Continuing on from week one part two, this is more of a relaxed week - exploring more areas of the greater Tokyo area, lots of shopping and resting, and handling a dental emergency!

Dental Emergency Part 1

At some point during the last week - I think during the Pokemon Cafe visit? - one of my teeth started to hurt.

Now, I had 6 fillings done in September, 4 of them were right on the nerve of a tooth. The dentist did want to do root canals, but I have an aversion to dentistry due to some bad childhood experiences and just got fillings in September to try to get things fixed as simply and quickly as possible.

During those 6 fillings, the dentist told me that I have extra-large gaps between my teeth, and that food will get stuck in them very easily. I figured: okay, I will brush and water-pick and all that jazz, since my first dental clean in like 20 years has left everything exposed. In the two months between those fillings and this holiday, I’ve been on top of that pretty well. Extremely well compared to the past 20 years, at least.

But now - one tooth started to hurt. And in the last 4 or 5 days of hanging out with grandma in Tokyo, it was just getting worse and worse.

I used a hotel-provided toothbrush, a cheap shoddy thing, and brushed my gums real hard at one point - did I stab or slash something? Then I remembered that I did actually pack my electric toothbrush, and threw out the hotel-provided manual brushes. The electric toothbrushes with the pressure sensors and timers per mouth section are incredible, they make it so much easier and nicer to take care of myself.

So… hopefully not a brushing problem. But then what? Did some food from a Pokemon Cafe menu item get stuck? The granola layer in the big layered dessert I got felt like a problem when eating it, maybe I chipped something when eating again…

Feeling my teeth - ouch, the whole tooth hurts to touch - but all of my teeth are still intact and whole.

…The whole tooth hurts to touch? Oh.

I realised what that meant on a Saturday night. I was half-hoping that it was a gum disease problem, so I went to a nearby 24-hour pharmacy (hell yeah, 24-hour shops!) at 1am because I couldn’t sleep - the pain was that intense and ever-present - and got some gum cream and actual dental care toothpaste. Maybe a couple of days of sensitive care would help? God, I hoped that was going to fix it.

But it didn’t.

I kept it together for the Sunday - the last day of hanging out with grandma in Tokyo before she went home. We had good food together, but hot food and cold drinks were causing more and more pain as the day went on. Grandma went home, and I rushed back to my hotel to try to brush out any stuck food and try to sleep through the crap.

Like, sleeping is just fast-forwarding when it comes to the body trying to heal itself, right? If I just skipped ahead a few hours to see if my gums were any better, then maybe I could be on top of things. But the whole tooth was hurting. Not the gums, not a chip in any tooth - the whole tooth was hurting.

Monday came and went. Pain still present. I booked into a nearby English-speaking dentist - Rodin Dental - for their soonest-available session on the Tuesday.

I rock up, greet their staff, get x-rayed, and then get told: you need a root canal.

Days ago, when I realised that touching the tooth caused the whole tooth to hurt, this is what I was afraid of. The nerve is inflamed, the filling is too close to the nerve, it has to go.

I asked if just removing the tooth would fix things - it would, they said, but then I’d realistically need more work for fake teeth or teeth alignments or whatever else. So now, months after avoiding root canals in favour of simple fillings, the root canal has become the simple option.

And as a funny-different note: Japan. Asian countries. I’m a big Western guy - the x-ray machine was hitting my shoulders as it spun around me, and I was barely able to find a comfy way to lay down on the dental chair. Things are just too small here, by default. Not impossible, but just uncomfortable.

So, for this appointment, I ended up opting for the root canal. The original filling was removed - and god, it was scary when a chunk of it was removed with a loud crack. I thought something in my jaw had snapped. The filling removed, the nerve scooped out, a temporary medication-filling was put into place, and I had to wait a few days before the dentist could put in a permanent filling.

However, my root canal is a bit different to the typical one because so much of the tooth is still intact. So instead of capping things off with a fake tooth or crown, the goal was to just remove the nerve and put a filling in place. This meant that the procedure performed in this appointment made a giant empty column through the tooth - a nice clean column, with plenty of tooth surrounding it… if anyone wants the photo that the dentist took of this, please reach out to me. It’s kinda wild. Definitely uncomfortable to look at, so I won’t include it in this blog here - but it’s crazy.

The way root canals work - it’s all about the nerve. That’s the problem they’re solving. The nerve is removed, but that’s a very sensitive section of your jaw now, so medication is put into place to prevent infections or kill any existing infections. That anti-infection step takes time.

