Metro System + Imperial Palace
Okay, so this is quite surprising, but I actually didn’t sleep for as long as you’d expect. I was losing it the night before – feeling like I might collapse on the floor because of sleep deprivation at any second- unable to process everything I was seeing, there was a lot to take in. Maybe it was the pure excitement or the fact that I knew the fun that was to come – whatever it was got me out of bed at around 5 that morning, after seven hours of sleeping. That isn’t much, but given the last twenty four hours before that only had three hours of sleep, it was quite a lot for me.
I know, not a regular teenager that can live on four hours of sleep. Crazy that those exist, huh?
I took a bit of a view outside while i had it, showing the metropolis outside. Derek was already up by that point and it would only be a short time before we were going out. The streets outside were alreaedy quite busy, with cars moving through the streets and lots of people walking through the alleyways. Tokyo is like a maze, I swear. And somehow people can navigate through it. In time, I would start to eventually get some sense of direction in the area.
We met in the lobby to discuss where we’d get breakfast. After some discussion, the consensus was to immediately go to a nearby shop to find food for breakfast. Afterwards, we’d return to our hotel room and after some preparation, we’d begin our first day in Japan. And holy crap, was there a lot that was going to happen today.
Our parents found a pretty quick and convenient location- a wonderful place called Seven-Eleven, known for being synonymous with gas station food. Well, it was going to be feeding me today. There were actually quite a lot of options of what we could eat, mostly rice and some small toppings. Nothing too crazy, but I suppose it was better than nothing. By around 7:00 AM, we were picking out our food, and in case you’re wondering, I have no idea what I got at the place that day because I forgot to take a picture. Most likely it was rice with meat on the side. Casey got fried chicken (his favorite food. You could take him anywhere in the world and he’ll eat it) and the adults got whatever else was availible in the store. The store was mostly selling food, but I looked around and found a lot of other things, including water bottles, candy, and you guessed it… vapes. Are vapes just part of Japanese culture? Why was I seeing so many?
We decided to go eat back at a lounge in our hotel, where we could enjoy the morning breeze and all the plants in the front of the hotel. We finished our food and took some time in the hotel room to prepare, get our stuff ready, and use the restroom one last time before heading out again. First, we were heading to the nearest metro station to navigate through the city.
Now would be a good time to introduce the Suika Card, which is an important part of all the money I spent on the trip. The Suika Card that we bought totals around 10,000 yen (Which equals about 70 USD at the time of me writing this) and can be used to buy metro, get food, and buy whatever else we wanted, which was super fun. Everyone got their own which they could spend on whatever they felt like- me, Derek, Casey, and Jason. The adults didn’t give us any warnings to limit our spendings and pretty much just told us to buy whatever we want when we wanted to, which as you’ll see turned out be a very bad choice.
For now, though, all of our spending on different things would be pretty minimal as we were just getting started on the vacation. As we headed to the nearest metro, some of us decided to buy some drinks to help cope with the heat- Japan is known for its vending machines, and there’s quite a lot of them there. Their options are pretty diverse- they’ve got orange juice, water, and some more adventurous drinks that I couldn’t remember to save my life. Point is, they’ve got everything for everyone – mostly drinks, but we would find other vending machines and a huge array of shopping materials.
At around 8:30 AM, we arrived in the metro station and went down the first of many flights of stairs, entering this sort of tunnel in the area. Casey, Derek, and I chatted away while our parents tried to navigate through the maze of tunnels to figure out where we’d board the train. I used the first bit of my Suika Card to pass into the metro station, where our parents now needed to stare at the map to figure out how they were going to get to where we needed to be.
And let me just say, at first glance the map just looks like a bunch of fancy colored lines. It might as well be art.
Once you see it for a while and understand how it works, it does get easier- by our last day in Tokyo, our parents were starting to get the hang of navigating through the place, which made the trip even more enjoyable.
It turned out the trains were pretty quick- one train from one route would come in and once in arrived at the station, you’d have forty seconds tops to get in and settle down. If you weren’t in by then, well, tough luck. Another train usually came after a couple minutes, though, so the wait usually wasn’t horrible. Once our train came in, we entered it and quickly remembered that Tokyo has 40 million people- the Californian population crammed into an area the size of Rhode Island. Of course it was going to be crowded! There weren’t too many seats, so obviously finding one wasn’t going to be very easy, but this place was next-level crowded. The cars were filled to the brim with people standing, many of them only balanced by the hanging metal bars from above.
