Japan: Tokyo - a blossoming city

As overcrowded and bustling as the Tokyo city can be, it is also sophisticated, which makes it a very nice city to live in.

It has a vast and reliable train network allowing you to cross the city in less than 30mins. Thus people walk and avoid driving, resulting in a city with very few traffic jams, pollution and noise.

People are also educated to bring their trash back home (there are barely any garbage bins in the city/parks), move the baskets to the side to bag their purchases at the grocery store, place orders from a tablet at a restaurant, clean after themselves and bow to show respect.

We thought the bowing gesture was mainly at the temples, but bowing is an important gesture in Japanese culture to express a lot of different feelings from thanking to apologizing deeply. This was a gesture of piety and respect for the samurai at the time, and we guess Japanese kept this as part of their education. They even bow when they know people would not necessarily see them.

They do not bow to the cherry trees but they do love to take pictures of them, and boy do they take a lot of photos.

We had the chance to see the cherry blossoms in Tokyo, in the Ueno Park. This park displayed a street full of blossoming cherry trees and the number of people there was just crazy and made it impossible to take a picture without anyone in it. But I would still congratulate the Japanese authorities as they organized the streets so that people could move more quickly.

The other parts of the park were also nice to visit and enjoy the food stands that were selling some delicious snacks. People were having picnics everywhere!

The alternatives would have been to eat in the Ameyayokocho area, the shopping streets around Ueno, also full of people wanting to taste the food in the area.

The day after, we went to the imperial palace gardens. When you look at a map of Tokyo, you see a large round patch of green in the middle of this city of 38M inhabitants, those are the gardens of the Imperial Palace.

As we entered from the south side, we discovered that the entire park was not completely accessible as the current Emperor and its court are actually living there. Only if you reserve a spot to visit the palace through a guided visit or on special holidays can you enter those grounds. We could only go through a corridor through the middle of the gardens guided by security guards.

We visited the north gardens up to the Nippon Budokan, a large gymnasium, and left the grounds through the north gate where there were a lot of blossoming cherry trees.

Thanks to the tip of a Japanese couple we met at lunch, we continued north to see the Yasukuni shrine with the biggest torii that we had seen during our entire trip.

The following day, we decided to walk from Ginza all the way to Hinode Pier. We stumbled into the Ghibli clock, a clock built using the concept of Howl's Moving Castle, the famous movie from Hayao Miyazaki. We had the chance to arrive a little bit before 1pm and see the clock come alive for a few minutes.

Tokyo loves Ghibli films and it was a shame that we were not able to go to the brand new Ghibli park or even the museum as you need to buy tickets months in advance.

We continued walking on a sky pathway on Showa-dori avenue, allowing us to enjoy the sun and the moving trains between those large buildings. We turned south and found the Waters Takeshiba and Hinode Pier.

Getting on the train to Odaiba Marine Park, we could admire the surroundings and Tokyo Bay from the Rainbow Bridge.

This huge white bridge allows cars, trains and people to get to Odaiba, where the Japanese enjoy the beach, the view of the city, as well as 2 major statues, a smaller version of the Statue of Liberty, and a real size Unicorn Gundam (what I imagine would be the real size according to the description in the manga).

The area of Odaiba park is awesome to visit, if you have some time to spare and need to escape the city's crowded areas.

And that concludes our trip in Tokyo and in Japan.

Japan is definitely an amazing country to visit, a medley of superb mountains, beautiful forests and the beautiful colors of the cherry and prune trees. And all of it is only possible to enjoy thanks to the Japanese culture of respect for nature.

It is also a sophisticated country with all its clear processes and automations, even if sometimes we felt that impaired their humanity a little bit.

It did not deter our appreciation of the country though and we would definitely come back in a few years, but this time to see Japan’s Autumn colors. And until then, we got socks to remind us of this awesome country!