2025 November Japan Trip - Week 1 Part 2
Continuing on from part one, this is more of taking my grandma through a few touristy areas in Tokyo, more shopping and sightseeing, and plenty of nice views.
Sumida Aquarium
On Thursday, I planned for my grandma and I to go through Tokyo Skytree. It’s a giant building - the first 4 floors are a shopping center, the basement levels contain a train station (or two, was hard to tell), and the 4th and 5th floors contained entrance to an aquarium and the super tall tower: Skytree.
Our first stop was the aquarium within the Skytree building - Sumida Aquarium.
Now, I’ve grown up in Australia - very specifically on the Sunshine Coast, where we have large animal places like Australia Zoo and even Underwater World. Sumida Aquarium is like Underwater World, almost - it’s not grand or open like a typical Australian animal place. It’s not as open as Sea World or Taronga Zoo. It’s a few enclosures across 2 floors of a chunk of the Skytree building.
I think it’s a nice place. Not awesome, not abysmal. Just nice. The fish tanks and jellyfish tanks and koi tanks are cool to see.
The penguin enclosure is cool - though I would feel better about it if there was some sunlight involved. The penguin enclosure is the most-open part of the aquarium, physically, and still… it’s indoors. Entirely indoors.
The seal enclosure is… not for me. I have to duck to enter the tunnel to view it and remain ducked the whole time, though there are still some parts where you can see the seal enclosure from above the enclosure as well, thankfully. I would not recommend coming to this place for tall or average-height people if you just want to see seals!
The cafe in the aquarium was great - very fun themed items there. Got an iced chocolate with a marshmallow seal sitting on an iceberg of whipped cream:
Overall, I don’t know that I would visit this aquarium again. It’s good for what it is - an indoors aquarium in a bustling part of Tokyo - but I would rather go and find some larger, less-metro animal place next time.
Tokyo Skytree
After finishing up at the aquarium, grandma and I went up to the Tokyo Skytree. On my last trip, I was booked into the first session of the day - and the queue took a solid 30 minutes to get through. I was worried that we’d have a queue again, so I got us to the booking early - and there was no queue! And we had booked the sunset session!
Several elevators later, we were up to the top deck of the tower - 450m above the ground.
Then we found the crowd.
Skytree’s 450m deck is a big circular walkway that rises and descends at various points. Big ol’ glass tube, basically. The crowd was crammed into one part of the tube so they could see the sunset over Mt. Fuji. I mean - it’s what we showed up to see, I get it. But…
As great as the view is, we can’t really see much of the mountain range - let alone Mt. Fuji itself. Still, I think seeing that much city stretching into the distance like that is awesome - and the sunset painting rays across that big expanse is really pretty, to me.
But anyway, instead of standing in the crowd, grandma wanted to find somewhere to sit. So, we went back down to the 350m deck - there was a cafe there!
We had a dinner booked but it was still a couple of hours away - and grandma wanted a snack! We got a lil plate of chocolate brownies and mini cupcakes with frozen fruit and cream-jam sauce, featuring the tower mascot.
A snack with a view. Real nice stuff.
I’m still slowly hacking away at this dumb lil Astro blog but until I get a magnifier implemented, feel free to right-click (or long-press on mobile) and download the full-size images. Really great views out here!
And again - so much city!
Pokemon Center Skytree Town
On the way out, we had a brief bit of time to spare - so I visited another Pokemon Center!
I’m a firm believer in the idea that each of these centers has something different about it, and find it real fun to figure out what that is in each center. At a glance, with a basic mindset, much of the Pokemon Centers are the same - but each store does typically focus more on one type of product than others, and most have store mascots, statues, and exclusive merch!
The Skytree store does a different birthday thing for visitors - in the Tokyo DX store, I got lil paper vouchers of some Pokemon codes to redeem in games later. In Skytree, I got to redeem another set of those Pokemon directly into my Pokemon Home mobile app.
And as seen in the photo above - the Skytree store gave me a birthday basket! Every staff member who saw me while I was shopping came up to me and wished me a happy birthday, it was really kind of them.
After that, grandma and I split off to our hotels to dump our shopping, and regrouped at the Pokemon Cafe an hour later!
Pokemon Cafe Tokyo
The Pokemon Cafe was great, as always. Loved it in my previous trip, loved it in this trip. Great food and drinks (although pricey), fun atmosphere, cool merch, and just a real nice place to be overall.
There was even a lil show from the baker-costumed Pikachu, too!
I got a newer menu item for my meal: an augmented-reality Mega Charizard curry! It’s my first exposure to “tomato rice” and it’s got me hooked, too. And I got a DIY shaker chocolate milk, with themed “Moo-moo Milk” from the Johto-region Pokemon games.
Grandma got a Pikachu-shaped curry, and a Sinistea-themed apple tea. The tea had something real smart to it - it provides concentrated syrup in a separate cup, so you can control how flavoursome and thick the tea becomes yourself. Real clever!
It was really fun, and there’s new dishes to try every time I’ve visited the Pokemon Cafe - so I have to keep on going back, trying all the cool new things! So good!
That was a big Thursday out, and that’s all done.
Asakusa and Sensō-ji
For the Friday, grandma wanted to see a samurai museum. Her hotel is right near one, and also right near a major temple site: Sensō-ji!
We had a quick visit to Sensō-ji before sunset, as the goshuin office was shutting for the day. I got another goshuin for my goshuin-cho - a nice standard black-and-red calligraphy goshuin!