The metro train started moving, and this thing went fast- it accelerated to a respectable pace in mere seconds, and before I knew it, we were at the next station. There was nothing on all sides other than darkness, but I could clearly feel and see that we were moving fast. We had already slowed down and reached another station- we were moving again, then we weren’t. Then we were moving again, and we weren’t.
Around this time I realized that balancing yourself in the car was actually easy. I was able to stand up completely without metal bars to support me just fine, even when the car was accelerating. So yes, if you’re competing for space on a metal bar and it’s too much space, you can balance yourself out just fine, but still use the metal bar, people will appreciate it if you don’t fall over into them…
Because the speed of these cars are surprisingly high, we reached the area where we wanted to go in about 20 minutes, traveling from our hotel in Shinjuku all the way to another district called Chiyoda. When we emerged from the underground metro station, we got this view, which is honestly pretty impressive:
We walked down the road and immediately, I knew where we were going. We encountered this structure:
The Imperial Palace of Japan.
We walked across the bridge and reached the entrance, buying tickets to enter this ancient looking structure. We entered and checked out the scene a little. There were a few interesting bits of information sprinkled here and there and cool structures like these:
We didn’t spend too much time here. There was a Museum of Imperial Collections inside the exhibit that I did have some interest in, but the general consensus for most people was that we all got bored pretty quick and it wasn’t long before we were heading back. Everything there just wasn’t interesting the others, I guess. We headed back into the Metro Station and quickly decided to head to our next place, which for the kids would be 10x more interesting…
At around 10:20 AM, we emerged out of another metro station a few miles south of where we previously were and got this view:
Gamers might want to see this + fire steak
We walked down the street for a while, coming across a few shops with some food options, but none of them seemed to be notable to the point where I’d be losing my mind. This next place, however, would be a very interesting one. So interesting, in fact, that when we came out of this place, Casey’s Suika Card, which was around 9,700 yen, would be literally down to zero.
This place was a Tokyo Shopping Mall- full of electronics. A lot of things, but when we immediately walked through the doors of the mall, suffering from the heat, it was mostly electronics. If you’re wondering exactly what electronics they had… let me just say…
Everything you’d ever want.
Our parents, knowing we had enough money to afford a lot of the things here, told us we could look around and immediately this meant getting to look about everywhere. The first floor we visited consisted of gaming, electronics, computers, and anything that requires electricity. There were fancy iPhones all over the tables, but since Casey and I already had iPhone 14s, we didn’t care much for the 15 yet.
They also had a lot of computers- new models, of course, which they bragged had some interesting capabilities. We didn’t have the budget for any of these on just 10,000 yen, but all four of us took interesting. Some of the computers and machines we had actually allowed previews and customer usage, which you bet we took the opportunity to use. For a brief moment, Casey took one of the fanciest computers with a super big monitor and processor, pulled up google, and legit googled “Fortnite download” before all of us dipped again. (Don’t worry, he didn’t actually install fortnite) We also found a preview for an XBox gaming console. Casey hasn’t used Xbox in a while, so he and Derek were both jumping up to play this car racing game on it for a while. After playing a few rounds, they somehow crashed the car into a ditch and couldn’t get it out, so they decided to just reset the game and go somewhere else. The XBox was really good overall- the car racing game definitely looked like something that would require a huge processor and the game was producing these high quality images super fast. The only weird thing was that the gaming console preview we had had two controllers (Which Casey and Derek used) but there was only one car to control, although there was probably a button to fix that somewhere that nobody saw. We decided to go to the second floor of the huge mall, where they had even more electronics devices.
After briefly taking a stint in the fax machine hallway and checking out some printers on the second floor, we found a wild gaming section, filled with all the things that Casey and some of our friends obsess over. First up were gaming chairs, which are pretty okay. Casey doesn’t care much about gaming chairs- his chair is pretty mediocre, just a black one with no specific design to it, but it gets the job done. If you want just about any chair, it’s probably here. Look at these options…
There were so many gaming chairs sitting down next to each other and there were about sixty of them, sitting in an arrangement that went for miles and miles. They had just about every color, which was super nice as well. We came back here every time we needed to take a seat for a few minutes- they were very comfortable, just like the ones Casey has at home.
