An Urban Boychick Takes on the Outdoors: Japan / Thailand Part II: Tokyo

This entry is a continuation of my Japan/Thailand trip summary, which starts here.

Thurs 1/8

Thursday’s plan was to spend most of the day on a bicycle tour around Tokyo. I started the day with breakfast at Tully’s, a very western-feeling coffee shop, complete with jazz music playing in the background (when I walked in, a jazz version of "If I Had a Bell" was playing). Upon arrival at Haneda airport I had discovered Tully's, and more importantly, discovered that they have decaf coffee, and so I sought out a location near my hotel for breakfast. Fortunately, there was a Tully's just a few blocks from my hotel. Decaf is a rarity in Japan. Not even all of the Starbucks (of which there are plenty!) offer it.

As I mentioned when describing the previous day’s lunch, Japan often provides fresh food in cases where in America you’d get something pre-cooked. The reverse is also true: some things which you’d expect in America to be made fresh turn out to be pre-prepared in Japan. Along with my coffee I ordered French toast, which turned out to be pre-made, taken out of a sealed pouch and quickly heated up, then drizzled with syrup. It was actually pretty good, and just about the right size for my kind of breakfast - I’m not generally a jumbo American breakfast kind of a guy.

Breakfast at Tully's

Japan also has very different napkin etiquette than America. You know that hot washcloth you get at the beginning of a meal at a Japanese restaurant? Well, it turns out that’s an etiquette thing: something to clean your hands is a good etiquette at every Japanese meal, though in casual situations like Tully’s you’ll get a packaged wet wipe rather than a heated washcloth. On the other hand, paper napkins are hard to come by in Japan, and the ones which do exist are of a gossamer thinness - the tissues and toilet paper are similarly thin.

Anyway, from Tully’s it was about a forty minute walk to the starting place of the bike ride. There was a city bus which likely could have gotten me there faster, but based on my own long experience with city buses I wasn’t about to trust one to get me anywhere quickly during morning rush hour. As with the go-karts, the tour was me plus a parent with two teenager/young adult kids - this time a Brazilian family touring Tokyo on their way to go skiing up north. Our tour guide was an affable guy named Gaku. It turned out he was the owner of the tour company: former Japanese employee of Patagonia, about eight years ago he quit corporate life to start a tour company. Early on in his business he ran headlong into the pandemic, but he persevered and the company is doing well now - as evidenced by the fact that he had tours running even in January, a slow time of year for bicycle tourism. Tokyo has milder winters than DC and to my mind it was a perfectly fine day for riding, but not everyone feels that way.

Cycling in Tokyo is a trip. I’ll never complain about DC’s bike infrastructure again (don’t hold me to that)! There’s very little in the way of bike lanes. Gaki explained that there really isn’t a culture of transportation cycling there; mostly people use bikes around the neighborhood, or as “last mile” transportation to ride to the local subway stop, and so the city doesn’t feel any need to put in bike lanes to facilitate longer distance riding. As a result, cycling in Tokyo is a daredevil activity where riders jump back and forth between riding in the streets dodging busy traffic and threading through pedestrians on busy sidewalks. No one wears helmets. No one rings a bell, calls their passes, or issues any other kind of warning while barreling through knots of pedestrians. Successful riding also means jumping lights to get out ahead of the cars before the light turns green. Occasionally on larger streets there’ll be a quasi-bike lane marking, but it doesn’t have any width of its own; it’s just a painted mark along the edge of the curb lane, and cars completely ignore it anyway. I wouldn’t have expected it, but cycling the streets of Tokyo felt much more dangerous than go-karting!

Our ride lasted almost six hours, including stops at both well known and off-the-beaten-path attractions. Our first stop was a neighborhood shrine. Nothing special about it, but it gave us an introduction to the idea that there are some 70,000 shrines and temples scattered around Japan. Most Japanese practice a combination of Shintoism and Buddhism, and in fact most aren’t particularly religious (Gaki said that outside of tours he’ll visit a shrine once or twice a year), yet this multitude of religious sites is maintained. Having had that pointed out to me, I noticed lots of other little shrines/temples tucked here and there as I explored the city.