So things aren’t done, but $1400AUD later, at least the terrible pain is gone.

I just had to carry on with the holiday while I wait for the next appointment - waiting from Tuesday to Friday.

I’ll be frank: this sucked. It put a huge dampener on the week, made me scared to eat or drink (because the other 3 nerve-neighbouring fillings were on the other side of my mouth, and if I used that side too much, would I suddenly need more root canals?!), and scared to venture too far away from the hotel or have full days out in case something did go wrong. So, the rest of this week was a heap of “I’ll go out for 2-3 hours and then rush back to the hotel”.

A day trip to Enoshima Island via Kamakura’s beach-bordering train was cancelled (thankfully, nothing was paid or booked in advance for that), but at least I had put plenty of space into my itinerary for rest days anyway. I just had to shuffle things around, refocus on what I really wanted to visit or see, and pace myself over the coming week. Week 2 was never going to be as busy as Week 1 in my holiday’s plan, but now it was really important in my mind that I didn’t do too much in Week 2 at all.

Tokyo Bay Shopping

On my 2024 Japan trip, I wanted to visit the Tokyo Bay Pokemon Center store - but it closed for rennovations after I had booked my flights! At the time, it was the only thing really grabbing my interest of the area - so I skipped it. This time, however, I wanted to make sure that I visited this area. Not just for the newly-rennovated Pokemon Center, but for a couple of other nerd merch stores like BOOKOFF and whatever else I could find in LaLaPort Tokyo Bay!

As part of the lingering anxiety from the dental emergency, I didn’t wanna faff around with long walks through the public transport system and wait on the train to then do more long walks to get to the destination. So, I took taxis to and from this shopping center. $130AUD each way. Oof.

But it was worth it - LaLaPort Tokyo Bay is fantastic. It’s huge!

Plenty of shops, plenty of food, plenty of things to explore and see. The Pokemon Center even has a big statue in the courtyard of the shopping center - the only other place I’ve seen with that was Ikebukuro, with the “Pokemon Center Mega Tokyo DX” store having statues spread across the floor space in front of the shop. So the shop’s clearly important to the shopping center overall!

I bought a heap of things from this Pokemon Center - they had some homewares that the other stores didn’t have, as well as more store-specific mascot merch. Plenty of awesome things to find in this Pokemon Center!

…I’ll have to do a Pokemon merch tour or something like that when I get home. Photos of the merch in their packaging or tax-free bags or with the backdrop of the hotel room aren’t as cool, to me.

And man, it’s so nice visiting these places. Pokemon hotspots in the real world are epic hotspots in Pokemon Go!

It was honestly hard to get my game to zoom out from its default view when starting up the games - there’s so much stuff in the game at LaLaPort Tokyo Bay!

Outside of the Pokemon Center - and almost directly across from it, is a Disney Store! There was one of these in Shibuya and Skytree Town as well, but I skipped those on this trip. Still, I had to visit a Disney Store eventually - Christmas is coming, and I know my mum would love some cute Christmas-themed Disney stuff. She might read this, so I’ll leave the details out for now - but the Disney Stores are very much worth a visit!

After my shopping, I found a nice restaurant called “Eggs n Things”. They’re a chain restaurant - one that I was hoping to visit down at Enoshima Island, cancelled as mentioned earlier in this post - and focus on Hawaiian food!

Now, those who really know me know this already: I’m allergic to pineapple. Like, “one pina colada is half an hour of struggled breathing”-level allergic.

Hawaiian food - pineapples are in many of the menu items. My choices were limited at Eggs n Things, but it was still a great restaurant to visit with a nice quiet vibe after the hustle and bustle of the shopping center’s inner areas. I say inner areas, beacuse Eggs n Things was on the ground floor bordering on the shopping center’s courtyard - somehow, nobody was down there. Maybe because it was like, 10’C outside? Either way, great stuff.

Eggs with dinner still seems like such a novelty. Sweet teriyaki chicken with wedges and eggs - very nice dinner. Almost as pricey as the Pokemon Cafe though - expensive!

With shopping from the Pokemon Center and Disney Store done, and a nice dinner done - there was one place left that I wanted to see in Tokyo Bay.

Bookoff Super Bazaar.

A gigantic secondhand store.

