but you didn’t see it there, as it seemed to know when it had the element of surprise and usually took full advantage.

Those still unawares of the guardian of this decaying bridge are the main victims, and so it was with me the first time. There I was, crossing the bridge to Ikebukuro, my trademark beanie protecting my shaved head against the winter chill, slowing down to ponder the outstanding urban detail around me, when a sudden rush of air fractionally presaged a raking of talons across the top of my head – my beanie protected my bonce from a lot more than just the cold that day! Thankfully it dropped my hat almost immediately, which thankfully fell on the right side of the railing where I could pick it back up rather than seeing it fall 20m onto the railway tracks.

That was the second time a crow scared the crap out of me in Japan, coming a few years after the shrine in Kyoto. As I reached the end of the bridge, I passed someone coming the other way.

“Watch out,” I told him in Japanese, “there’s a big bad crow up there.”

But he totally ignored me in the usual Tokyo fashion, perhaps with a hint of a sidelong glance at this stranger breaking his bubble – and so I chuckled as I looked back to see the crow let him go by, before divebombing him and clawing at his unprotected head. This was something I witnessed on several more occasions, though it never got me again – I was always careful after that to watch above and watch my 6, and whenever I saw it we kept our beady eyes on each other the whole way across. What a performance – but yet, again, I couldn’t help but admire it. Oh, you humans built all this? That doesn’t make you the boss. Or so it seemed to say.

Another place where the crows have particularly stuck out in my memory was spooky Osorezan, a volcano at the end of the Shimokita Peninsula up in the Tohoku region. Osorezan translates as Mt Fear or Mt Dread, and in Japanese tradition the Sanzu River (which drains the lake in the volcano’s crater) is the gateway to the spirit world; it’s a desolate and otherworldly spot, with volcanic gases venting from the ground and the poisons in the water giving the lake a luminous quality, jizo statues everywhere to mark the souls of departed children, a lone temple standing guard on the lakeshore, and everywhere these huge black crows calling to each other across the sands. It really is a cool spot, and the crows play their part.

So here’s to the crows of Japan, terrorising the cities, kicking up a racket and waking everyone up at 5am, ripping open garbage bags and spreading trash all over the streets, and divebombing passers-by on footbridges; what absolute characters they are. They may be right troublesome little bastards, but they’re actually pretty awesome in my opinion; really smart and full of character, and while certainly not cute they make up for it in attitude. And I definitely like it that one of them once scared the crap out of me in the snow at Fushimi Inari!

For more Osorezan pics see here, and click here for more Japan posts

Neo Tokyo: dystopian dreams

Architecture, Japan, Movies & TV, Music, Tokyo

While I do despise the YouTube algorithm as a radicalisation & bullshit engine that human society would be better off without, I must grudgingly admit that it does occasionally dig you up a gem.

It suggested this beauty recently after I’d been listening to some of the Blade Runner soundtrack:

I knew I’d heard that haunting vocal somewhere before; took me a while to place it as I hadn’t listened to the album for years, but it was sampled to great effect by Future Sound of London on their track My Kingdom (from the album Dead Cities):

Great tune that.

The original piece is titled Rachel’s Song, written by Vangelis for Blade Runner but unused in the final cinematic release (or any of the multiple director’s cut iterations); in the above video it’s been set to some interesting CGI renderings of Tokyo, prominently featuring Mori Tower in Roppongi (I wonder if it was originally actually some sort of promo video made by Mori).

It got me thinking again (as I discussed here) about how despite not really having any direct connection to the movie, Tokyo is the city which most strongly invokes the visuals of Ridley Scott’s future Los Angeles. And that in turn got me thinking about future visions of Japan itself in various classic animations.

Japanese sci-fi anime has a tradition of imagining some sort of post-apocalyptic Neo Tokyo rebuilt from the ashes following the destruction of the original in a cataclysmic event; here are three of the most influential (all based on popular manga comics).