We also visited Tokyo’s biggest shrine, Meiji-Jingu. Apparently, a couple of days earlier it would have been packed, as New Year’s is a big time to visit a shrine, and the shrine was still decked out in New Year’s banners. The grounds of Japanese shrines and temples are always beautiful, but the buildings themselves are fairly austere. While a European Cathedral might be stuffed with art, Japanese religious sites are clean and simple. So you go, you take in the surroundings, you take a look inside, and that’s your visit.

Our bikes

Gaku tells us about a neighborhood shrine

Meiji-Jingu gate

Meiji-Jingu

Lunch stop

Bike "lane" markings

Metropolitan Government Building observation deck

Bicycle action shots

The signage at Meiji-Jingu talked about the Emperor who had “modernized” Japan by adopting Western customs and culture. Maybe my mindset is too “woke”, but it seems weird to me that in 2026 they’re still referring to abandoning their traditional culture as modernization. I asked Gaku about this, and he seemed confused. I guess taking Japan out of the era of topknots and samurais and into the era of being a super modern, high tech industrial power (you should see the technology of their toilets!) is viewed as a net positive, even if from a woke perspective it smells a little of cultural colonialism.

Where else did we go on the bike tour? We rode through Yoyogi Park, through historic Aoyama cemetery, and past the Imperial Palace. We visited Zozoji temple. We traversed the fancy neighborhood of Roppangi Hills, and took a nice lunch break at a riverfront promenade in Takeshita after stopping to pick up lunch at a nearby convenience store (for me, this included tuna sushi, lotus root salad, a coffee beverage, and something which looked like a dinner roll but which to my surprise turned out to be a dessert - sweet and cream-filled). We also went up to the free observatory at the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Center, which had the only bag check I encountered all week. Also, that’s where I saw the only pickleball court I encountered all week (Gaku said pickleball isn’t big in Japan, to which I added, “yet”. The Government Center observatory has a grand piano sitting in the middle of it, which visitors are welcome to sit and play, however we were fifteen minutes too early - playing time runs 10AM - noon and again 2 - 4 PM, and when we were finishing up our visit it was about 1:45. Gaku apologized, but said we couldn’t wait around until 2 PM. I hadn’t really expected him to as he had a tour schedule to keep, but he offered that sincere Japanese apology for not being able to stay and satisfy my desire to play (but also showed a palpable sense of relief when I didn’t push back).

At then end of the tour I took the bus back to Shibuya, where I spent some time browsing the shops, including Uniqlo. Yes, I can shop Uniqlo in Tysons Corner, but shopping Uniqlo in Japan is cooler, plus the exchange rate combined with after New Years sales meant there were some pretty good deals. Shibuya is a shopper’s paradise - there are a zillion stores, with the preference seeming to be a larger number of more boutique shops over American-style big box stores. Before the trip I had considered shopping for a pair of Onatsuga Tigers, a timeless Japanese sneaker style (check out the yellow pair Uma Thurman sports through the Japan sequence of Kill Bill), but they actually seemed very stiff-soled, and the Shibuya store was always packed - those darn tourists again - so I skipped it. I finished my shopping trip empty-handed, though I did go back and pick up a few things at Uniqlo later on.

After a quick nap, I decided to go out for the evening and catch some jazz. Tokyo has a big jazz music scene well beyond just being background music at Tully’s coffee. I researched a bunch of jazz clubs and discovered that Body & Soul, a classic jazz club with a place on Downbeat Magazine’s list of 100 top world jazz clubs, was literally around the corner from my hotel.

I may not actually be cool, but catching a jazz band in a historic Tokyo jazz club made me feel pretty darn able to pretend I was. The night’s band was the Satoshi Inoue quartet. Inoue is a guitarist in his sixties and was backed up by a really hot trio of young Tokyo jazz cats. The pianist, with a mop of orange-dyed hair which looked like something out of a manga, was stunningly good. The drummer, a guy with a neck beard, round glasses and a beanie, kept the beat with an expressionless “I’m too cool to show emotion” jazz cat mien. The bass player was a big dude, able to work the big instrument with great dexterity. Satoshi himself is a guy who clearly has the chops to play in that million-notes-per-minute jazz guitar style, but chooses not to. A player of great subtlety.

