We visited Tenhinbashi-suji today, a covered pedestrian shopping street that is the longest in Japan. At 2.6 km in length with 600+ shops, it’s quite a place to shop, although today being New Year’s Eve a good portion of the mostly ‘mom and pop’ stores were closed.
There’s still a lot more evidence of Covid here than in the USA, and as one example the street still has periodic hand sanitizer available. I found it charming that it was served by standees of young women holding signs that advise social distancing:
The street runs alongside a shrine that we had identified as a new years celebration location, so after an afternoon/evening siesta we returned to the shopping street late at night and found it considerably more active:
The festival stands had set up and all sorts of unusual food was for sale, including fried eggs served on shrimp crackers, roasted chestnuts and ‘castellas’ (cream-filled cakes). We even saw a stand where you could catch fish like the one I tried in Asakusa last week. It was very popular with young women!
I always love the mask-sellers, and I was a fool for not buying any of these:
And look at these insane chocolate bananas!
As it turns out the shrine was actually closed despite (or maybe because of) the increasingly large crowds and since midnight wasn’t for about 90 minutes and we were tired (and I have laryngitis) we grabbed a quick bite and headed back to the hotel:
Happy New Year! Happy 2024! Happy Year Of The Dragon! Let’s hope it’s a good one 🙂