Our only full day in Tokyo and we decided to have a little adventure without following the schedule drafted by my mum’s friend. Brad and I spent the best part of our morning in ITO-YA, a 9-storey stationery shop with some of the most peculiar products, for example, a leather pouch for your tin of mints.
Our next destination was the paradise for all geeks: Akihabara, Tokyo’s famous electric town. It was one of the busiest parts of town on a Sunday. We walked into a shop with rows and rows of toy vending machines and some of them contained pornography plastic figures! With Japanese Yen being quite strong, we didn’t see much point in buying gadgets there. So we ventured to another bizarre part of town, Harajuku.
We were hoping to take some interesting photos at Harajuku’s Cos-play-zoku (or Costume Play Gangs) that assemble in Jingu-bashi (the bridge linking Meiji-jingu with Omote-sando), but found that the whole thing was just another touristy trap. We quickly moved on and were more fascinated by some girl dressing up like a French maid doing some shopping nearby.
Mum and dad met us for dinner at a Korean BBQ place, where they spoke no English at all. We managed to stay away from anything that is too authentic by pointing, nodding and smiling (like a bunch of idiots).
After dinner, Brad and I went to do some night photography at Shibuya, which Brad insisted on seeing as it was heavily featured in Lost in Translation.