We have landed in Tokyo. Early in the morning on a weekday, somewhat groggy with jet lag, and hungry. The first order of business was to get rid of our luggage (in a large locker at Tokyo station). The second was breakfast.
Finding breakfast wasn’t hard. There are convenience stores absolutely everywhere. Finding a place to eat that breakfast was harder. You aren’t allowed to eat and drink while walking in the streets; it’s considered disorderly. There are also almost no benches anywhere. Benches encourage people to sit and hang around, especially young people, and that is kind of considered to be “loitering”. I think they generally just don’t want people to hang around in public places. You can use streets and parks to go from A to B, but keep your socializing and living out of the public eye. Such a contrast to many European towns and cities that go out of their way to liven up their public spaces, with benches and greenery etc, to encourage people to hang around.
We did find a pocket park consisting of about three bushes, a few metres of artificial turf, and a bench where we could sit and eat.
After that we just wandered around to get a general feeling for the city.
A lot of it is very tall and modern.
Then you turn off the main streets and wander into the smaller ones, and the atmosphere changes abruptly. Small concrete houses, little back alleys with potted plants.
A lot of the smaller streets are completely without sidewalks. Which doesn’t mean that they’re not for pedestrians. There’s this little strip of asphalt on one side, demarcated by a painted line, that is sort of reserved for pedestrians. But not really. You just have to co-exist with cars, bicycles etc. It mostly works out. It helps that there isn’t that much traffic on these back streets.
The building lots are often small. In Stockholm an inner-city building can be tens of metres in each direction; here they’re sometimes smaller than an average Swedish single-family house.
We saw so much every day, and I took so many photos, that I’ve broken up each day into multiple posts. After our general wandering on this day, we walked to Senso-ji temple and the surrounding Asakusa district, and then onwards to Ueno, all of which get their own posts.
Jet lag caught up with us around four or five in the afternoon. We picked up our luggage and started making our way towards our apartment in Ikebukuro.
Wherever we walked, there were shrines and temples everywhere. Outside of the central business and shopping districts, I think there’s a shrine almost in every city block. Some smaller, some larger.
Everything is slightly alien. I feel displaced. The streets are not like streets usually are; the familiar vegetables at the grocery shop are interspersed with strange ones. None of the signs are readable; none of the prices are relatable.
Tokyo is located by the sea and has some waterways flowing through it. In the places where we ended up, they were hardly noticeable, and mostly we forgot the sea was even there.
