When we visited Tokyo four years ago, we got about 1.5 days for a “furlough” from our 2-week mission work. Samantha and I spent that time in Tokyo visiting some of the most famous areas of the city such as Shibuya (the “Times Square” of Tokyo) and Asakusa (famous shrine, marketplace, and pagoda).
For this trip, we didn’t want to duplicate any sites we saw last time, so we tried three different areas. On Monday night, we went to Akihabara, to an area known as “Electric City” for its abundance of electronics shops and video game arcades. (We were in dire need of an ethernet cable to use in our hotel room.) We found a store with seven stories that sold everything from big screen HDTVs to chopsticks.
On Tuesday night, we ate dinner at MOS Burger fairly early with Sam’s advisor, so we just wanted to find some good dessert. We ended up going to Ikebukuro to an enormous shopping mall called “Sunshine City.” It was also several stories tall (about the first 5-6 floors of a 59+ story skyscraper). There were so many places to see (there are 120 shops and 60 restaurants, plus an aquarium), that I know we only saw a fraction (plus it was getting late). We couldn’t decide on what to get for dessert until we agreed on ice cream from Cold Stone Creamery (but this Cold Stone had green tea ice cream!).
On Wednesday, our last day in Tokyo, we parked our luggage at Tokyo Station, where we would be catching the shinkansen (bullet train) later. We toured the grounds of the Imperial Palace, an area built in the Edo era, and still in use today. It was a beautiful area that gave us just a glimpse into feudal Japan.
Since Japan (and Tokyo especially) is a complete mix of modern and traditional, this entire area of Japan cultural history is surrounded by expensive skyscrapers, international embassies, world trade, and everything that embodies the global society. We ate lunch in what could be considered “downtown” Tokyo, as it was the equivalent of New York’s Fifth Avenue.
We did a little more shopping and then rested our very sore feet for a while before boarding the bullet train to Takasaki to meet Paul and Stacey Herrington (see next several posts).





















