35,000,000 people can’t be wrong!

08Mar09

It’s one of those things you have to see to believe. The Tokyo Metropolitan Area has nearly 35,000,000 people, making it the largest metropolitan area in the world.  There are few places in the world where you can go to the top of a skyscraper and see buildings and concrete all the way to the horizon, 360° around.

It’s hard to describe Tokyo.  On one hand, it’s a world class city on par with the likes of London and New York, but on the other hand, it’s still “Japanese”.  The population density and the amount of people that flow through the city each day is unimaginable.  One of Tokyo’s busiest stations, Shinjuku station, is used by over 3,500,000 per day, which is also a world record holder.  And yet, it’s surprisingly easy and not too expensive to move about Tokyo.  The Yamanote line, Tokyo’s ring of steel, loops around the city’s most important districts, and the each train is a mere two minutes apart at any point on the line.

The trip itself went pretty well.  Due to some packing blunders, I was only able to take pictures with my cell phone camera and not my real one.  Either way, this particular trip was more for the purpose of meeting people that I knew in the area rather than for sightseeing.  I met with a friend who was a former student here at my university in Nagoya, a friend from my home university who is studying at Chiba University, and my former host family from three years ago (also from Chiba).  Seeing my host family again was nice; this time around I was able to talk with them completely in Japanese.  They treated me to lunch and dinner, as well as brought me to the zoo and a planetarium.  During the times that I wasn’t with anyone, I pretty much wandered through the various districts of Tokyo and did some shopping/sightseeing.  You could spend weeks wandering around the streets of Tokyo and still find new things to do and see.

For this trip, I splurged a bit and paid for a hotel for two nights, and I’m glad I did.  The hotel was actually quite nice for the price that I paid (￥6000 per night), and it was located in Asakusa, which is a more traditional, laid-back district in Tokyo.  The hotel was located right next to Sensouji, one of Tokyo’s most important temples.  However, I didn’t make it through the trip without anything going wrong…  after going out with some friends on my last night in Tokyo, I was supposed to take a night bus back to Nagoya, which would arrive there early in the morning.  However, I dropped all my luggage off in a train station locker on the other side of the city.  I thought for sure I’d have enough time to retrieve it and come back for my bus, but it turned out I misjudged a bit.  It was 11:00 PM by that time, and I had nowhere to stay.  I ended up going to Akihabara and spending the night in a manga cafe.  It’s not exactly the most ideal accomodation, but it had a bed of sorts, and was only about ￥2000 for the night.

Anyway, I could go on about Tokyo for quite a bit longer, but I don’t want to ramble on and on about it.  All I know is that I’ll definitely be making a return trip in the next month or two.

More updates coming soon!

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Tags: akihabara, asakusa, shinjuku, tokyo