The club itself is intimate, maybe 50 seats, and on a Thursday evening it was only about half full. The menu was, surprisingly, Italian. As is typical with music clubs, the food was subpar. I ordered a pizza (my second pizza in Japan!) and a beer. At least the beer was good. The crowd was a mix of locals and tourists, and an older woman who I took to be the boss made the rounds, here and there sitting for a bit with what I assume were the regular customers. Sitting across the table from me was a young tattooed guy from Milan, who surreptitiously filmed the whole show on a GoPro in violation of the “No photography or recording” signs, and to my left sat a Japanese jazz fan in a turtleneck, who nodded along to the music while chomping throughout the show on mixed nuts from the bar.

I mostly obeyed the "No Photography" signs, but did surreptitiously squeeze off one shot before the show

For the price of admission you get to stay for both sets, which I did, so that was my evening, and at the end of the night it was nice to just pop around the corner and be home.

Music tech geek side note: while as expected the club’s piano was a Yamaha, the PA was EV and JBL (American brands), and the bass player was using an amp from a boutique amp maker based in Brooklyn. U.S.A.!

Fri 1/9 (writing)

Friday’s big event was going to be a food tour starting in the late afternoon, which left me a good part of the day for other sightseeing. I decided I wanted to see Shinjuku, one of the other big tourist areas, and in particular wanted to find the giant Godzilla atop an office building there. But first, along the way I was going to see some nature at Shinjuku Gyoen garden.

I’ve had a soft spot for Japanese gardens since Valerie and I toured the Japanese garden at Golden Gate Park on our very first trip together. And where better to find a Japanese garden than Japan? Even though it was winter, I knew the design of the park would provide scenic beauty, and I read that the garden has a large greenhouse which is beautiful year-round.

Once again, I walked to my destination (this is why I averaged 20,000 steps per day in Japan), which took me through some residential neighborhoods - people walking their dogs, kids going to school, office workers heading for the train. I like that. It’s nice to see another side of a city, not just the tourist sites but also getting a taste of day to day life there.

Japan has ubiquitous digital payment cards known as IC cards. These days you don’t even need a physical card, as you can have a virtual IC card on your phone. Before the trip I had set up a virtual Suica card (one brand of IC card - the most popular card, but also I chose it because they have a cute penguin mascot), which came in handy in many places, including swiping into Shinjuku Garden as easily as getting into the subway. No waiting in line!

The garden itself was, as expected, quite pretty. Parts of it are landscaped Japanese style, while other sections sport a more Western garden style, with big sweeping lawns. It was another sunny, 50-ish degree day, and lots of people were out enjoying the weather and the locale.

I did visit the greenhouse, which seemed very foggy to me, as my glasses fogged up as soon as I walked in from the cold into the warm humidity of the greenhouse. Also, the previous emperor maintained a Western style villa on the grounds of the park as a Tokyo residence. As royal residences go it was fairly modest, but it was the first place in Asia where I was required to take off my shoes before entering. Hint: when visiting Asia, wear slip-on shoes.

I saw almost no American cars in Tokyo - but someone had this beautiful old Buick Roadmaster wagon in their driveway. How do they maintain the thing?

Shinjuku Gyoen garden

Sweet potato sundae!

Greenhouse

Jugatsu zakura - an autumn cherry tree, flowering in January!

