We mostly walked around for the rest of the day, looking at shops and buildings and people. The girls especially, but also some of the guys were dressed quite elaborately. The street fashion was very entertaining. We caught the tail end of the cosplayers dispersing as we filtered towards Harajuku. My feet really hurt by this point, so we wound up stopping and sitting several times. When we reached Harajuku, I saw something I hadn’t seen yet in Tokyo - hills! They were slight, but it was still nice to see a bit of variety. There were also a lot of trees dotting the streets (there seems to be a lot of green even in the heart of the city, with the architecture accomadating lush terraces and the streets offering trees and pretty landscaping throughout. We tried to find the entrance to a large garden that borders Harajuku, but we failed, and wound up walking some quiet residential streets for a few blocks as we curved back around to Harajuku. My camera had long since died at this point, so Ryan snapped a few pictures of the more fascinating buildings and people.
It was starting to get dark, so we walked back towards Shibuya to enjoy the lights and catch a glimpse of the nightlife. It was really like nothing I’d ever seen before - NYC is active at night, and Times Square is brightly lit but it’s not even close to the visual assault that was Shibuya at night (Steve and Ryan both agree that Akihabara is similarly bright and lively at night). It’s probably for the best that my camera died - I would’ve been taking pictures every block! Ryan found a manga store in his guidebook, and we accidentally ran across it as we wandered through the neighborhood. We went down, and down and down, three or four stories underground, to what really felt like a geek’s basement. Tall cabinets of figurines and collectibles and massive shelves of manga were crammed tightly into the large, dark room. I browsed the collectibles for a bit and found a couple small charms. It would’ve taken hours to browse through if I were able to read any Japanese! There were some neat DVD sets I haven’t seen out in the US, as well as all of the Death Note individual release DVDs with the figurines (Near’s is super cute and the final figurine is a “mystery”). But seeing as I read a pretty small selection of manga and can’t read Japanese, I didn’t find too much stuff.
It was fun to people watch at night. We saw the epitome of Japanese courtesy when 2 parking garage attendants bowed to the exiting vehicle, and then bowed to pedestrians on either side of the exit to thank us for waiting. There were young people everywhere, out on dates or meeting friends. Shop clerks, gentlemen's club staff and restaurant hawkers were trying to drive business by recruiting on the street (the word vegetarian solved that problem pretty quickly!). It was really crazy! Total visual overload. By this time my feet hurt way too much to do anything else, so Ryan and I headed back to the hotel and got some beer from the vending machine (so awesome!) - I guess the age check is being able to reach the button. I’m not gonna lie, taking my shoes off was probably the second best part of the day (second to seeing Ryan of course!!). We chilled out for a little bit in the room - I showed him some of the popular things he was missing in the US, like “I’m on a BOAT”. Mary and Steve came back shortly after, and Ryan had to catch a train back to Chiba, so we had to say goodbye. We all fell asleep pretty soon after, and that was that!
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