Tokyo!

We got up late today and realized we need to plan things better in order to see much. Japan needs a lot more preplanning than Vietnam or China we have found, and we will spend a lot less time and a lot more money here, so we did our best to plot out our tourism days after this one.

Our first full day in Tokyo we took a train one stop to Ueno station, where we had breakfast in a joint that sells food through a machine that spits out coupons at you, which you then give to the cook. This kind of reduction on human interaction saved us some money on food. We met a couple from Australia there who were just starting an around-the-world tour.

Due to heavy rain we went to a nearby modern art museum, located in the Ueno park along with several other museums. The museum was free but was pretty outdated in curation style: there were many items crowded on the walls with little numbers by them that you could look up in a leaflet, all in Japanese. They had big exhibits of calligraphy, painting, and photography. We went from there to the national museum of history, located in the same park.

This national museum had a few buildings to it. The main one displayed collections of Japanese ancient relics and artwork, showing the development of their culture from about the time of the introduction of Buddhism to Japan until modern times. It was sorted by period or topic and very interesting. The second building was dedicated to relics of other Asian cultures (mainly China, India, and Korea but also Egypt). This was all very impressive and we were sad we could not stay longer, since it all closed at five o'clock.

On the advice of the tourist information we took a subway to the Akihabara district and sought out an electronics shop there, where we bought our daily subway passes for the next 2 days. As foreign tourists we got a steeply discounted rate on them, but we couldn't buy those tourist passes just anywhere.

Akihabara is an interesting district to visit anyway: it used to be the main place to buy all sorts of electronics at a fair price, but now it also has a collection of otaku shops, that is shops for geeks. There are many stores selling collectible items like cards, action figures, manga and DVDs, and even shops that seem to be dedicated to J-pop music idols. There are also some "maid cafes" around there, but we only stopped into the shops to look around.