After strolling for a Shinjuku Gyoen and passing up the cafe’s temping treats (including sweet potato sundae), I walked up into Shinjuku proper. I was there during the day and I think Shinjuku is another place which really comes alive at night, but I found it ugly - if Shibuya is the modern, Disneyfied Times Square, the Shinjuku is like the midtown Manhattan of old, say Macy’s Herald Square up to Times Square, big, brash, but kind of skeevy. The red light district is there. Lots of tourists traps. I don’t know; it just didn’t grab me. Maybe I missed the good side of Shinjuku, but from what I saw I was glad I wasn’t staying there (it’s a big tourist hotel spot). I did go in and look around in a fancy department store, but everything was very expensive and designerish. Meh. I did find the giant Godzilla, which was fun. Knowing I had the food tour ahead of me I skipped lunch (which turned out to be a good decision, as I had a lot of eating ahead of me!), stopping just for a coffee (my only Starbucks visit of the trip - this location had decaf!) and a snack.

Shinjuku

Godzilla!

Having had my fill of Shinjuku, I took the train over to the Ginza, Tokyo's fanciest neighborhood. I wasn’t there to see the high-end shops; rather I wanted to visit the Yamaha instrument division flagship store, seven floors of instruments plus a cafe and a sheet music store. I got to monkey around with Yamaha’s current line of synthesizers, plus I played the digital piano in the lobby. I went upstairs to the floor with all the Yamaha pianos, but up there you needs to sales staff to assist you before you play, and there was already someone auditioning pianos - a very talented young man playing complex classical piano pieces. He probably started Suzuki method when he was a tot. I wasn’t going to interrupt that just to dork around with some pianos.

Trying out keyboards at the Yamaha showroom

And then, the food tour. Ooh, boy. The tour I had booked was a little more expensive than the competition, but I liked it because they said they could accommodate all kinds of food preferences, including no pork, no seafood. I was hesitant to otherwise book a food tour, for fear that it would be an evening of food I couldn’t eat.

As it happens, management hadn’t passed any of my food restriction information to Ray, our guide, but it didn’t matter - each place we visited had options I could eat, and by happy circumstance we visited all the shops in an order which fit with my dietary law constraints. Ray, interestingly, was not Japanese; rather, he hails from Turkmenistan. He's married to a Japanese woman and has lived in Japan for a long time, and so had the chops to lead a Japanese food tour.

We started with sushi at Sushi Zanmai, a chain owned by sushi big shot and personality Kiyoshi Kimura, who holds the record for buying the most expensive tuna ever sold in Japan, $3.2M for a 535 lb tuna. That’s about $6,000 per pound, considerably more than I pay at the supermarket. Six pieces, including two cuts of tuna, mackerel (mild), sardine (fishy!), flounder (mild), and egg.

Toasting over Okonomayaki

Okonomayaki with bonito flakes

Chicken wings at an izakaya (pub)

Street corner ramen

Red bean cakes for dessert

Sushi: Otoro (tuna), mackeral, tuna, sardine, flounder, egg

From there we moved onto an Osaka specialty, okonomayaki, which is a savory Japanese pancake, made with a batter of flour, eggs, and stock, mixed with shredded cabbage and other fillings like pork, seafood, or vegetables, then grilled and topped with a sweet-savory sauce, Japanese mayonnaise, bonito flakes, and seaweed. They made one for me without the pork. And we had maybe a little too much sake.

Next, we moved on to an izakaya, or Japanese pub, where we tasted Japanese chicken wings and had some sort of alcoholic punch sort of drink. And from there we went to a very casual neighborhood ramen place. Mind you, each one of these stops save for the izakaya could have been a full meal in itself. The tour was eating several dinners in one, and when we made our final stop at a food hall for red bean pastries, I barely had room to take a bite. I waddled home highly sated.

Sat 1/10

After the previous night’s food tour I needed to devote significant energy to digesting, like a snake that’s swallowed a mouse. Plus, my sleep had been fitful, as my body clock was still off. So, I got a slow start to the morning and after talking with Valerie and catching up on emails and such didn’t get out the door until about 9 AM. I hopped the Ginza subway line from Shibuya across the city (about 45 minutes) to visit Tokyo’s oldest and most significant Buddhist temple, Senso-Ji. For the first time on this trip I felt I was at an old-school tourist attraction like the Empire State Building or the Washington Monument. Lots of obvious foreigner tourists speaking all kinds of languages, taking at the sights. Everyone had their phone out taking pictures. That kind of vibe. In a place where everyone seemed to be chasing particular sights and experiences they've learned about on TikTok or Instagram, it was nice to have that more traditional touristy feel.