This is technically not part of the LaLaPort Tokyo Bay shopping center - it’s in a separate building, separate opening hours, separate parking, etc etc. There was even a cheap Burger King in the food court here - I was kicking myself after spotting that, suddenly craving a burger after a week of rice every day. But still, I went up to the floor that had Bookoff. Literally: the floor had Bookoff on one half of it, and the other half had a handful of other stores. It’s huge.

For the folks back in Australia: imagine a Cash Converters the size of a decent Coles or Woolworths supermarket store. Insanely huge, much bigger than any Cash Converters or other secondhand store that I can think of.

Now, I rocked up at 7pm and the store shuts at 8pm. I was able to explore just half the store before it closed. There was a whole other half of the store dedicated to furniture, higher-value clothing, jewellery, and other larger or more-expensive things. I focused on the nerd stuff!

Bookoff is awesome. I’m hooked. I’m going to visit them whenever I can, now.

I think I spent a total of 3 or 4 hours at Tokyo Bay, and only explored 3 shops plus dined at one restaurant. This shopping center could easily be a day out on its own, if you wanted to explore the full center. And it’s closer to Disneyland and Disneysea for those who might visit Tokyo just for Disney things! Very nice spot for tourists and shopping.

The taxi ride back to Minato City was nice and smooth, and had good views: I knew I was heading to Odaiba soon enough, and got a pretty view of its nightlife from the Tokyo Rainbow Bridge:

Harajuku Shopping and Shrines

The day after my evening at Tokyo Bay, I went to Harajuku - there were a couple of destinations to visit across this suburb.

First, was a Japanese fabric store. This was meant to be a double-whammy of a location: there’s an art museum in the same building as this fabric shop, the “Ōta Memorial Museum of Art”, but I mixed up my days due to the shuffling-around of things after the dental emergency and the museum was closed. But the fabric store was still open!

So I went to “Kamawanu Harajuku”, found some nice prints and fabrics (“tenugui”, their specialised version of screenprinting on these super-thing fabrics), got some stuff for mum to work with (she loves her screenprinting) and stuff for me to display. Nice little shop with great items.

After the fabric shop, I started on the walk for some more temples! I wanted to fill out more pages of my goshuin-cho! The nearest temple or shrine to me after the fabric shop was Suiko Shrine or “Kamiike”, a lovely little pond with walkways that backed on to a hotel. They had no goshuin here, but it was a nice nook of nature buried amongst this densely-metro area of Tokyo:

A waterfall, a pond, a heap of koi - just not what you’d expect to find in the area. The story of this shrine though: it was auxillary land for a larger nearby temple, Togo Temple, and was donated by a lord to that temple. The lord who donated it liked duck hunting, and used the land for hunting ducks - it was a very lush pond, essentially. During the air raids in World War 2, people would dive into the pond to escape danger. In the 1980s, the pond was rennovated to add the waterfall to it as well as some water purification systems - making it nicer and cleaner again after the damage from the war.

The waterfall is small, and is on the edge of the road between Kamiike and Togo Temple, but really announces the start of the natural area. It’s really nice.

Hard to imagine that the metro-iest metro areas of Tokyo are just around the corner, right?

After Kamiike, I headed up to Togo Temple. I went in a side entrance, apparently, because Kamiike really was meant to be some add-on part of the larger Togo Temple, but the main entrance looks like this (and was my exit, whoops):

I got my goshuin from Togo Temple staff, and then started really paying attention to the temple itself.

Togo Temple was really interesting to me - a lot of Shinto is about interactions with and respecting nature and the kami, these deity-like beings. But sometimes in Shinto, a person achieves so much in life that they become revered enough to deserve a temple of their own as well. These types of temples are interesting slices of history - and Togo Temple was all for a Japanese admiral born in the late 1800s, a war hero named “Heihachiro Togo”.

This temple was essentially a large ring with several structures dotted throughout it. Along the ring wall of the temple, various bits of the admiral’s life, insights, lessons, and ideals were on display. Lots of imagery as well - it was cool to see the evolution of artwork into early-era photography also to depict the admiral as well.

The admiral was trained in England, and was a hero for his feats against the Russians in the Russo-Japanese war, in particular the Battle of Tsushima. This was a huge thing not just for Japan, but also globally: Russia is considered a “Western” country, and this war was the first time that a Western country was defeated by an Eastern country in modern history.

From this temple, it was a nice walk through Harajuku streets to reach the big one, the largest temple grounds in Tokyo: Meiji Jingu.