Surely the ultimate dystopian future Japan is the one depicted in 1988’s Akira. The opening shot of the movie is Tokyo from a high angle, the skyscrapers of Shinjuku suddenly silhouetted by the glare of what appears to be a nuclear explosion (later revealed to be a psychic singularity, and the trigger for WWIII) which rapidly expands to swallow them:

The story proper then starts three decades later in Neo Tokyo, a new city built on reclaimed land filling up Tokyo Bay, a visually stunning hi-tech dystopia of martial law, unaccountable elites, biker gangs, mass unrest & violent protests, and towering skyscrapers built upon decaying foundations of urban grit. Not to mention prematurely aged children with psychic powers, and a bike gang member mutating into something which I still don’t understand no matter how many times I watch it. It’s all a bit of a headfuck to be honest, but an absolute feast for the eyes – one which was, almost unbelievably, entirely hand-drawn. Check out the iconic bike battle scene:

…which leads the ill-fated Tetsuo to his collision with Takashi and subsequent torment:

This collision awakens Tetsuo’s psychic powers, culminating in his rampage through the city and that grotesque final transformation in the under-construction Neo Tokyo Olympic Stadium:

In a neat quirk of fate, Akira is set in 2019 and has Neo Tokyo building a stadium to host the upcoming 2020 Olympics – while of course the real-life 2018 Tokyo is presently building a stadium for the exact same purpose. A notable difference though – the 2020 Tokyo Olympics will be the 32nd Games, but the movie’s 2020 Neo Tokyo Olympics are the 30th (the implication being that a couple of Games were missed due to WWIII).

The real Tokyo hasn’t missed the coincidence, and has even been using Akira footage in some of its promo events:

Another influential vision of Neo Tokyo was Tokyo 3 in the trippy anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion; the story goes that the original Tokyo was destroyed by a nuclear strike during the chaos following the ‘Second Impact’, a cataclysmic event in Antarctica causing the entire ice cap to melt and sea levels to rise catastrophically, with the Earth also shifting on its axis leaving Japan stuck in an eternal summer – if you’ve ever experienced summer in Tokyo, you’ll know that isn’t a pleasant prospect! The capital was then shifted to Matsumoto (renamed Tokyo 2), before the construction of Tokyo 3 (in the location of Hakone) as the HQ of the Earth’s defenses against the alien Angels.

This series is actually based on the Apocalypse in the Biblical End of Days sense, with the Antarctica incident heralding a series of attacks by 12 alien entities analogous to the 12 angels of Bible prophecy. And the only people who can stop them are 3 deeply disturbed teenage kids (one of whom is secretly a clone) piloting giant biomechanical Evangelion fighting units (Evas), a nightmarish responsibility which doesn’t exactly help with their existential crises. It’s another total headfuck, and it’s one of my favourite TV series of all time.

But anyway, as for its portrayal of a future Tokyo, it depicts a city capable of going into ‘battle mode’, with all major buildings sliding underground on rollers and defensive screens sliding up everywhere while the Evas do battle with the angels. Not something we’re ever remotely likely to see, of course; but in-between the angel attacks we see the daily life of the characters in a city almost entirely alike the Tokyo suburbs of the 90s, when the anime was made. The kids’ school looks like any Japanese high school, they all live in apartment blocks just like the ones everyone in Japan actually does live in, and they rattle around on trains exactly like the ones rattling around Tokyo on any given day. So while it’s a crazy battle-mode sci-fi city, it’s also just like everyday suburban Tokyo, and there are some great little daily life sequences in the anime & spin-off movies like this:

And the never-ending summer is done well, with the constant soundtrack of cicadas and the characters bitching about the heat as they mop their brows with handkerchiefs. Just like real Tokyo in summer, in other words.

It all gets a bit Godzilla when an angel turns up for a mecha-scrap and they seem to destroy half the city each time, but in the end it turns out the real battles are internal, in the characters’ own heads, leading to another ending that left viewers scratching their own heads in turn.

Here’s the angel Ramiel attacking Tokyo 3 (from one of the spin-off movies):

One more for this post is Ghost in the Shell – not the movie version(s), which use Hong Kong as the setting and which I’ve written about here – but the Stand Alone Complex anime series which is set in a clearly Japanese environment. Specifically, the story takes place in Niihama, a new megacity built on artificial land in the Seto Inland Sea after the destruction of Tokyo in World Wars 3 and 4 (real bunch of optimists, these manga writers).

