Tokyo was a whirlwind. First of all, its huge. It’s not the kind of city you can see in a few days, or even a week. Add to that the cultural barrier and Tokyo seemed almost impenetrable to me, much more so than the other places we visited in Japan. So during the three days we spent there, I felt like I just barely dipped my toe in to the water.
We did experience some if it. We saw the bright neon lights of Akihabara Electric Town, which was complete sensory overload – the electric, futuristic Tokyo of the movies. At the Tsukiji Fish Market, we watched the vendors portion the enormous tuna into slabs and peered into tanks of squid and scallops. Outside the market, Trevor ate the biggest oyster I’ve ever seen. We ate sushi of the highest quality, the only non-Japanese people sitting at the counter, pointing and arigato our only forms of communication. We spent hours in the train station, eating porky tonkotsu ramen and shopping in anime stores, a whole store for each character. In Ginza, we explored department stores with whole floors dedicated to high-end foods, sampling what we could afford. A friend living in Tokyo took us out for fresh bonito and sake. We went to a park where the rapeseed was blooming, rendering the whole field a gentle, glowing yellow.