Day 5: A Trip to Shibuya

Today it was finally time to go visit Shibuya! Some of the others had already gone, but not all of us, and so some sightseeing was in order. Who’s a good boy??

After getting into Shibuya station with no issues at all, we quickly stopped by the Hachiko statue just by the entrance to the station. As always there was a massive queue to take pictures with him, so we mostly just wandered by.

So many people filming all over…

The very next step was to cross over the famous scramble crossing! People hype it up a bit more than it deserves, at the end of the day it’s just an omnidirectional crossing, but it is a really cool idea, just maybe not quite that cool.

Next thing visible from the station exit is a famous shopping mall, the 109 building. It’s a mecca for certain fashion subgenres in Tokyo, especially for teenage girls. The reason I find it interesting is because it features quite prominently in one of the best Nintendo DS games ever made (The World Ends With You), but there it has been renamed the 104 building, probably to avoid copyright.

Very much says 109 and not 104!

This caused me major confusion when I first saw it for real, but eventually I figured out it was in fact the same building and I wasn’t going insane misremembering things (sidenote, if you haven’t already you should totally check out TWENY, it’s amazing).

Anyhow, after taking a quick look around at the sites we begun heading down the main shopping street, towards the closest Uniqlo. On the way we were stopped however! A young Japanese guy (about my age) came over and asked us some questions about our experience and expectations as tourists. It seems he was doing some form of survey to better tourist experience or something similar. We had an interesting conversation, and then continued onwards towards Uniqlo.

You gotta respect the drip.

We all got ourselves some nice clothes, and then continued on to a Family Mart nearby to get a snack, and to buy a pair of their socks for my brother who needs them to complete his Family Mart fit. On the way over we also saw those street legal gocarts you can rent and drive around with in the area. We saw people dressed up as Mario and Picachu among others, but I unfortunately didn’t have time to snap any pictures before they’d raced past.

Finally we got dinner at a really expensive restaurant (by Japanese standards at least, it was in Shibuya after all). We had some food and some drinks, and then we headed on home. The food may have been expensive, but it was good, and the drinks were quite cheap.

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