On top of that was microphones, and oh boy were there a lot of them. They had two or three aisles at least of several rows and columns of microphones with every color and every size. Casey and Derek examined each one of them- there were a lot of them, and they certainly did look pretty cool:
Although I’m not sure at the moment if that would beat Casey’s current microphone, which looks like this:
Headphones, similarly, had a wide array, and Casey at the moment (to my knowledge) doesn’t exactly use a pair of microphones, typically just using the earplugs in our home. This definitely could change that, because the options here were somewhat plentiful, although admittedly a lot of them did look the same.
And if you’re interested, yes, the mice range was pretty good as well. A lot of them were black, white, gray, so their color options were generally a bit limited. They did have this only really cool model of a gray mouse which had a ball attached to it that you would spin to move your cursor, which I thought was a pretty neat feature. I remember I used to have a mouse looking a lot like it, with a titled side that looked and felt really cool.
Although for Casey, at the end of the day, (And me as well to an extent) the color is all that really matters: Can your mouse beat Casey’s? There were also a lot of keyboards. Most of these just had a flashy color or were just your plain old boring keyboard, and at the end of the day the only thing that I would remember was this keyboard right here:
It does look quite normal, but trust me, it’s not. This keyboard is huge- like someone took a regular keyboard and quadrupled its size, making each key almost the size of my palm. Above is my hand in comparison to that keyboard- it’s huge, and I play piano, so my hands are pretty big already.
The rest of the floors, 3, 4,5, I think it went up to eight, showed even more gaming items, video games, more Xbox stuff, washing machines (Literally all of Floor 3 was just washing machines) and Godzilla toys, which Derek and Jason were interested in. Casey, who had recently gotten into the shoes trade, started to get some ideas. On floor 6, there was a shoe shop, and you already know what that means for Casey’s Suika Card. So far, nobody had spent much yet, but that was about to change.
Casey immediately began looking around the shoe store for any good looking pair of shoes he could find. And if you’ll remember from before in VN2023, this situation looks eerily like something I’ve been in before:
Casey, who had already shown his interesting personality during our ramen conversation, entertained us in that store. We all watched him enter the store, which sold literally everything that our money couldn’t buy. It sold computers, these fancy gadgets, and iPhones from the next century. We all watched in amusement (and slight concern) as he started to survey the walls of technology and began to grab every single thing he saw. We watched as he appeared carrying a buttload of loot in his arms and continued to get more. Shortly after, one of the store’s employees started following him. Despite the fact that he could get in a lot of trouble for this, I couldn’t really stop myself from laughing. – VN2023, Chapter 7, in Bangkok
Unfortunately, fancy shoes that everyone wastes money on are expensive, and Casey was having trouble finding a pair that cost less than 10,000 yen. He looked around for a bit, trying to find a good deal and eventually asking me to donate some of my money to help him afford one pair of shoes he got interested in. I refused this, because at the time I wasn’t sure if we could refill our Suika Cards, and I didn’t want to waste mine on his spending spree.
After looking around for about 20 minutes, he eventually settled on something which just so happened to cost around 10,000 yen- more than what he had in his Suika Card already. He grabbed it and decided to talk to the manager and get a deal. He eventually learned that being a tourist gave you a discount, which exempted you from the tax of the price. It reduced the price by a little over 15%. The manager, however, told him that the discount only worked if you showed a passport to prove it, which was something that Casey didn’t have on him. He looked through his wallet a little further, managing to find a few hundred yen in loose cash that would just be enough to pay for it- he’d be able to afford the shoes, but he’d have so little cash left over that he wouldn’t be able to buy even the cheapest lunch on the streets.
Nevertheless, he agreed and gave the store manager everything he had for the shoes. His Suika Card literally had zero now. Just then, our parents gave us a call telling us to come down to the bottom floor to meet up, where we would plan out where to eat and meet before lunch. Oh boy, was the conversation a funny one.
