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Saturday 4th May, 2013

Today was a bit problematic for us – we’d been fairly happy in terms of what to do with three days in Tokyo but the fourth stumped us. Particularly as Golden Week was well under way and so everybody was in holiday mode.

Should we go on a day trip to Mount Fuji? Logistically it’s a long trek and there’s no guarantee of seeing the mountain, particularly in May when visibility is apparently at its poorest.

Should we find an Onsen and do something authentically Japanese? We’d been keen to do this in Kyoto but had chosen a day out in Nara instead. Tokyo does have authentic thermally heated water in some of its onsen but we would rather have done it somewhere more picturesque and the Oedo-Onsen-Monogatari on Odaiba didn’t really appeal.

Should we go to Disney? I read somewhere that Tokyo’s Disney resort is the most visited attraction in the Japanese capital and we’d had good reports (especially of DisneySea) but on a sunny Saturday in Golden Week doing this would have been utter madness.

What we hadn’t seen of Tokyo were the historical and cultural things that had been our priority in Hiroshima and Kyoto. So, having dismissed several options we went to the north of Tokyo to visit the Sensoji temple and pick up some souvenirs at Nakamise. It was full of people.

With souvenirs bought and photos taken we thought we might go on a boat trip down the river but that’s the equivalent of a YorkBoat cruise on a gloriously sunny Bank Holiday Monday multiplied by a factor of Tokyo so we didn’t do that either. Instead we took the subway, skilfully circumventing the hordes and arrived at the peaceful and serene Hamarikyu gardens (which, because of Golden Week, had free entry) where we enjoyed sitting in the sunshine.

For our final night in Tokyo we decided we would go out to the Skytree to see it lit up at night – it was very impressive – and we enjoyed some very succulent and very tasty tonkatsu for our tea.

Sunday 5th May, 2013

Our final morning in Tokyo had arrived.

Although we’d been to several of Tokyo’s famous suburbs we hadn’t yet been to the Roppongi Hills. Happily one of the first churches Google returned was based there so we thought we’d check it out.

The Roppongi Hills are the realisation of Minoru Mori‘s vision of an integrated urban space consisting of offices, flats, shops, restaurants, cafés, cinemas, a museum, a hotel, a TV studio, an outdoor amphitheater, and parks. Making that dream a reality took some commitment with a price tag of $4 billion and the need to amass 400 separate plots of land. It took 17 years from inception to opening.

Tokyo Lifehouse was a great place to spend our final Sunday morning. Mind you, we must be getting old if we thought it was all a little too loud (although not loud enough that we picked up a pair of ear defenders on the way in). It was a good bilingual service and we were made to feel really welcome. If you’re looking for community when you arrive in Tokyo I think this would be a great place to find it. Whether or not you’d make it your regular church it is definitely somewhere to find friendly faces who’d be only too happy to help you settle in to a new country.

Although we’d had sushi we hadn’t had done the carousel experience so as we walked back to the hotel we spotted a restaurant and ticked that off our list of things to do. We then picked up our bags and boarded the Friendly Limousine Shuttle (not actually a limousine, but very friendly) for the airport and our flight on to Auckland.

Japan had been wonderful but we both felt that five nights in Tokyo was too many. Although it’s one of the world’s great cities we didn’t really connect with Tokyo and whilst we wouldn’t reject a return visit we probably won’t be going out of our way to go back in the future. Perhaps it was because we’d come to Tokyo having been to Hiroshima, Miyajima, Kyoto and Nara where we’d seen Japan’s heritage and culture or perhaps it was because shopping isn’t one of our motivators in visiting a place (if shopping excites you then I imagine that Tokyo has a lot to offer). Nevertheless we did have a good time, we just weren’t as enthralled by the city as we’d expected.