Ryan Amor

Our last full day. So we did the expected and went up the Tokyo Tower.

Did you now that the Auckland Sky Tower stands at 328 to 360 meters tall while the Tokyo Tower stands at 333 meters? And yet, to our eyes, there’s so much more expansive views over Tokyo.

Mt. Fuji was being coy. A swathe of cloud covered half her southern side and did not budge until we had left.

There were two good choices afterwards- TeamLabs and the National Art Centre; but we ended up trying to find silly stickers, animal plushies and key-chains somewhere in Harajuku instead. We knew it was a rip-off, but we had lunch there and paid twice what we would normally pay elsewhere (to be fair, it was only NZ$70), but when you’re clocking five hours of walking or roughly 5kms fuelled by nothing more than convenience store latte and tiny, expensive lukewarm matcha, you need to eat pronto when the gas tank finally hits empty.

We inadvertently exited out into Takeshita Street and it was insane how it’s funnelled all the tourists into it. How do you explain this phenomena when there’s nothing remotely interesting or unique, or fair (price wise) about it? I guess there’s no accounting for taste and interest right?

We took the long route back and ticked off the final little things we wanted to buy (eye-mask for the plane, stationery from Muji), eat (butter biscuits, custards topped with sweet potato string, lucky milk) and see (this 2nd-hand luxury goods store run by Filipinos in Taito).

But FYI, I’m not done yet with Japan- will have more posts when I get back and have the space and time to process the images.