Shinjuku marathon
Okay, I have a piece of advice.  Do not plan to spend 9 hours wandering around Shinjuku.  Even more important: don’t think that in 9 hours of wandering around Shinjuku you will see any significant percentage of what’s there!  Oh, and if you are going to wander around for 9 hours lugging an EOS 20D with an IS lens, get a comfortable camera strap.  Holy crap.  My feet and back are killing me.
 
Okay, okay.  I guess, in fact, I did manage to see some of the key highlights.  Tokyu Hands, Sakuraya Camera, Bic Camera, Kinokuniya Books.  I even made it to the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building to visit the observation deck, but they are either closed Sunday or close early on Sunday (I went at about 7:30).  Too bad.
 
I did not ever find the “Yakitori-cho” area that Dave said to look for, although I did have Yakitori at a pretty nice place right next to a 4-story music store with a decent selection of high-end basses.  I browsed a 6-story watch store with some very nice makes and very high prices.  I did not find “Oosama-no-aidea” gift shop, but I bought some souvenirs at Tokyu Hands.  I never found Yodobashi Camera, but I figured two out of three wasn’t bad.  All in all, a good day.
 
Okay, so, speaking of Tokyu Hands.  If you ever come here, go to this store.  It’s amazing.  Imagine the nicest crafts store you’ve ever seen, and the nicest hardware store, and then stir in housewares, toys and games and you’ve pretty much got Tokyu Hands.  I absolutely loved the logic of the layout of the tools.  There was a whole aisle of “things that cut things”.  Scissors, diagonal cutters, bolt cutters.  Brilliant.  There was another aisle entirely made up of micrometers and calipers.
 
At Kinokuniya, I broke down and bought a couple of small Japanese phrase books.  I really wanted a Berlitz guide, but I couldn’t find one for the life of me.  The ones I got seem to be decent, and complement the small but very good pamphlet I got at Narita nicely.
 
After Tokyu Hands and Kinokuniya, I had lunch at the sushi restaurant on top of the “Times Square” building that houses Tokyu Hands.  Not bad.  Very expensive, though.  At least it was not McDonald’s!  Then, it was off to find the camera shops.
Funny story.  I wandered around for awhile trying to find the camera stores.  I didn’t seem to be able to locate them, so I bought a soda from a vending machine and was sitting down to rest my feet when it dawned on me.  The 8-story building to my right was Sakuraya Camera.  They just didn’t have it spelled out in Romaji on the store.  But, a quick look with my magic decoder ring at the 2-story tall kana in lights on top of the building confirmed that, indeed, this was Sakuraya.  Now that I recognized the name, I could tell that not only was this Sakuraya, but the building down the street was as well.  And the one just past that.  And the one around the corner.  AND the one on the other side of the train station.  Good grief!
 
By the way, notice how the whole side of the building is plastered with ads so thick that you can hardly read any of them?  The entire inside of the store is like that, too.  It’s like Microsoft’s packaging department flew to Tokyo and went totally psycho with their “more is more” style.
 
Even funnier story: I had already decided that I was going to look for a comfortable camera strap while in Shinjuku, and I did look in the two Sakurayas and the Bic Camera that I visited.  I found one possible contender (made of neoprene), but not really what I was looking for.  I was also disappointed in the lens selection for Canon cameras at these stores.  So, something like 20 floors of “camera” stores, and not a strap to be found.  I’m told that the different branches tend to specialize, and I probably didn’t hit the right ones.  But, I only had so much time.  
 
In fact, these stores sell cameras, but they also sell computers and MP3 players (no Roku stuff that I could find) and TVs and on and on.  So, the camera stuff probably amounted to about as big as Keeble and Shuchat in Palo Alto, but with more point-and-shoot and less SLR.  I did pick up some DVD-R media to back up some of my pictures and so forth from the trip.
 
Funniest story yet: I just imported my pictures from the camera.  Soon after arriving at Shinjuku, I took a picture of a giant electronics store, because in the window they were advertising the Hitachi “WOOO” LCD TV (it’s the top-left blueish square in the rows of square ads there).  I happened to have seen this model of TV being assembled first hand in my travels on the first leg of this trip, so that was a bit of a shock, and I decided I had to snap a shot of the building with the logo.  Anyway.  Would you care to guess what the immense katakana on this building spell?  If you guessed “Yo-do-ba-shi Ka-me-ra”, you got it in one.  Oh, well.  Guess I did “find” it after all.
 
If you look at the full-size pic on the Japan page, you may be able to make out that of the 9 floors, only 2 have camera stuff on them...
 
Well, it’s  now 1am, and time for bed.  Tomorrow, probably Akihabara, unless I decide to take it easy and go to Harajuku instead..
 
Monday, May 1, 2006