• 01-01 (January 1st)
• 01-10 (January 10th)
• 01-11 (January 11th)
• 10-01 (October 1st)
• 10-10 (October 10th)
• 10-11 (October 11th)
• 11-01 (November 1st)
• 11-10 (November 10th)
• 11-11 (November 11th)

As an aside, yes, I do have some more posts to do about my second Tokyo trip. I’ll get to them eventually, sorry. ^^;

We then visited Shibuya. In this photo, you can see a crew in the process of putting up a new sign on top of one of the skyscrapers. From what I saw, the sign is split into sections, which are unrolled and placed over the previous sign one at a time to create a new one.

Near the JR station exit, on the Hachiko side, there were several buildings with large displays on them showing TV programming and ads.

This is the Shibuya 109 building. Apparently it’s a famous building, and its name is a pun on the owner of the building, Tokyu. The “to” part being one of the readings for 10, and “kyu” being 9. I don’t know much about it, save that I’ve seen it in trailers for the Nintendo DS RPG from Square Enix entitled “The World Ends With You.” I have yet to play that game, however.

While in Shibuya, we decided to grab something to eat and got crepes. This was my first time having crepes in Japan, and I got one with strawberries and vanilla ice cream. It was really good. Sorry for the blurry picture, forgot to switch my camera over to close-up mode. ^^;

Also while in Shibuya, we visited a Softbank store to pick me up a cell phone. I still didn’t have one at this point, but we figured I really needed to get one so we could keep in touch while at Comiket. Unfortunately, the first store we went to didn’t have any of the prepaid phones, so they directed us to one on the next street over, which did. Of course, the reason why we went to that first store in the first place was because they had fluent English speakers on staff, but I managed to get a phone with a minimum of hassle at the other store, despite my misgivings about my relatively low level of Japanese fluency.

After the sun went down, we visited Tokyo Tower. It was lit up beautifully with “2009″ on the side. The pictures don’t really do it justice, mostly because I only have a point-and-shoot camera that’s several years old. ^^;

Unfortunately, I couldn’t take vary good photos from the tower itself, my camera isn’t good enough and the tower was moving too much in the wind to be able to get a decent shot. I kept this one and a second one just to help illustrate that point. We went up to the main observatory, then the special observatory. There was an additional fee for the special observatory, which is much higher up on the tower, but it’s well worth it. Interestingly enough, at Tokyo Tower we met up by chance with another exchange student at Kansai Gaidai and his sister, who was visiting. These two were actually on the same bus to Tokyo from Hirakata that we were. After Tokyo Tower, we headed back to Akihabara to grab some food, then headed back to the hotel.

During morning rush hour, the first car on certain lines is reserved for women only. This is because people are squeezing very tightly into the cars and in such close quarters, women have been getting groped by perverts. Known as “chikan,” it’s a very real problem, and one of the ways to mitigate it has been to set aside cars for the exclusive use of women during those times.

Overall, we had a great time, and I hope that I can go back again some time to see more stuff I didn’t get to see the first two times, like some of the famous shrines in the Tokyo area. As with the previous two posts, you can check out additional photos in the December 29th photo gallery.

It really was a nice view from Tokyo Big Sight, out over the water of Tokyo Bay. ^_^

This was a boat we spied out on the water from the monorail line we took to get to Tokyo Big Sight. That monorail line is called the Yurikamome. It’s separate from the subways or JR system, run by a different corporation independent from the JR or Tokyo Metro.

Of course, we made a trip to Akihabara (Akiba, for short), but by that time it was getting late and alot of stuff was closed. Though we did manage to visit Gamers. This little gem of Engrish comes from a sign posted by the stairs/elevator in the store. What it’s supposed to be explaining is that you need to pay for the stuff you want to buy separately on each floor of the store. This is actually an extremely common practice in multi-story Japanese stores.

After the Akiba trip, we headed back to the hotel to plan for when and how we would be going to Comiket. While we were at Tokyo Big Sight, we were able to pick up copies of the Comiket catalog. It’s a good thing we did, as that told us who was selling what when. You see, most of the sellers are only their for one day, so if you want something from a specific artist or group (known as a “circle”), you need to find out which day they are selling their wares. We found out that we really didn’t want to go the first day, because there was nothing we wanted, so we skipped that day, and it gave us the extra day we had been wanting to do more sightseeing. That day will be the subject of the next post in this series. As before, you can browse the full gallery of the Dec. 28 pictures if you wish to see more. ^_^

We left on Saturday night (Dec. 26th) after checking into Seminar House 2. (Yes, Seminar House 3 was closed for the break, so they made us move.) I went with my friend Taylor, who I mentioned in my previous post about Yodobashi Camera. The header pic for this post is a lovely bit of Engrish we found along the way during our night bus trip to Tokyo. Since my camera’s time and date were incorrect at that point, I had to guess and put it on the 27th. Please make sure to throw your trush into the proper bin, okay? XD


The Tokyo Metro subway system has this lovely series of PSA posters, most of which say “Please do it at home” or the like at the top of them. Basically they’re to inform and remind passengers of expected manners while in the stations and on the trains. Checkout this Gizmodo article on the signs for more of them and hilarious commentary and comments. ;) The first time I read that article, I had tears in my eyes, I was laughing so hard. XD (Sorry for the blurry photo, my camera has a manual focus setting and it wasn’t set to the right one to get this picture correctly. However, I didn’t find this out until I got back to Hirakata. Ah well…)

After we got to our hotel, we met up with Juan, another friend I met at the same time as Taylor. The two of them had been hanging out together most of the semester. He was in Tokyo as well, showing his Dad around. His dad was visiting Japan for a few weeks. We got some food at a Ramen place in Shinjuku where you pick your meal at a ticket machine. You put your money in the machine, push a button corresponding to the dish you want, and then give the ticket you get from the machine to the staff. A very efficient way to handle paying for meals and it means that the cooking and serving staff doesn’t have to handle the money directly. Unfortunately, I was still somewhat tired from the night bus trip and didn’t have the presence of mind to take any pictures at this point. D’oh!

Anyway, not really much of interest happened on Sunday besides that meal and a trip to Yodobashi Camera in Shinjuku. As well as checking out the arcades in that area. From what I recall, we headed back to the hotel and crashed, as we were again, tired from the overnight trip and the restless sleep on the bus.

If you want to see more pictures from this day, you can visit the December 27th gallery.

Yodobashi Camera is basically a huge, multi-story department store, and they have an incredible selection of stuff ranging from computers and home electronics; to games, toys, and figures; and even some clothes. You could probably get lost for hours in that store just looking at everything on just one floor… it’d probably take days to thoroughly explore the entirety of the store. n.n;

Afterwards, we stopped at a couple more shops, then ate at a very nice, and also fairly inexpensive, Italian restaurant in Namba. More pictures after the jump.


On our way to a shop in Namba, I took this photo of these giant neon signs. I especially though the giant Glico man sign was interesting. n.n

I tried some more Taiyaki, this time with anko inside of it. I think it’s an acquired taste. ^^;

This is the cover of Saizeria’s menu. Saizeria is this wonderful Italian restaurant in Namba with what I would consider very reasonable prices.

For example, this plate of spaghetti w/ meat sauce was 399 yen.

They also had a “drink bar” with unlimited refills for 180 yen. They had melon soda, so of course, I got my money’s worth of that. ;)

Overall, this compares favorably with what I recall of restaurant prices back home. Of course, I never really have been in the habit of eating at restaurants on a regular basis, but it seems about equal pricing.

You can see more pictures at my gallery for that day, some of which will probably be used in future posts.