Me (Basically taunting Casey): So, Casey, how much do you have in your Suika Card?
Derek’s dad: He bought something? Shoes?
Casey: ZERO!!!!!
Me: HE DOESN’T EVEN HAVE ENOUGH TO GET BACK HOME! Lol…
Dad: Shoes? He bought shoes?
Me: Yeah, he doesn’t have enough money to get back home.
Derek and Jason: *laughing*
Casey: Dad, can I borrow yours to get back?
Dad: Casey, you used all your money? Now we’ll have to refill your Suika card, and that’s gonna waste time! Bruh…
Everyone else watching: *still laughing*
Casey: Wait, but hear me out… I thought this was a tax free store.
Dad: It is, but you need a passport…
Casey: Check this out, though, this was so worth it!
Dad: Don’t you have like ten of these at home???
Our dad, once again, was pretty chill with this, since it was vacation time and Casey already does these things a lot. So Casey got to keep his shoes, although it probably wasn’t worth it.
Anyways, it was now time for lunch! There were quite a lot of options since the mall had two floors dedicated just to food, and once again, the kids decided to eat separately from the parents. I don’t know where my parents went, but we looked around and after considering fried chicken (which was definitely Casey’s input) we settled on a restaurant which served one of the best meals of the trip. We chose to eat at this steak house on the food floor, and holy sh*t, was that meal something else.
After agreeing to split the bill and have me pay for all of it (Since Casey used his Suika Card) we ended up ordering our food and getting some steak for lunch. It did take quite some time to wait for the steak to come, but when it finally did, the wait was completely worth it. The steak was sold on a black colored bowl, which was super hot and was actually where the steak would get cooked- on top of that, there was some corn and lettuce- but no one’s paying attention to vegetables when there’s a huge, delicious looking steak right in front of you; this thing tasted super strong- a bit hard to chew at times (or maybe I just can’t chew) but overall super tasty and great to eat. We also got some water to keep our mouths cooled down, because it was obviously super hot. I didn’t dare touch the black plate it was served on until the very end of the meal- I hope Casey didn’t try to do it first…
After the meal was over, we all paid our expenses and headed to find our parents, eventually meeting them at the front of the room again. We spent some more time exploring the store, from looking at these toy godzillas (which Derek enjoys) and exploring this Xbox related part of the store with every game imaginable, we decided it was time to head to our next attraction.
Before we could go, however, we had one problem to take care of… Casey’s Suika Card was completely empty because he’d used all of it on shoes. Before we could head outside, we needed to refill the amount in Casey’s Suika Card first. This wasn’t too much of a hassle- we just pulled up to the nearest machine (which was just outside the nearest metro station) and refilled Casey’s card- this time, my parents clearly learned their lesson, because they made sure to only fill Casey’s Suika Card partially so he couldn’t blow another sixty dollars on a pair of shoes. With that done, we could head into the metro again for another long series of line after line- the system of getting through the metro is navigable, so we were already at the stop we needed to be at by around 3PM, just a short time later.
Kaminarimon Gate
We ended up emerging on another street- this one was far more open than the previous ones we’d seen, and I could already see a huge tower – the SkyTower, it was called, in the distance. We walked down the street, away from the tower towards a huge intersection with another road, where we could see our next attraction in the distance: The Kaminarimon Gate.
If you don’t know tourist attractions well or aren’t familiar with Tokyo, you probably don’t know the name. But, you’ve definitely seen pictures of this place:
The only problem was the palace wasn’t very close to the road- it was actually about a half mile away or so- that doesn’t sound so bad, but let me remind you that this is the summer in the Northern Hemisphere, and Japan is a scorching hot country. Under these conditions a hundred feet could be a mile on its own.
The road leading up to the main palace had several smaller buildings on the side full of stalls were people sold whatever products they had to offer. These ranged from food and souvenirs to a freaking sword – they were literally selling entire swords to people on the side of the road. Despite the huge size of this place, it was pretty crowded today- thousands were walking on the road up to the temple and every store was getting its fair share of customers.