Meiji Jingu

70 hectares of green space, right in the heart of Tokyo.

This place is awesome. The contrast of nature and city, the history ingrained into the space, the care and culture found here - it’s so nice.

Since I had already done a bit of walking around on this day, going through Harajuku, I stopped at the cafe at the entrance to the temple grounds. Fantastic space to just sit and relax, and people-watch as the crowds roll through the entrance to the grounds.

Before getting into the grounds, it’s really important to understand: the space is huge. The map on the entrance information board might help convey the scale here:

See that lump in the bottom-right of the map? Light-brown with a red box near it? That’s the entrance. The entrance with the giant torii gate. That area. It’s tiny. The temple grounds are huge!

To make any headway into the grounds, you have to walk a long road and cross at least one bridge. It’s real nice, especially as a change from walking in city streets.

On my way to the main hall of the temple, I went past a few interesting things:

Sacred sake and wine barrels, offered up to the beings enshrined in the temple.

Typically, the offerings would be to the enshrined kami - and I think technically it still is? Togo Temple is all about the Meiji Emperor and his wife - people, that have become enshrined in a temple, just like the heroic admiral from Kamiike. Unlike the admiral, the imperial bloodline is said to be of kami blood already - so when the ruling imperials die, they are leaving their mortal lives behind and joining their deeper family tree as spirits.

A while beyond the barrels, a long chunk of road has marquees set up along it - flower displays to commemorate the imperial and noble families of Japan. This… there was so much detail in this. Different types of displays, different plants, different dioramas, different bonsais, different stuff all along the road. I think I took like 30 minutes just on this chunk of the temple, just taking photos of every bit that looked interesting. I won’t put all of those photos here for the sake of not making you scroll forever on the page, but some highlights:

Each display had a tag on it, indicating what family it was representing or honouring. Really cool way to see the vastness of nobility across Japan - sculpted, cultivated, designed, and carefully-maintained displays. I’m a big fan of the dioramas - especially the One Piece display:

At the end of that street, we’re to turn a right corner and then see the main temple hall - or, the outer walls of the precinct surrounding the main temple hall, at least. Kinda cool spot though, on that corner: you look in either direction and just see more forest stretching across the road. Again, this is deep in the metro heart of Tokyo - and it’s forest. Big, evergreen forest.

So, continuing down the road…

…and through the outer wall and its gate…

…we finally reach the main temple of Meiji Jingu.

Now, we can go up to the main temple and make an offering of a coin, watch a ceremony or ritual be carried out (there were drums and chanting!)…

…and then go and find the merchandise office, and wonder where the goshuins are given…

…and find it tucked away in a corner of these grand grounds.

When you look back on the ground covered, this place could easily have been its own little town. These temple grounds are, again, huge!

This is why some places are called a ‘complex’, surely. Lots of layers to the crowd-building-forest mix here.

It was a long walk back out of the grounds, but it was nice - again just keeping in mind how much of an atmospheric break this is compared to the rest of the metro area that is Tokyo.

And that was all in a day! Buying fabrics, learning about the heroic admiral, walking through a huge chunk of a 70-hectare property - a big day!

Dental Emergency Part 2

Friday rolls around - this was the last appointment to literally cap off the dental emergency and finish up the root canal. This wasn’t too eventful - started to panic for no reason at all when they were injecting the anesthetic, but otherwise all was fine.

I’m real dang grateful that they were kind and patient and clear with me on everything that they wanted to do to fix my problem - though it’s made me realise that I’ve probably got 1-3 more root canals in my future, since I had 4 similarly-deep fillings done in September and this emergency spawned in one of those deep fillings…

To handle a root canal at this dentist, the grand total across the two appointments came to roughly $1900AUD. At the time of writing (23rd November 2025), I’m still waiting on Australia Post’s insurance team to process my claim. 10 business days of their supposed turnaround time have come and gone - so I’ll have to chase them up more-persistently soon… but at least my dental emergency is handled!

And while I felt scared and anxious through the whole dental situation - if anyone else has a dental emergency in Tokyo, I fully recommend Rodin Dental. Fantastic clinic, fantastic staff, very clear services and prices and so on. Got a full report for insurance without asking, super simple and hassle-free service there.

Odaiba Shopping

Another memory of my 2024 Japan trip - the Gundam Factory in Yokohama was a real nice touristy spot. Dad’s suggestion - big ol’ Gundam fan there - and it was a great suggestion. So when he finds that a new Gundam store has popped up, that’s a great tourist outing to me!

