Japan, Day Four: Tokyo

On our last full day in Tokyo we walked to the fish market again for breakfast. Here's our hotel!

We went straight back to the same place.

And this time no messing around, we ordered a whole bunch of fatty tuna. I sent my boss this picture to make him jealous.

After breakfast we headed back to the Tokyo National Museum. Before leaving we verified that it was, in fact, open.

The best part of going to Japan is just being there, walking around and observing all the weird little things about their culture and then getting used to it so you don't even notice anymore. Tokyo was extremely clean, which by the fourth day seemed normal.

On the way to the metro station we passed this temple so we went inside to have a look.

The Tokyo National Museum is enormous. The first building we visited was Asian art (a separate building from Japanese art).

I thought it might be kind of boring with only ceramics and old swords, but as it turns out there are a lot of interesting things in there. This, for example, is a 3500 year old statue of Ba'al.

There was an Egyptian section as well, although I guess Egypt is not strictly Asia.

There's a gorgeous garden in the back.

Very many rooms dedicated to painted screens and very old calligraphy.

They also have a good restaurant. We both got the bento box lunch. We weren't entirely certain what all these items were, but it was all tasty.

After lunch we took the subway over to see the Meiji Jingu shrine, near the baseball stadium we'd visited the first night. One of the most amazing things about Tokyo is how they manage to maintain so many expansive, peaceful parks and historical treasures in a modern city home to thirty million people. Meiji Jingu is in the midst of a dense forest right in the middle of town. Two minutes' walk inside the gate and you would never know you were in the largest city on earth.

After our experience at Sensoji a couple days earlier, I expected Meiji Jingu to be swarming with people, but it wasn't bad at all.

For dinner we went on a trek to Ukai Toriyama, the only restaurant I pre-booked before we left. My pictures do not do this restaurant justice - it's a magical fairyland in the woods, with winding paths and little wooden bridges and individual small dining houses for each party. It required an hour-long journey out into the suburbs of Tokyo, the very end of the train line, and then a shuttle bus up the hill to the restaurant. I'd almost talked myself out of it a couple of days before because it seemed like kind of an ordeal, but I'm very glad we kept the reservation. This is the kind of place you remember forever. We also never minded spending time in transit - trains are always interesting.

Here's Ben in our little dining house! No shoes allowed inside. The service here was completely over the top, smiling women in traditional kimonos doing a lot of bowing.

The restaurant has several different set menu options. We chose the Kaiseki Course (wikipedia: kaiseki is a type of art form that balances the taste, tecture, appearance, and colors of food) because it was the fanciest and we were mostly eating $8 noodles for lunch.

The first course was boiled leafy greens and chrysanthemum, walnut tofu, and taro root.

Second was sashimi of the day, which I believe was carp.

I loved all the little dishes in Japanese restaurants. It made me want to change up our whole way of eating - but also I couldn't help thinking what a pain it would be to have to wash all of them.

One of those above is mushroom soup, which was served alongside this steamed egg custard.

Next was stone-grilled wagyu beef. We grilled it ourselves on that hot stone. It was fun! I have a video of Ben grilling his but he said I can't post it because he looks stupid (he doesn't).

Next is barley rice with grated yam, miso soup, and Japanese pickles. I think we all know how I feel about that grated yam so I used it sparingly and it was much more tolerable. Maybe that first place did it wrong.

Dessert was zenzai (sweet red bean soup) with chestnuts, which I did not photograph.

The entire experience was perfect from beginning to end. We waited in this waiting room for the shuttle to take us back to the train station.

The train was absolutely empty when we got on - the only time we ever saw this. Takaosanguchi Station is not a Thursday night hotspot, apparently.

On the way back to the hotel we got off the train in Shibuya, mainly just to look at it. This is a big nightlife area, very stereotypical of what you imagine when you think of Japanese cities, and very different from the more sedate businessy neighborhood near our hotel. I was constantly amazed at how many people were out walking around in every corner of this city at all times. Where are they all going?