Nakamise-dori shopping street

At Senso-Ji temple

PAgoda at Senso-Ji

Amida Nyorai Buddha statue

The Kannon Bodhissatva (a.k.a. Avalokitesvara) - Senso-Ji was built on a spot where a statue of Kannon was mysteriously found by fishermen

I know this is an ancient symbol which is found at many Buddhist temples, but that doesn't mean I like it

I like it when they dress Buddhas in outfits

Someone in traditional Japanese dress

At Kaminarimon gate

Crepe stand

Happy to have a nice, warm buttered crepe

Asakusa, where Senso-Ji is located, is very much old Tokyo. I guess it’s kind of like visiting Old Town Alexandria in that it’s got a vibe of the old way a place used to be, but without the modern upscaleness which has crept into a place like Old Town. The area has lots of little shops selling interesting things. I had forgotten my toothbrush, so at a shop selling natural bristle products I bought a horsehair toothbrush. Did it feel any different to brush with it than with a plastic-bristled brush? Neigh.

In Asakusa you also see people here and there dressed in traditional Japanese clothing. Apparently getting dolled up in a kimono and strolling Asakusa is a thing which people do. Some are tourists who have paid for a kimono experience, but it seems like many are locals. A lot of young women, all taking pictures of each other with their cell phones, which looks kind of funny, plus some young couples, and moms and daughters. I didn’t see any unaccompanied guys - maybe it’s not a guy thing beyond doing it to please your girlfriend. Since in Japan it’s not good etiquette to make a spectacle of people by photographing them, I only stole a couple of photos of people from behind (I figured it was fair game if the woman doing a photo shoot in front of one of temple buildings wound up in my photos).

You approach Senso-Ji temple via Nakamise-dori shopping street, a street of little stall-like shops. The shops are targeted to the tourist trade, but unlike the upscale shopping of Shibuya or the sleazy excesses of Shinjuku, this is the place to get Japanese fans, chopsticks, those little waving cats, snacks, and such. It’s very nice and very quaint. At the top of Nakamise-dori you get to Kaminarimon, the Thunder Gate. Gaku, my bike tour guide, had explained that a temple’s gate separates the everyday from the holy, and this particular giant gate with its signature red lantern is also is one of Japan’s top photo spots (what we used to call Kodak Moments). Once through the gate you pass through a courtyard with an incense cauldron (believed to bring good health and healing), and then the shrine itself. Senso-ji has been a shrine since the 7th Century, though the current main hall is from the 1950s, built after the previous temple burned when Allies fire-bombed Tokyo in 1945. It’s big. Really big.

There was a ceremony going on at the temple, which was interesting to see. While one monk chanted and played a drum (amplified so it could be heard throughout the area), another did various gestures and such with various objects. I’m afraid I don’t know anything about Buddhist rituals; nonetheless, this was interesting to watch.

The temple complex also includes a number of other buildings, and a giant pagoda. I spent a little time exploring the buildings, gardens, and statues. There's a moving memorial to the civilians who died when on March 9, 1945 in the Great Tokyo Air Raids, when the Allies firebombed Tokyo and burned Asakusa to the ground. Not to get off-topic, but I want to say that civilian casualties in war are tragic - but do not necessarily constitute genocide - not even when the numbers are large, such as the 10,000 who died in a single day in the Great Tokyo Air Raid, or the 200,000 who died in the U.S. atomic bombings of Japan. But I digress.

I had been too full to eat more than a slice of bread for breakfast, and so at about 11 I had a snack of a buttered crepe from a stall on Nakamise-dori Street, then did a little souvenir shopping there. Oh, another thing about Japan. People don't walk down the street eating or drinking. So when you buy your crepe, you hang out and eat it around the stall, which also affords you a place to through out the wrapper when you're done by returning it to the vendor (remember, no public trash cans).

