Our flight back home leaves Narita at 11.25 on Friday morning, so today was an in-between day, a day to fill up with goodies and get rid of our remaining yen. My theory is that if you see something you like in a different country, it's durable (i.e. it's not immediately consumable), can fit in your bag, is within budget and you can't get it back home, then you should buy it. View it as an investment. Take, for example, a beautiful book of reproduced Japanese prints by Yokoyama Taikan. Now it might cost 2100 yen - that's above average for a book I know - but it's something that I'll be able to keep for the rest of my life, so in fact it's a real bargain.
A Yokoyama Taikan print
The lotus leaves in the park at Ueno
After checking out train times at Ueno station for the return trip to Narita, we went to the Yokoyama Taikan Memorial Hall across the park, which is not actually a hall, but the former residence of the artist from 1909 onwards. Raph managed to get himself embroiled in a Japanese conversation of sorts with a member of the museum staff, who - once she had ascertained I was English - decided I must like golf and gave me directions to the nearest driving range about 200 yards down the road. I-wa-saki, she kept repeating. Perhaps worth remembering in the unlikely event I take up golf and ever find myself with time to kill in Tokyo, but not today thanks.
I-wa-saki! The tiniest golf-driving range you ever did see.
Travelling around in Tokyo all day enabled me to do a bit of T-shirt spotting. For some puzzling reason, everybody except native-speakers seem to find the English language sexy and the Japanese are no exception. You'll never see a Japanese person wearing a T-shirt with a Japanese text, it's always in English. Well, at least a form of English. How about Eat More Buck, Never Ending Estate or Keep Frying Sail. I know Japanese is an abstract language, so maybe I'm missing something here. But then again, I'm probably not. My absolute favourite however, was a T-shirt worn by an attractive, rather well-endowed girl in her twenties with the text Busty Magic (sorry, no photos). Well, they do say that ignorance is bliss, don't they?
We took a walk round the Kagurazaka district which had been recommended in the guidebooks, but by midday, it was so blisteringly hot, that we decided to take cover in the metro and move to Shibuyu, where Raph wanted to visit the HMV store. Unfortunately the CD he wanted (Plastic Tree - Puppet Show) wasn't in stock and anyway, CD prices are prohibitively expensive (3500 yen). Shh, don't tell anyone, but he'd already downloaded the music, he just wanted the "feel" of the CD in his hands (nice to know that some things never change).
The Shibuyu Crossing with the HMV store peeping around the corner in the background
We moved slowly on in the heat to Harajuku where I was intent on picking up another "investment" - a book of woodblock prints by Hokusai - from the Ota museum where we had been on our very first day in Tokyo. We hit the metro again and headed for Kinokuniya. This is perhaps the largest bookshop in the city, at least the one with the largest English section. But I was headed for the map section. Anyone who knows me well, will be familiar with my addiction to topographic maps, and with 1:25,000 and 1:50,000 "ordnance survey" maps going for a song, well, I was in seventh heaven. My trip to Japan just couldn't go wrong from here.
Outside Kinokuniya bookstore
It was time for a drink. Coffee to be exact, which I had been missing for most of the trip so far. We found a table at Starbucks (only just) and I filled up with my caffeine fix, before catching the metro back to the hotel for a rest. Well, not much of a rest for me, since after the spending spree, I was running out of yen and spent 45 minutes searching for a Post Office (the only places in Japan that take international bank cards) in order to fill my wallet for "contingency" purposes.
Akihabara, with Club Sega on the right
One final sortie in the city sent us in the direction of Akihabara (remember, the electronics district?), where Raph had read that there were stores selling Manga. By the time we got there, the bookstores had closed and instead, we went for a tempura (a kind of deep-fried seafood) at a restaurant on the main drag. Next stop was Club Sega where our senses were assaulted by the misceallenous gaming machines that occupied every level of its five storeys. There were even queues for some of the machines. Raph admitted it was noisy but he was able to cope with it and passed my antipathy off as a generation thing.
Give me the peace of the mountains anytime.
The queue for the gaming machines in Club Sega
So, we took our last metro one stop down the line to the hotel. We don't want to be late for the plane tomorrow (and to catch the last chance for Manga books at the airport).
The last metro
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