Exploring Shinjuku District
Our hotel that we were staying in the previous few days is located in the Shinjuku District of the Tokyo City, but in those three days of exploring Tokyo we did not spend very much time actually looking around Shinjuku- we’d spend the first several hours of this day giving Shinjuku some attention and cruising the streets.
I was really sick the night before- like, bad enough to the point where I couldn’t leave my hotel room and needed lots of sleep- this happened in JP2024 and frankly happens at every opportunity to where health can get bad for me, so I wasn’t entirely surprised to get this sick at the time. It was quite a surprise, however, when I fully recovered the next day. After that we didn’t really talk about the incident again. I guess my health did improve a bit compared to VN2023, because that time it took… What, two days or so to fully recover? It was a lot easier now. Maybe swim team gave me some strength.
We went out to find breakfast from a local gas station in our area once again, walking just a short distance away to find this particularly sizable one about a ten minutes’ walk from our hotel. Compared to the first two stores that we’d visited to get our breakfast in the mornings of Day 2 and Day 3 of this trip, it was far larger, had a greater array of foods, and also looked a lot more professional than the previous ones did. We took some time to explore all the options to see what we wanted- on top of meals that could be cooked in a few moments, they also offered fresh fruit.
In the end, we chose to get quite a lot of things, mostly microwavable meals made of rice and meat, but a few other random things that you see in the basket. Below also includes my breakfast which we decided to eat in the hotel— it consisted of rice again along with little bits of chicken as well as grape juice. My only major comment was that the grape juice definitely did NOT taste like grapes (probably artificial). I don’t know what it was, but it wasn’t…. normal.
With that now out of the way, we could continue and begin exploring Shinjuku District, which is the area our hotel was— for today, there’d be no need to go down into the subway and drain more money off our Suika Card. We did have a bit of a walk ahead of us to our first attraction— a little over thirty minutes or so. As we walked, I took several pictures of the streets in the city. While none of them were impressively high (It was a little hard to find anything tall after the experience in the Sky Tree) they did create an atmosphere that I would never see in the suburbs of America. Cars went on the left side of the road… it was extremely crowded, and every building on each side of the road was at least four stories tall. Just like most Asian cities, everything is a lot closer together than you’d get for America.
Another thing me, Derek, and Casey noticed again while we were walking through the streets of Shinjuku is holy crap — that’s a lot of people vaping! We seemed to find a new one on every corner— America has this problem too, no doubt, but for some reason I just didn’t expect Japan to have this many smokers. After this point, Derek, Casey, and I came up with the idea of just counting how many people vaping we could see for the rest of the trip, and eventually this would transform into a huge comparison where we ranked cities based on how many vapers we could spot. We reached the number ten by the time we arrived at our destination, which was a simple mall. Great! We could get access to whatever authentic Japanese goods there were without having to deal with the stress of huge crowds. There weren’t as many people running through the aisles, and there were even times when the quietness of the store felt almost… American?
After entering a building, we entered the fifth floor of the mall, which was filled with clothes. We spent some time surveying the clothes— the way they give clothes here is very similar to American clothing stores. You have clothes on a rack publicly displayed, you pick what you want, take it to the cashier, and buy it. Surprisingly, Casey didn’t blow all of the money on his Suika Card buying another pair of shoes, but this is probably because he didn’t have enough to buy shoes. He did, however, run off quite a bit, which did cause confusion for a while but we did track him down to another floor.
We eventually went to explore some of the other floors— while there’s too much to summarize what happened in each floor, there were a few notable highlights. There was an entire section for pianos. Mostly electronic ones, but still pianos. There was also a pretty sizable area for Nintendo Switches and Nintendo games.
The remainder of the store had some pretty boring electronics stuff, so we moved on and found another store to explore, just down the street. This time, we had to go up to the top floor by stairs, but it was completely worth the trip. On the way up, we actually found a decently sized fish tank for display. I’ve always wanted one of those, and they’re pretty cool to see.
On the way up, we didn’t see that much more but the top was quite interesting: It was more food oriente. Snacks had a pretty big area in this store, as well as energy drinks. The main difference about energy drinks here is that it mostly sold Japanese drinks, not American ones. You probably won’t find Prime (Casey drinks that a lot)in the aisles of a Japanese store, but it’s possible to find a lot of others.
Casey and I went around to explore the store a bit. After accidentally encountering a sex shop, we eventually bought a few packs of spices to take home and use on our own food. Derek and his family had left the shop a bit earlier, so we were sort of left on our own to head to the last shop, which just so happened to be a clothing store just a few blocks away from the second one.
