Day 5 in Japan: Nod and Smile

Apparently the Imperial Palace in Tokyo opens twice a year, and one of those days was today. So we went off to the Imperial Palace by Tokyo Station.

As you’d expect, there were lots of people. Lots of security, too.

Got my bag and body searched. The bag search was pretty thorough (she found some embarrassing stuff from Paris I had forgotten about!), but the body check was kinda half-assed. It seemed like he missed the camera in my jacket pocket.

But they gave out free Japanese flags, so it’s all good.

Even had horse patrols:

Mounted Patrol

And mysterious teams of men and women in suits:

Mysterious Suited Security

They didn’t seem to be police because the police were there in uniform, too. On that note, the police officers had interesting weapons, no guns, but instead short staffs wrapped on one end for a handle. The sticks were about sword-length. As far as non-lethal weapons go, they seem like they would be pretty effective.

The Imperial family would only make 5 appearances during the day, and we missed the first 2 at 9am and 10am. Moving with the crowds, we made it to the 12pm showing.

In line for the Imperial Palace

The Imperial family came out after waiting 45min or so and proceeded to smile and wave a lot. After the cheering subsided, the… guy, Emperor I’m assuming, said a few words and everybody went crazy with shouts of “Banzai!” and the like.

The Imperial Family

Everybody going crazy!

After navigating the crowds to the exit, we headed to a nearby department store to find food. Ended up at this Ochazuke place called Dashi Ochazuke.

Dashi Ochazuke

Food Report: Ochazuke

Short version: Pretty good. The “tea” anyway was really good, I liked the flavor of the dashi. Glad I went for the sea bream, too, it was great.

On our way out we saw this lion dance-sort-of-thing where the lion bites the head of passerbys to remove their bad luck.

Lion Biting Dude's Head

We headed to Ginza afterward to check out their department stores.

Ginza

We first visited the Sony building, which is more like a free, “buy me, buy me!” Sony shopping park. You walk around, marvel at their awesome stuff, try their awesome stuff, and have the option to buy it at the end.

Sony Building

They had real snow in the front of the building for some reason!

Real snow!

The inside is pretty cool, state-of-the-art TVs playing HD footage of animals everywhere. They had this live feed in HD of polar bears and penguins in a park in Hokkaido.

They even had this weird portable speaker that rolls around and dances called the Rolly. Actually pretty cool, I’d get one if it wasn’t so absurdly expensive at 50000-ish yen!

Rolly

We stopped by the Mitsukoshi Department Store nearby to look around. Lots of food and souvenirs at the basement levels. For instance, there was this store that sold lots of different kinds of honey in little jars, like coffee honey, white clover honey, acacia honey, and dozens more.

By the way, coffee honey does not taste like coffee, a little disappointed by that.

Basement Level of Mitsukoshi

We went to a nearby Sweets Paradise afterward to partake in cake buffet a second time.You can see our full group below with my sister, Lu, and two dudes we met at the hostel: Elliot and Umer (I’m so sorry if I misspelled your names!).

Full group at Sweets Paradise

Since Elliot and Umer have already seen Tokyo Tower, we parted temporarily after Sweets Paradise and the rest of us went to go see Japan’s national phallic symbol tourist trap attraction.

Tokyo Tower

As par the day, we waited in line for 45min to get tickets. Then we waited in another line for a while to get into the elevator to get up to the first observation deck.

How it works is that there are two main observation decks. You pay for a ticket to the first one which is roughly halfway up the tower at the ground level. Then at the first deck, you can buy another ticket up to a higher and smaller second observation deck.

On Elliot’s and Umer’s advice, we just went for the first observation deck.

Lobby of Tokyo Tower

I loved all the pamphlets about Tokyo Tower and how they mostly stated how much more awesome Tokyo Tower is than the Eiffel Tower.

“It’s taller, so suck it, Paris!” That kind of thing.

After a packed elevator ride, we were greeted with… lots of people and darkness. Although the whole deck is basically nothing but windows, it was still hard to find an empty window.

But the views…

Computer Time-Lapsed View of Tokyo

…didn’t look like that. They had these cool touchscreens showing the skyline in front of you that let you identity major buildings and jump around in time.

Took a whole lot of pictures of the night Tokyo skyline though.

Tokyo at Night

Tokyo at Night 2

The first picture is of… Shinjuku, I think? The other is of Odaiba and it’s Rainbow Bridge.

They also had these cool floor-mounted observation windows that let you look down. Complete with amusing stick figure symbol.

Bend over.

Look-down Window

The look-down window was really popular with the kids, it seemed.

There was this little boy that was walking all around it excitedly, even laying down completely on the window to get that full body experience. Then he gets up and runs to his parents and says, “That was scary!” and his dad replies immediately,”Liar!”.

Wish I got a picture of that.

Well, we made our way back to the hostel and rejoined Elliot and Umer and the five of us set out in pursuit of karaoke. It is Japan after all.

We set out to Akihabara to try out this chain place we saw called “Big Echo”. Seems like karaoke places get significantly more expensive as it gets later into the night. Also, their advertised price was with a membership card.

So we decided to shop around. Found this evil place:

Evil Place

And went somewhere else.

We ended up back in Asakusa and went to this local place called “BanBan”.

Karaoke

As a person who has frequented the karaoke places in Austin quite a bit, karaoke in Japan kicks some serious ass.

Sharp-eyed viewers will note the remote in the picture above. That thing had a touchscreen with the full catalog inside. You could search by artist and song name and things like category. Category search also kicks ass since you can search Anime songs and it lists songs by Anime title!

For instance, I looked up Haruhi and saw that they had pretty much every song in there, including image songs. They even had the individual versions of Hare Hare Yukai!

They also had pretty much every popular IOSYS song too! “Pop Star” had the original MV! Ken Hirai’s pretty fabulous in that video, btw.