Across the road and the railway tracks from Yoyogi Park and Meiji Jingu is Takeshita Dori (Takeshita Street). This is apparently the centre of Japan’s “most extreme teenage culture & fashion”. From an adult’s perspective, there’s not much shopping to be had unless you’re extremely petite, but the people-watching is exemplary. Free your inner salmon instinct and work your way through the stream of bodies along the narrow street, darting off into shops on the side to catch your breath.
Shinjuku
Shinjuku station is the world’s busiest railway station handling more than two million passengers per day. To the west of the station is the skyscraper district and to the north east is Kabukicho, packed with countless restaurants, bars, nightclubs and other entertainment venues.
45 floors and 202 metres up, the observatories in the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Buildings (“Tocho”) offer superb views over the west of Tokyo, and if you’re lucky with the weather, you may be able to make out Mt Fuji in the distance. Best of all, admission is free of charge.
From the observation deck you get a sense of how big this city is: this building is on the west of the city, and the view below is looking further west from there.
After dark, when the salarymen have finished work for the day, dozens of bars and eateries in the tiniest of alleyways come to life in the Golden Gai area of Shinjuku. Some places have barely enough space for half a dozen patrons, filling what looks like little more than a corridor with a few bar stools. It’s an atmospheric area with a certain charm to it.
Sensoji Buddhist Temple
Tokyo’s oldest temple, dating back to 645 AD. It is especially colourful and detailed, because the buildings were reconstructed after being bombed in the war and it stands as a symbol of rebirth and peace for the Japanese people. Like the Meiji Shrine across the city, this site also attracts around 30 million visitors annually, making them two of the most-visited religious sites in the world.
As you would expect at a place that receives almost 100,000 visitors per day, this is a crowded place, and you notice it here because it’s far more condensed than the forest around Meiji Shrine. The knowledge that the buildings making up the complex are relatively modern structures is a minor detraction taking away some authenticity, but at the same time this also offers the opportunity to see what these buildings were intended to look like in their prime, which you don’t get to enjoy at temples that have faced the elements for centuries.
Links
Sightseeing
Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building Observatories – link
Jan & Warren's Spot 