Now I’m not really into clothing and fashion, but I had to admit that this place had just about every piece of clothing on Earth. They were set out very neatly in these organized and satisfying looking little piles, and I’ll just let the pictures speak for themselves:
We decided to go back to the hotel after buying some clothes to wait for Derek and his family to return before getting a late lunch. Once again, we decided to stop by another sushi place that was just down the road. It wasn’t a very big restaurant for sure— you could walk across it in the span of a few short moments, but their menu option was huge. Once we were inside, they gave all of our food options on this huge list of items, which featured around forty things. We were given a paper each where we could check boxes on which food item we wanted, and how many of them we wanted to buy. I ended up getting only five or six of the foods on this menu, but that alone was already going to be enough to stuff me completely for days. We had to wait forty minutes for our food to come, but everything we got looked really appetizing. This is Jason’s order:
And here’s mine:
The sushi was indescribably good— I downed the whole thing in several minutes, and before we knew it, we were already on the road to our next location, which is…
Cat Cafes
I’m sure you’ve heard of Cat Cafes before— you know, those little cafes where they give you a million cats to play with? That’s where we were headed next, and Japan was known for having quite an abundance of them. It’s pretty well known that there are Cat Cafes with several stories for people to chill in and a million cats running around, but we ended up going to a comparably small one that took up one floor in this little five story building on the street.
We did have quite a short distance to get to the south before we could arrive at that Cafe, which meant some more transportation. Instead of an underground metro this time, we were going to take a train line above ground a short distance away. Once again, the views in the area were pretty spectacular and we even ran into some kind of performance out on the streets of Tokyo. Earlier, on our way to lunch, me, Derek, and Casey had spotted a lot of people walking around in what appeared to be some kind of traditional dress and instruments. A few hours later, they were performing in the streets with these loud drums to a huge audience, including a considerable number of Westerners — I’d say about two thousand people or so crowding on the street to watch the performance. We ended up pausing our walk to the train station so we could watch them dance to the music, which was amplified by the drums the dancers were also playing as they danced.
After the performance, we continued down to the train station and from there it was just a short train ride and walk straight to the building where the Cat Cafe was. After taking an elevator up to the fourth or fifth floor, we were able to get ourselves thirty minutes to spend with the cats. Entering the room, we quickly realized: There were a LOT. There was a pretty sizable room, maybe twenty to twenty-five feet from end to end, complete with seats and tables for the customers, but most importantly decorations for the cats. The center of the room had a huge play structure for the cats to climb up and jump around in, as well as a lot of these small ledges on the wall that the cats would frequently jump onto. I’d often find them just sleeping on the tiny ledges with half their bodies dangling over the edge, just like this little guy:
The cats themselves didn’t really care for the customers that much— most of the time they minded their own business, climbing all around the room and sniffing everything in sight. A lot of them were just lying around on the ledges by the wall doing nothing, but would jump somewhere else if you came too close to them. None of them were really interested in human interaction, so we quickly found the strategy to getting their attention: Bribing them with kitten treats.
As soon as we got this little creamy substance, all the cats changed their attitude. They immediately all started trailing past us— they would all immediately jump out of whatever business they were doing as soon as they smelled it. As we started to see a few particular cats follow us, we ended up giving them names (Despite signs on one of the walls that literally named all the cats), continuing our list of naming random inanimate objects and animals we’d encounter along the way. There was a white one we named Jimmy, who continued to follow Derek around as he walked through the Cafe, feeding to every cat he could find. Jimmy, however, was really focused on Derek’s food, and would always get to the spoon first before the other cats did, solidifying his place as Derek’s favorite.
