Tokyo
Tokyo is very spread out with four or five downtowns. Buildings ripple with animated neon and humongous video advertisements. Twisty weird architectural creations jump out and vie for your attention as you pass them on the train, but there’s rarely enough in one place for a skyline. In parts of O Daiba you can’t see the ground through the web of footbridges, aerial building to building tunnels, trains, and highways. Think Metropolis.
Where we stayed was quite a contrast from all that. Tokyo’s fairly expensive, so our hotel in Ueno was the cheapest place we could find in a poor part of town next to a soup kitchen. The joint was spotless. Absolutely immaculate. Important fact: In Japan, the ghetto is clean.
Shinkjuku has big business and the totalitarian looking metropolitan government buildings on one side of the tracks and the bright lights of a fading red light district on the other. Japanese drug laws are fairly liberal so there’s all kinds of weird fungus and colored powders for sale on the streets. The rattling pachinko parlors and throbbing strip joints are succumbing to Big Retail kinda like Times Square.
Everything new, cute, glowing and popular can be found in Shibuya. Fashion and toys predominate. It was a fun place to window shop, but for tourism, Love Hotel Hill took the cake. There’s a little hill in Shibuya covered with hourly rate fantasy hotels. They look like little castles, mosques and spaceships. You can rent a room for a quick tryst in whatever theme you like: Underwater Adventure, Sultan’s Harem, Dungeon, Outer Space, Hello Kitty, High School Classroom, you name it. They even offer concealed parking and –as should go without saying now– its all very clean.
We tried to capture some interesting stuff in photos, but not a single giant penis destroyed even so much as a city block while we were there. Maybe next time. Out of money and a little travel weary, we fluttered off to San Francisco. Perhaps to settle down for a bit…