It was sunny and warm (mid-50’s), perfect for the 20 minute walk from Senso-Ji to Ueno Park, which in addition to being a nice park is also Tokyo’s museum district. Along the way I grabbed a can of coffee from one of Tokyo’s ubiquitous drink vending machines, and was surprised to discover that it was hot! I’m used to cold drinks from vending machines, but in the States I’ve never come across a machine which serves both cold sodas and hot coffee. Since drinking while walking down the street would have been a faux pas, I hung out by the vending machine while I drank my coffee, then packed the empty can away in my backpack and continued on to the museum.

Vending machine with hot coffee

The Tokyo Museum is something of a snapshot of Japanese history through various artistic, archaeological, and cultural artifacts. The pottery and stuff was fine, but I was there mainly to see the Samurai armor and swords, which were way cool. By the end of my museum visit I was finally starting to feel hungry, but the museum cafeteria was closed. I think there’s another cafeteria in another building, but I didn’t feel like searching it out, so instead I got a small salad with noodles and chicken and a fruit drink at the 7-11 across from Ueno Station. Yes, I ate it while standing outside the door of the 7-11 so as not to walk and eat, which felt pretty foolish. Then I hopped the subway over to the Asakushabashi neighborhood in search of beads as a gift for Valerie. She’s really into beads from a Japanese company called Miyuki. Unfortunately, the Miyuki Factory store is closed on weekends, but Asakushabashi is billed as a “bead district” so I figured I’d poke around some other shops. I never found the exact beads Valerie was looking for, but I bought a little something from each of the three shops I visited, including Miyuki beads, beads from their competitor Toho, and a couple of fun little things which would make cute novelty earrings - hopefully a nice souvenir.

Tokyo Museum Main Building

Doppelganger

Giant temple guardian statue

Samurai armor

Japan's oldest torah .. just kidding!

These vases were actually made for export to the West

By the time I finished bead shopping it was getting dark and I was running out of steam a bit, so I hopped the subway back to Shibuya. It was rush hour and the subway was crowded, but not as bad as I feared rush hour in Tokyo would be like. There wasn’t anyone pushing people onto the trains.

Bead store

Having eaten very little all day, I was ready for a meal. Nothing nearby on the Happy Cow app (vegetarian food finder) piqued my interest, but I spotted a listing up the street from my hotel for Falafel Bros. Vegan falafel. Well. Valerie and I used to go out for Chinese food in every city we visited (mostly so we could sneer about how inferior it was to New York Chinese food - an opinion we'd probably hold even if we were in China), but last year in Paris we were intrigued by and wound up eating at a famous falafel joint. And now Tokyo. So maybe falafel is the new Chinese food. The restaurant turned out to be little more than a food court joint in a busy shopping mall - it took seven escalators through a busy mall to find the place, but the menu looked good. I spotted that they had “Israeli beer” listed among the beverages. Hmmm. A quick search revealed that the restaurant (currently a chain of four locations) was indeed started by an Israeli entrepreneur, a guy who had previously, in typical Israeli fashion, blustered his way into starting Japan’s first bagel and pita bakery (he didn’t reveal to his initial investors that he didn’t have any idea how to bake bagels), a successful business which he has since sold. Now he’s on to a new venture, introducing Japan to falafel. At Falafel Bros. you can get your falafel topped “Middle Eastern style” (hummus and spices), “Asian style” (lotus root, eggplant, and garlic)”, “American style” (lettuce, corn and I forget what else), or “Mexican style” (vegetarian chile). I went for Asian style, which was quite good, and it paired quite well with Israeli beer. I would have gone back for a dish of their vegan ice cream, but restrained myself because I was leery of once again having that overstuffed feeling. Well fed on what I can confidently say was Japan’s best vegan falafel, I waddled across the street to my hotel, where I somehow got the energy to do laundry, then pack my bags - the next day, after one more early morning tour, I would be leaving Tokyo, bound for Kyoto.