Tokyo Day 1: Friday, September 24, 2004

Because of all that sleep we had on Thursday we got up early on Friday. Way. Early. So we had breakfast in the hotel, which cost us about $20 each (my first shocking experience with the expensive nature of Tokyo, but not my last). But it was a good buffet, and I had all the coffee I wanted (more on that later).

We were supposed to get picked up for our tour to the sumo tournament at 12:30, but it was barely 9:30. We found the hotel where our tour met, then wandered around a little. We ended up at the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building.



I say skip the tour and head to the observation deck. The view was impressive, even if the weather was not participating.



I saw this thing in the building and when no one was using it, I snapped a picture:



It's for smoking. You smoke behind the screen and that green thing sucks up all the smoke. If you made these in America you could make a mint.

Anyway, eventually the bus picked us up and drove us all the way from Shinjuku to Tokyo station, stopping along the way at a couple other hotels. It took about an hour to get to Tokyo, in the meantime we passed the Imperial Palace:



and Tokyo Tower. Finally, we arrived and met up with our tour guide. Anyone going to Japan and planning to take a tour in English should look into JTB Sunrise Tours. We might have been able to get by without a guide, but we wouldn't have known what was going on. The tour guide did a great job of explaining the rules and traditions of sumo to our group.



This is the trophy awarded to the winner of the tournament. There's also a little museum at the Ryogoku Kokugikan, the sumo stadium.



Here are some stills of the action, I'll post some video at a later date:





It's really something to see, and since there are only three tournaments a year, we were fortunate to be in Tokyo during the fall tournament. It's easy to see sumo wrestlers and just think, "big, fat guys," but they really are awesome athletes. Very agile, very powerful.

On the way back, we stopped in Akihibara, aka "Electric Town". It certainly lives up to the name, it's like Vegas or a scene out of Blade Runner:



This is also where I whipped out the plastic for the first time, buying up three Soul of Chogokin Evangelions (to match the Unit 02 Chogokin I bought at FanimeCon and an Evangelion model from the new PlayStation2 game. It was an Evangelion-kinda night:





The store we were in closed, so we checked out a couple arcades. I'm a big fan of Sega games, so naturally this caught my eye.



The arcade didn't die off in Tokyo like it did in America, where they were stigmatized as hangouts for gangs, child molesters and drug users. Which is too bad, because they have much cooler stuff in the UFO Catcher machines (sort of like the Challenger machine, only harder):



Rhonda tried to get one of these cats, and ended up just buying one later at Mandarake. She was pretty bitter about coming up empty.



The games were cool too. I took a picture of the Taiko game for Sara:



Rhonda and I battled at the Azumanga Daioh version of Bubble Bobble. She played as Osaka, and I came out the winner as Chiyo-chan.



By ten we were exhausted. We took the JR train back to Shinjuku, made our way to the room and passed out.

All the pictures from day one can be found here.