Much like Evangelion, despite the post-apocalyptic scenario the action takes place in an environment very much recognisable as modern-day Japan, but with far more advanced AI and cybernetic enhancements as routine. It’ll probably prove to be the least wildly inaccurate prediction of the future Japan on this page, but it’s the setting of the Hong Kong-based movie version that leaves the stronger impression.

So there you go, apropos of very little, some waffling musings on depictions of post-apocalyptic visions of the future in dystopian Japanese anime – aka how I just passed the time on the shinkansen from Kyoto to Tokyo!

Check out my posts on Blade Runner and Ghost In The Shell. More Tokyo posts here, and check out my quick guide to Tokyo; for more on Japan click here

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For my Japan overland travel guide, click here

A Few Random Things to Do in Tokyo

Japan, Tokyo

If it’s your first few days in Tokyo, chances are you have a to-do list including the usual spots like Asakusa, Shibuya, Shinjuku, and Meiji Shrine. But how about if you’ve done all that before? If that’s the case, here are a few random ideas for some cool stuff to do or places to check out in Tokyo – things that perhaps wouldn’t make it onto any ‘must-see’ lists, but which show you another side to the city or are interesting in some way or other.

Walk over the Rainbow Bridge to Odaiba

It’s not the most pleasant walk you’ll ever do – the constant stream of traffic over the bridge includes plenty of fume-belching delivery trucks – but walking over the Rainbow Bridge is pretty cool, due to the views of the Tokyo waterfront, getting a close-up look at a great piece of engineering, and the buzz of being that high over the water with the wind blowing by.

Walking across the Rainbow Bridge to Odaiba — Did it again with my parents

On the far side of the bridge is the island of Odaiba, a patch of reclaimed land in Tokyo Bay which is home to various shopping malls, the Fuji TV Building, an artificial beach, a mini Statue of Liberty, and the famous Gundam statue.

Access to Odaiba is usually via the Rinkai Line or the Yurikamome Line; to cross the bridge on foot take the Yurikamome from Shimbashi (transferring from JR/Ginza/Asakusa lines) or Shiodome (Oedo Line) and get off at Shibaura-futo. From there take the east exit and walk south for 5 minutes to reach the bridge. You access the bridge by going up the elevator in the bridge tower – it’s marked on Google Maps as レインボーブリッジ遊歩道入口 (Rainbow Bridge walking route entrance). As noted above the bridge & views are great, the traffic less so – it’s a good idea to take a pollution mask with you! (you can get them from the convenience store)

Kowloon Walled City

Within a games arcade in Kawasaki City (just south of Tokyo proper) is this amazingly detailed reproduction of a section of Hong Kong’s infamous old Kowloon Walled City. For more detail and pictures, see here

It makes for an interesting half-day out in its own right, or can easily be visited en route to Yokohama.

Head out to Okutama

A small town in the mountains on the western edge of Tokyo, Okutama’s a popular hiking & outdoors area in summer. Although technically still in Tokyo, there are some sizeable mountains and some fairly serious hiking trails, with the summit of Mt Kumotori at 2017m being the highest point in Tokyo and a fairly strenuous workout.

For something more easygoing, the Okutama Old Road up to Lake Okutama is a nice hike.

As well as being good for hiking, Okutama also simply shows another side of Tokyo, a far cry from either the neon of Shinjuku or the old-time Shitemachi neighbourhoods, or any of the urban residential districts. Ageing, crumbling, and deeply conservative, it’s not somewhere I’d want to live, but it’s interesting to visit.

Manseibashi

Manseibashi Station was once of similar grandeur to Tokyo Station, a Meiji-era building inspired by the grand architecture in Europe at the time; however, it was severely damaged in the bombing raids towards the end of WWII and was never put back into service afterwards.

The Chuo/Sobu line always continued to run over the top of the ruined station though, and a few years ago the old structure was renovated and reinvented as a shopping centre of boutique stores with a few cafés and a craft beer bar housed in the railway arches (the cafe through the back on the ground floor does some really good cakes!)

