Neon lights, crowds of people, skyscrapers, Shinto shrines, crazy fashion – everything you’d expect when you hear about Tokyo. My Canadian friend, Larissa, was visiting Japan for a week after a month in Southeast Asia, so I decided to meet up and travel around Kyoto with her for a few days. She was flying into Narita airport so I headed down to Tokyo a few days before she arrived to explore on my own. The only other time I’ve been to Tokyo was over a year ago, when I first arrived on JET, but I didn’t stray outside of Shinjuku (where the conference was being held) so I didn’t consider that I’ve actually “been” to Tokyo. This time, I had three days, a subway map, and all the time in the world.

In a city the size of Tokyo you need at least a week just to scratch the surface (the subway line that runs around the city takes an hour to go around once!). I was staying in Asakusa so the first thing I went to see was the Kaminarimon (Thunder Gate! what a cool name), with its massive 12m paper lantern, that stands at the entrance of Senso-ji, a large Buddhist temple in the heart of the city. After wandering around Senso-ji and the jumble of side streets of old Tokyo, I headed to the electronic district of Akihabara.

As I exited the train station, my senses were assaulted from the noise of the crowd, the calls of the salespeople, and the neon signs and multi-story billboards plastered to the sides of the buildings. Akihabara is the heart of “Otaku” culture, filled with video games, electronic stores, arcades, hobby shops and manga stores. Women dressed in maid costumes stand on the sidewalks and invite patrons into their maid cafes, tiny entrances lead into a multi-story building full of computers, TV’s and cell phones, four-storey bookstores are filled with jostling customers and small alleyways and staircases lead to non-descript adult stores. It’s said that any electronic part you think of can be found in Akihabara. I spent a few hours wandering around, poking in and out of the countless stores and wishing once again that I was fluent at Japanese.

The next day I got a more traditional dose of Japanese culture by visiting the sprawling Emperor’s palace in the middle of Tokyo. It was drizzling that day, but it only helped to dispel the crowds as I strolled through the Japanese gardens next to the palace. I walked through the high-class district of Ginza and made my way to the shopping districts of Shibuya and Harajuku. Shibuya is my most favorite part of Tokyo (so far). It’s a district with narrow pedestrian streets at all angles to each other and full of tiny (and some not so tiny) stores, shops and restaurants. It’s busy and bustling until all hours of the night, partly due to the fact that just up the hill is the highest concentration of nightclubs and love hotels in Japan. It also has the busiest scramble crosswalk in the world where you could spend hours watching the sidewalks continually fill up with humanity and spill into the streets (which is what I did.. for maybe 20 minutes). Harajuku is another infamous shopping area geared mainly towards trendy youth. It was probably due to its fame that the streets - lined with cosmetic shops, gothic Lolita, hairstylists, crepes stands, lingerie stores and cafes - were packed to the brim with people and tourists hoping to catch a glimpse of the crazy fashion.

That night I decided to stay in a capsule hotel since the hostel was booked up. There was enough room to sit cross-legged and to stretch out, and weren’t as claustrophobic as pictures make them out to be. There was an onsen on the roof, air conditioning, clean blankets, a TV, and it only cost 3000yen a night… it was perfect!

The morning of my last day I went to Ryogoku to catch the sumo wrestlers at practice, but was unfortunately closed that day. I did manage to catch a glimpse of the sumo wrestlers riding down the street on their mama-chari bicycles. Next I did the touristy thing and hit up the Tokyo tower. I got a great view of the Tokyo skyline from 150m in the air, with its skyscrapers that continue to the horizon. It was cloudy that day so I couldn’t get a view of Mt. Fuji but the 820yen elevator ride was worth it. That night happened to be the night of the welcome enkai for all the new JETs coming to Hokkaido so, after a quick nap at the capsule hotel, I headed over to Shinjuku and Kabuki-cho (the red-light district) to explore a bit before I had to meet up with them. We all met up, drank, ate food and chatted it up with our new neighbors and before long, I had to make my way back to my capsule hotel on the other side of the city. Larissa was arriving at 7:30am the next morning so I had to catch the first train at 5:00am in order to meet up with her at the airport on time. I didn’t want to get lost on my way to the airport so I figured out which subway lines to take beforehand and, after a brief incident with the JR Metro police (which ended up me getting searched and fingerprinted), I felt confident enough to navigate the Tokyo subway blindfolded.

As I lied down in my little plastic box to catch a few hours of sleep, I thought back over everything I’d done in the past three days. There’s so much to do and see in every nook and cranny at all times of the year that you could spend a lifetime in Tokyo and not see everything. Tokyo, like Hong Kong (and as all big cities seem to do), managed to reel me in and make me want to see more. I'll have to go back there again too some day.