To cool off in the extreme heat, we decided to eat something called shaved ice from one of the stalls as we moved through the endless crowd; it’s exactly what it sounds like- flavored ice that you can eat from a cup like normal ice cream. They had quite a lot of options; just about everything you’d want, so I picked peach and sat down on a beach at the side of the street to watch the hundreds of people walk towards the palace shaped-structure, which was getting closer and closer – it was already big enough from afar, but it seemed even bigger now that we were just a few hundred feet from it- hundreds of people could fit in it with no problem. Behind it was another large area with a huge container of incense burning that covered some of the gate in a thin smoke. Behind it was also another large buddhist temple with very sophisticated looking decorations inside of it. Almost all of it was made of very extravagant gold sculptures and creations. Whoever designed this place really put their heart and soul into it.
There was even more to the side of that temple, where numerous gardens of greenery were located- these were a lot less packed with tourists, so if you’re into this kind of stuff I’d certainly recommend checking it out- the kids were all too tired to explore, so we just let my mom and dad take a look around while the rest of us used our phones, like usual. The park was quite interesting from what I could see- and I did go in to take a look for some time. It did feel a little unusual to see greenery here- this whole place was filled with white skylines and buildings- it had been a minute since I had seen anything with the color green on it. Surrounding this park were of course, more buildings, and in the distance the legendary tower that is known as the Tokyo Skytree. We’d be going there very soon. The area also featured a few Buddhist statues and shrines, as well as a small creek which was home to several dozen fish.
After some more exploring, we decided to head to our last attraction of the day: The SkyTree.
SkyTree
You’ve got skyscrapers, which soar way above your head and reach the clouds. Then you’ve got buildings like the SkyTree, which dominates just about any other skyscraper, allowing you to see for miles and miles and miles, and also probably tall enough to reach Low Earth Orbit. This tower was so big, when looking at a video I had of us landing in Tokyo, you could see that building stick out like a sore thumb.
As we approached the tower through the metro system, I really didn’t know what to expect. I was sure prior to this I’d seen some tall buildings before. I’d been to New York, but I frankly remembered nothing about the view or how tall any of the towers were. The last time I’d been there was something like five years before this trip. What about Vietnam? There obviously weren’t as many skyscrapers or massive buildings as Japan, but I’d been to Mount Fansipan, the tallest mountain in Southeast Asia. Unfortunately, the three seconds of research I put into this article shows that Mount Fansipan is nowhere near the largest mountain in the world- it doesn’t even make top 100 according to Wikipedia. All of those spots are hogged by the Himalayan Mountains. One of the buildings in Saigon called Landmark 81 had been one of the places we visited towards the end of VN2023- it’s the tallest building in Vietnam and I did remember it looked big, but I’d never get to know about the view since the view service was closed the night we visited it. Even the Flatiron building in New York, I remembered, looked like it might as well be in space, and even that was only a mere fraction the size of the Sky Tree.
The Sky Tree is easily one of the largest creations that humanity has ever made- we emerged from the bottom of the subway and I had to turn my head almost 90 degrees upwards just to see the top of that thing – it was so high up I got dizzy just looking at it. It was lucky I didn’t have a fear of heights- or rather, I didn’t have a fear of heights if the place had safety standards.
The surrounding area did contain some skyscrapers- apartments, they looked like, which also did look giant but were tiny in comparison to the behemoth that was the Sky Tree. I wondered how far away you could see with the sky tree.
We were there quite early- our time on the Sky Tree itself wasn’t for another hour or two, and Casey and Derek still wanted to rest- it was very heated, and air conditioners were nice inside, and everyone still wanted to be on their phones. We decided to enter a mall next to the Sky Tree for the time being and wait several moments. Everyone sat on their phones – I texted my friend for some time and recalled some stories so far of the trip for him- after some talking, a quick use of the restroom (which was very clean and fancy, as you might expect from Japan) and a bit of window shopping, we took another exit out of the mall we were in and found ourselves just a short distance away from the Sky tree- it was raining now, and the sky tree from above looked even taller this time. Many people actually ate meals on a little field just outside the sky tree, where apparently music and food was being served. There were also activities for the kids such as rock climbing and a little slide. If heights were too scary for you in the Sky Tree, they had smaller stuff for the little ones. It was starting to get late again- the sun was quickly going down, and we’d get to see a view of it in the sunset.