The old staircases are still there, still displaying damage from the war, and if you go up to the second floor you can sit and watch the Chuo and Sobu trains thundering past a few feet away.

It’s not worth going miles out of your way for, but it’s pretty cool and it’s right next to Akihabara (just over the Manseibashi bridge across the Kanda River) so it’s a good idea to check it out once you’re bored of Akiba’s flashing lights and maid cafe nonsense.

Manseibashi Bridge & Akihabara — Manseibashi Bridge

Specialist shopping areas

An interesting aspect to Tokyo is the way that certain neighbourhoods have become magnets for certain types of shops, with most of the city’s shops in those niches clustering together – and in a city the size of Tokyo, that’s a lot of niche shops!

Worth checking out are Kappabashi for kitchenware (and plastic sushi), Jimbocho for secondhand & specialist book shops and winter sports shops, and Nippori for traditional fabrics (e.g. patterned kimono silk). See here for more detail.

Yasukuni Shrine

Visiting shrines & temples in Japan often feels more like visiting sightseeing attractions than religious sites. Not so at Yasukuni, where you’re on absolutely sacred and oh-so-controversial ground.

Founded by Emperor Meiji in 1869, Yasukuni is where the souls are enshrined of all Japanese who died in service of the emperor from Meiji onwards. This mostly constitutes millions of young men sent off to fight in WWII, who did so out of a sense of duty & honour – but it also includes the souls of that era’s leadership, many convicted war criminals, hence the controversy. The attached war museum (the Yushukan) also presents a particularly whitewashed view of the war e.g. a locomotive from the Thai-Burma Death Railway is displayed for posterity without any mention of the 100,000+ Asian labourers and Western POWs who were starved, beaten, and worked to death in its construction.

To this day, Yasukuni is a magnet for extreme right wing black van groups who parade around the grounds in WWII-era military uniforms, waving the flags of Japanese colonies which haven’t existed for 70 years and counting & staring out foreigners.

It’s beyond the scope of this post to go into greater detail here – see my post here, or this page for more on the controversies – but suffice to say that if you’re looking for something a little more edgy or controversial than the usual, a visit to Yasukuni and the Yushukan might fit the bill.

Any questions or comments? Give me a shout below and I’ll get back to you.

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Into your cyberpunk? Check out my posts on Blade Runner and Ghost In The Shell

More Tokyo posts here, and check out my quick guide to Tokyo; for more on Japan click here

For my Japan snowboarding guide, click here

Check out my guides to hiking in Kyoto and Tokyo

For my Japan overland travel guide, click here

Top photo credit: martinnemo, used under cc

Tokyo’s Niche Shopping Districts

Japan, Tokyo

Entrance to Kappabashi — The start of Kappabashi Kitchen Street

Tokyo’s quite an amazing city for shopping – if you’re looking for electronics, home furnishings, toiletries, medicine, beauty products, luggage, clothes, etc, you can find them all over the city; the myriad department stores and big chains like Uniqlo, BIC Camera, and Donki Hotei make it easy to find whatever you’re looking for.

Interestingly, though, a few highly specialised shopping districts have formed over the years, with large numbers of the same type of businesses congregating and competing in the same locales.

These are obviously the perfect solution should you happen to be in the market for their wares, but they’re also interesting areas to check out – probably not something for your first few days in Tokyo, but perhaps if you’ve been there for a while (or it’s a repeat visit) and you’re looking for something a little different, a stroll through one of these areas will show you another side to the city.

Kappabashi Kitchen Street

Kappabashi is one long stretch of street lined on both sides by kitchenware vendors – pretty much all Tokyo’s kitchenware shops are here, supplying Tokyo’s thousands upon thousands of eateries with cooking equipment, no smoking signs & toilet signs, paper lanterns, plastic food for window displays, and all sorts of other restaurant related goods.

Though it exists very much for the food industry and not for tourists, it’s also become something of a tourist attraction in its own right. The shops and their wares are fascinating, and really what better souvenir is there than those realistic life-size pieces of plastic sushi?