There’s a new “Gundam Base” in Odaiba, a coastal suburb of Tokyo on the eastern side of the Rainbow Bridge. That suburb is very much a tourist hotspot - lots of shopping complexes, all called things like “Diver City” and “Aqua City”, as well as nice restaurants along the water, points of interest like a miniature Statue of Liberty, and various events (though I didn’t know it until I got there) like a Tokyo Drift competition.

So, I set off to Odaiba. Started off in one corner, figuring that a busy tourist area like this would have plenty of Pokemon Go things to play through - and I was right. I’m rarely in a beach biome in Pokemon Go, so it was a good chance to play some videogames at the beach!

I ducked into a nearby shopping complex/building/block, started exploring for food. Found a Toys R Us with a Shin-Godzilla set up as a Christmas display - had to laugh at that. One of the most-horrific versions of Godzilla used to celebrate Christmas?!

Got some Wendy’s, because burgers are always good (and I’m still a bit over rice at this point in the trip), found a nice rock to sit on, and had lunch with a view. Found the mini Statue of Liberty on the way to my lunch spot, too!

After that, it was time for a big trek across the suburb. I say “suburb” - this place was expansive and felt huge, the walk felt long, and the distance between points of interest made things seem a bit drawn out. Cool, but compared to the rest of Tokyo, this place is very spread-apart.

The “Flame of Liberty” was cool to see, overlooking… a busy carpark? That can’t be right, but at the time I was focused on reaching the Gundam Base before I explored anything else nearby.

The “Unicorn Gundam” statue was huge! Not quite as big as the Gundam Factory’s robot, I think, but still very impressive to see - especially up-close.

And as a fun change of pace compared to other previous touristy spots that I’ve seen, there was an actual event on! A quaint little “Gundam Festival”, featuring local high school groups. One of the groups was all about growing their English language skills, and doing that by offering conversations and being guides to tourists like me. One guide came up to me and started asking me about my time in Japan, was nice to chat about that for a bit.

Was funny though - she asked where I was from, I said Australia, she went “oh with all of the cute animals!” - I didn’t have the heart to go on about Australia’s dangerous wildlife to her. Things should stay nice and idealistic sometimes.

The Gundam Base shop itself was very small - like a third of the size of the old Yokohama Gundam Factory shop. It was still packed full of goodies though - I got more location-specific shirts, birthday-specific keyrings, some small Gundam model kits, and some nifty shield-shaped umbrellas. Very worthwhile shopping there. Also got a drink from a Gundam-themed coffee-van - just sugar syrup with grapefruit juice in a nice glass Gundam bottle.

I had to step into the nearby shopping center building to get cash out for the coffee van, but boy oh boy - that place is massive. You really, truly, could spend a day just in one of those buildings doing nothing but shopping. I couldn’t do that, not with a phone low on battery from a morning of Pokemon Go and a backpack full of Gundam merch. I had to keep on going.

But this was a good chance for me now - I just wanted to walk to someplace quiet and simple for a taxi pickup. But I could hear these crazy cars driving around again and again, all day long - this was a good chance to walk around and find out where that noise was coming from.

As it turns out, a Tokyo Drift compeition was being held during the whole weekend. I was in Odaiba coincidentally during round 9 out of 10 of the competition. The big carpark under the Flame of Liberty was a free car expo area - I had no idea until I got back to the hotel and googled about the Tokyo Drift event!

And I could see a crowd along the fence lining the drifting area. I joined that crowd. I saw a crowd in the bleachers, too, and was tempted to come back tomorrow to join in there - though that was going to cost $120-ish AUD, and that cost ended up deterring me from returning. But peeking over the fence was awesome:

It was really cool watching sun set over the circuit:

With some cool car footage and photos, a backpack full of merch, and tired legs from walking around all day, I wrapped up in Odaiba and went back to my hotel in Minato City. Just in time for some Duolingo, finishing the monthly challenge and reaching a nice milestone on Duolingo usage!

This learning streak covers some time spent learning French as well, and no - I don’t feel strong enough in either language to go around saying “I can speak this language!”. I know enough to know I don’t know enough to be useful! Plenty more to learn!

The Next Part

And with that, my trip in Tokyo finishes up - in the next part, I fly up to Sapporo to spend 15 days up there! Bring on the cold and snow!