Casey ended up befriending a cat who Derek decided to name Sammie, who to the surprise of nobody was focused on nothing but the creamy white substance in Casey’s spoon. I even have this picture saved of him: Sammy pic
I also went around feeding a few cats of my own, which Derek came up with a bunch of names for that I don’t seem to recall now. We went around giving a lot of food to the cats, and within about twenty minutes we’d already given away most of the food that we had in our little wooden cup of treats. Jimmy continued to follow Derek around after he ran out, hoping for another treat, but upon seeing that Derek had run out, he abandoned Derek and went to go back to his own business. After Derek and Casey witnessed this betrayal, all three of us agreed that Jimmy would forever be known as the “Food Digger” due to his actions. Derek spent the rest of the remaining time with this brown-colored cat who he named Barett, who was quite interested in him despite the fact he’d run out of food. Casey continued to hang out with Sammie until our time ran out, and we ended up leaving after all three of us ran out of food. We all kept an eye on Jimmy after the betrayal, wondering if he’d have a change of heart and come back, but he ended up chasing around another person who was feeding the cats nearby. Unfortunately, his bad karma caught up to him pretty quickly and he received zero food, which all three of us could tell was clearly irritating him. For the next few days of the trip, we’d have several conversations about our takeaways from the Cat Cafe:
- Barett was the goat and he’ll always be nice to you, regardless of if you have food
- Jimmy is evil
- Sammie’s okay, I guess
My brother, who was absolutely disgusted at Jimmy’s heartbreaking betrayal, put a picture of Jimmy on his discord profile picture for a few weeks, which definitely got laughs from me and Derek afterwards.
With a million stories to take home from the Cat Cafe, we continued onwards through yet another train station ride to our next location…
The Shibuya Crossing
You might not recognize the name of this place, but you certainly recognize the pictures, the videos, and especially the timelapses of this place. This crossing is famously the busiest in the world, and we were about to see thousands of people cross that road in action right now. When we arrived at this place, there was so many people I couldn’t even see the ground of the crosswalk… I tried to get a decent shot of all the people by standing on top of a nearby bench and taking pictures… all I got was this.
I wasn’t able to get a good crossing video, at least not yet, so for now we decided to cross to the other side of the street along with the four thousand or so people who were about to do it as well. I don’t know why, but there’s something really satisfying about watching hundreds of people stampede into the street like this…
On the other side just so happened to be a fairly tall building with a starbucks on the second floor. Great! We can get a good view from there… or so I thought at the time. We walked into the building, and found it crowded, to no surprise. But surely we’d be able to get some decent shots from the second floor?
Nope, the Starbucks was incredibly crowded, and not because they had really good coffee. There were hundreds, if not thousands of tourists in the area all fighting for a two-foot wide spot on the edge of the building where they could take pictures and videos of the crossing in action as it occurred. I attempted to get closer to the edge to see if I would be able to take any decent pictures, but the whole place was like a mosh pit— it was incredibly difficult to travel ten feet in any direction without running into someone on the way.
Perhaps if we continued to the next floor, we’d find something interesting? As it turned out, we would: the Third Floor actually didn’t have that many people on it— the views were completely unrestricted, meaning you could take all the pictures and videos you wanted without having to wait for your turn. Great! I hate lines anyways, but of course there was a catch: You actually had to pay money in order to get to the edge of the building. The building had this feature which required you to pay a decent amount to get to the edge, where you could sit on a reserved table, buy a drink and some snacks, and watch millions of people go about their daily lives. Besides the incredible view and services, there were also several pieces of amazing art in the spacious room.
My parents were okay with spending a little extra money for this great view, and I sat there and recorded this EPIC timelapse of everyone running through the crossing, which is one of the best things I’ve ever recorded (seriously though, this is like something from a movie!)
For about an hour, we watched the sun set for the last time in Tokyo as thousands of people ran from one end of the street to another. It’s a very surreal feeling to be able to watch this, and some of the people in our party even went ahead and got dinner while watching the crossings. My mom insisted I got food as well, but I wasn’t very hungry because of the huge lunch we’d had just two hours ago, so instead I grabbed a cup of orange juice and slowly sipped on it, continuing to watch the crossings ahead.
Another interesting thing I noticed were those Mario Karts— one popular attraction in Japan was one that allowed you to take these Mario Karts and ride them through the streets of Tokyo along with the traffic— I’m genuinely surprised this thing is even legal, but it sounded like it would be a lot of fun. In fact, when we were first planning on our trip, my brother officially listed the Mario kart attraction as the #2 best attractions on his bucket list for Japan. Unfortunately… That attraction is 18+, and they even require you to have a specific Driver’s License in order to join. Sadly, I didn’t fulfill either requirement, and Casey certainly did not, meaning we’d have to save that for our next time. Maybe in a few years or so, I’ll upload a video onto Inside a Wandering Mind that time lapses a Mario Kart Ride throughout the skyscrapers of Shibuya.
Eventually, the sun began to set and our time in Shibuya Crossing was coming to an end— we all decided to head back to the hotel after that, as the day had been quite exhausting and we wanted to be fueled up for our next day in Japan. This was our last day in Tokyo, and tomorrow we’d be getting our own tour guide and driver, who’d be taking us first to….