An assortment of plastic display sushi from Kappabashi

Japanese toilet sign from Kappabashi — Japanese sign from Kappabashi (on my parents’ bathroom door in England)

Kappabashi is associated with the kappa, a kind of gremlin-like spirit in Japanese folklore. Kawaii (cute) Kappa mascots are all over the place, and there’s a more serious statue in a recess halfway along the street. For more on kappa and other yokai (folklore spirits & monsters), see here

Kappabashi’s a short walk from Tawaramachi Station on the Ginza Line.

Jimbocho Bookstores

You can find bookstores all over Tokyo, but most of them are branches of the same huge chain stores. Those clustered in the area immediately south & east of Jimbocho Station, however, are small independent shops, selling mostly used books, and in some cases dealing with highly specialised material and antiques. Some carry English books but it’s mostly Japanese stock (unsurprisingly), and those English books you do find include some seriously old & obscure academic tomes; not exactly light reading material for your next bullet train ride, but fascinating to browse.

Books on sale in a Jimbocho side street — Jimbocho side street (taken with my crappy old *keitai* phone hence the fuzzy pic)

What’s cool is just the atmosphere of the shops with their comforting & permeating smell of used books, and even some of the side streets where the bookshelves have overflowed along the outer walls of the shops.

For more information on the specific shops with recommendations for where to find English books, see this great blog post.

Jimbocho Ski Shops

This area won’t be of much interest if you’re not into outdoor sports (especially skiing & snowboarding), but if you are it’s like hitting the absolute jackpot. Here you’ll find most of the winter sports stores required to meet the demand of all the millions of people in Tokyo, concentrated into a single neighbourhood.

Ski & outdoor shops in Jimbocho — (Screenshot from Google Maps street view)

Prices for imported gear aren’t cheap at all, but the close proximity of so many stores makes it easy to shop around for special offers and reasonable discounts can sometimes be scored. The ski shops are located further along to the east of the bookstore district, between Jimbocho Station and Ogawamachi Station.

Nippori Fabric Street

Most of Tokyo’s traditional fabric sellers are gathered along the same half-mile stretch east of Nippori Station. Again, if you’re in the market for some Japanese fabric this is the ultimate jackpot! But even if not it’s a decent place for a wander – some of the fabrics on display are gorgeous, and these are multi-generational family businesses which gives the area a nice old-time feel a world away from the neon of Shinjuku & Shibuya.

Nippori Fabric Town — (Photo credit: David Pursehouse, used under cc)

Any questions about these districts? Give me a shout below and I’ll get back to you.

Click the banner to pre-order a JR Pass for a 40-dollar saving:

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More Tokyo posts here, and check out my quick guide to Tokyo; for more on Japan click here

For my Japan snowboarding guide, click here

Check out my guides to hiking in Kyoto and Tokyo

For my Japan overland travel guide, click here

Gundam Got An Upgrade

Japan, Movies & TV, Tokyo

Having never seen an episode, I know very little about Gundam other than that it’s a classic Japanese anime about giant mecha robots defending the Earth, or something like that – I’m more of an Evangelion fan, though to be fair that could be described the exact same way! (see here for some random musings on different future anime Japans)

But you don’t really need to know the show to appreciate a giant life-sized robot statue (especially one that does light displays while it transforms), you just need to be a bit of a geek.

The original Gundam statue stood outside the Diver City mall in Tokyo’s Odaiba district (an artificial island in Tokyo Bay with various attractions) and became a popular tourist sight despite never having been intended to be permanent. So when they (whoever ‘they’ is) finally decided to remove it as originally planned, they went one better and installed a permanent, upgraded Unicorn Gundam.

This badboy transforms, as the Unicorn Gundam did in the show when it went into Destroy Mode, and the flashing lights produce a particularly good effect after it gets dark.

This isn’t something to get too excited about to be honest, but Odaiba’s an interesting enough area to check out for half a day and you might as well time it for the transformation – at time of writing the statue transforms at 11:00, 13:00, 15:00, and 17:00 every day. For something random to do, you can reach Odaiba by walking over the Rainbow Bridge.

For some more random things to do in Tokyo see here

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