Here’s a pic of our surroundings: Take that for reference to the crazy views we’re about to see.
The building’s ground floor was huge- they had a massive line full of tourists waiting there turn to reach the top, and I instantly knew that the top would be filled with people competing for valuable space and pictures. While waiting in line, we kept ourselves entertained with a TV, as well as the walls which were painted with this really nice infographic about the history of Tokyo. The lucky thing about a tower this big is that there’s so many elevators that it can actually accommodate the huge amounts of traffic we were seeing. That’s lucky, and just fifteen minutes later we were on an elevator, going up in height.
Let me just say that with the trafficking this place, this elevator can’t be a normal elevator. It was at least seven times the size of the elevator at our hotel, and it had the capacity to fill itself with way more people. The elevator at our hotel could barely hold our entire party of just eight people- the one here probably was big enough to fit a little for each of the eight members of our party.
Holy… crap. This view is wild.
You could see for miles and miles and miles- and it was nothing but an endless carpet of buildings in every direction. It was already dark by now- the sun was starting to set, but that only prompted many of the buildings to start glowing. It’s easy to get lost when you have so many buildings to look at, but the SkyTree was helpful with navigation. It held up charts in every corner of the panoramic view that you could reference if you wanted to see a specific building. It also came with a picture of the view and arrows which pointed to where you would find a certain structure. Even with that, many buildings were really easy to pick out of thin air- Tokyo is just that big. It was certainly strange to see all the buildings on the ground like they were built by ants- when I looked up at the normal buildings from a regular elevation, it looks like a skyscraper already- the scale of this Sky Tree thing is unfathomable.
We circled around the view very slowly, trying to see what we could find. The Kaminarimon Gate and the surrounding park and markets were super easy to pick off from here. You could even see the Haneda airport from here at this view, and the airport itself was already super far away- a car drive from our hotel to Haneda had already taken nearly two hours, and we were already even further away with the Sky Tree. Nevertheless, I could still see Haneda with ease, like I hadn’t traveled very far in Tokyo yet.
And apparently the view got even wilder- we took another elevator to an even higher floor on the Sky Tree for some even better views- aside from having this really cool elevator.
The view up there was even better- the metropolis looked even more vibrant now that the sun had completely submerged beneath the horizon. This was the home of dozens of millions of people, and I could see all of it in the same field of vision. Amazing.
There was another staircase that led to an even higher view inside of this new floor, but it seemed to go on forever, so after a little more picture taking and surveying the view, everyone decided to go back down to the ground to eat dinner. We were all starting to get tired now, especially me, Casey Jason, and Derek. The Sky Tree was incredibly crowded, so we had to wait roughly thirty minutes on a line just to get down to the bottom through an elevator- these elevators are huge and their size really can’t be overstated- even with their unbelievable capacity, there were still way too many tourists here to get several seats to yourself.
In a few minutes’ time, we reached the bottom of the SkyTree once again. The whole building glowed a very bright purple hue, which looked insane- I figured that planes landing at the Haneda Airport now would probably get a really good view of the tower. We went back into the mall at the side of the tower to sit down and eat some food, because we hadn’t eaten very much since that steakhouse. And of course, because this is Japan, we had to get some ramen. What do you expect?
We sat down at a local restaurant again and ordered our food- as we waited for it, me and Casey and Derek sat together and recounted everything that had happened today, giving our opinions on everything. The conversation could have been really enthusiastic, but I’d already been awake for something like, what, seventeen hours by that point and after that I just sounded kind of dead. Not that Japan was boring, but after a long day I just get tired quick. Makes sense, right?
Once the ramen came, we all ate it fast. Ramen fills you up very quickly, and it definitely did the job for me.
Some of the adults did talk about maybe exploring another mall or going shopping at one more building as we headed back to our hotel, but one look at the rest of us kids was enough to convince them that we maybe should stop for the day. Right after we finished our ramen, we all walked back to the nearest metro station and began heading back. It took close to an hour to get back home, even with the metro’s speed, and it took me a lot of effort to refrain from falling asleep on one of the seats there.
It took a lot of energy to reach the hotel again, and by that point I just wanted to sleep, so after a quick shower and rest I went back to bed and fueled myself up for another day.