Then, we made for the Samurai Ninja Museum in Asakusa - a quaint little museum tucked away within a building, you wouldn’t assume that there’s 3 floors of stuff to see from the outside. It’s a fun little place - larger than you’d expect, but still little. The museum tour guide and all other staff we encountered spoke English, so it’s an easy tourist destination for anyone passing through Tokyo.
There was a floor on weaponry and armour, a floor on a shuriken (throwing stars) activity, and a floor for a samurai sword demonstration. The gift shop was quaint but nothing we wanted to purchase seemed like a thing that we could feasibly fly home with… they had some very cool swords!
While not for sale at the museum, I especially like these types of banners or tapestries - this one depicts the royal imperial family line and its lineage all the way back to the deity, Amaterasu.
A big long unbroken lineage through history!
After that, grandma and I split for dinner - and I wanted to go back to Sensō-ji and shop at the market stalls before they all disappeared for the night. The Nakamise Shopping Street on Sensō-ji Temple grounds, online, says they shut at 8pm - but when I got there at 7pm, only a handful of stalls were still open. Luckily, one was exactly what I was hoping to see: a hand-made, hand-dyed fabric/banner/tapestry store.
And it was really nice to be able to get some photos of the temple grounds at night, too - not all temples light up at night, but Sensō-ji does!
When I got to Sensō-ji Temple for that night shopping, I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to get or expected to find. But, I managed to get some fun and cool dyed fabrics and even a long banner from the shopping street at Sensō-ji, I’m really happy with that!
Ikebukuro
For the Saturday, it was a nice break of a day. Grandma went to Ueno Park, close to her hotel - and I went off to Ikebukuro, another “city” within Tokyo.
Ikebukuro is like the new Akihabara - it’s a mecca for pop-culture, tech, gaming, anime, etc etc. While some local friends tell me that Akihabara’s golden age has gone, they’re beaming about Ikebukuro - and I agree with them. I went to Ikebukuro on my last trip, loved it, but was so tired that I barely had time to explore it.
Today was a chance for me to explore way more of this city!
Me being me, last time I visited Ikebukuro I only had time & energy to visit a Pokemon Center and One Piece Mugiwara Store before needing to run off to meet a friend. This time, I had time to explore the other nerd stores nearby. I started off with K-BOOKS. They had a whole heap of stores all in one area, and all had queues of people lining up to collect the latest manga, doujin, or whatever else they were lining up for. I didn’t look too closely - sometimes people go to those stores for NSFW things. I just wanted Pokemon!
In one K-BOOKS store, I met this Canadian guy that had been living in Japan for a few months - he’s currently teaching English, and had been visiting Japan annually for 20 years. We both laughed - teachers gravitating towards teachers, nerds gravitating towards nerds. He reached out to me while in a K-BOOKS store because I was wearing a Critical Role t-shirt, and he was amazed to find another fan in the wild. After a brief chat, we went our separate ways.
Then, I went into a nearby Mandarake shope - a second-hand store focusing on pop culture, nerd stuff, gaming, anime, etc etc. And I met the Canadian English teacher again! We both had no luck finding things of interest in K-BOOKS or Mandarake, so we headed to the Pokemon Center together.
Pokemon Center Mega Tokyo. It has a nearby “Pokemon Sweets Store” as well, but I’m yet to stop and visit that store. But the “Mega Tokyo” store - it’s a big one, and it had a queue to get into it. Worth it though.
My Canadian buddy mentioned that his favourite Pokemon is Sylveon, and we found some blind figure boxes that had a chance of containing a Sylveon. Apparently English teachers in Japan make something like $11-12 an hour, it would be real tough to be a merch-hungry Pokemon fan on that salary. So, I bought him one of the blind figure boxes.
And as if it was meant to be: the box he got contained a Sylveon figurine! So good!
And! And and and! I’m really happy to have found this book in the Pokemon Center: an ecology book about Pokemon!
I know it’s a childish thing, but I really enjoy the Pokemon world as a world - not just some monster battling game. A book like this is awesome, to me:
After the Pokemon Center, the Canadian buddy and I had a brief look at a nearby One Piece Mugiwara Store but it had nothing that really grabbed us. He had to leave for a lunch with someone else, and I kept on exploring - I wanted to find the big “animate” store that was nearby!
…so, it turns out that there’s some festival on, facilitated by the “animate” store, and I had run out of energy to tolerate the crowds by this point. I left! Got some food, went back to the hotel, and enjoyed some lazy time to myself - organising all the Pokemon merch I had gotten, playing some Pokemon Go, catching up on things online, etc etc.
Real nice day overall there!
Asakusa One More Time
Grandma and I caught up on Sunday to hang out before her flight back to Queensland. It was really nice and simple - I took her to Don Quijote, a department store that has basically everything across 4 floors near her hotel. She got some Japanese snacks for her flight back, I got some more Pokemon merch (because Donki holds on to whatever the Pokemon Centers have already stopped selling), and we kept on walking around Asakusa for a bit. Eventually, we went and found a Denny’s restaurant for lunch.
…Apparently, Denny’s in Japan is not quite what people think of when they think of the more-famous, more-American Denny’s. It was still really great - really tasty and filling food - but it was not some American breakfast diner!
That meal was an omelette with rice. A cheesy omelette, tomato rice, beefy gravy, and an extra side of fried chicken as well. Oh, and the drinks at Denny’s - lemon Coca Cola on tap! Brilliant!
The Next Part
On Monday, I said that this part 2 would come real quick - and it didn’t. Because a dental emergency wrecked things!
With grandma back in Queensland, week 2 was meant to be a quieter week anyway… still, some cool shopping to talk about and some insight into treating a dental emergency in a country where your language is not the main language will come in the next part! Soon!
