Category: Miscellaneous

Tokyo Brothers

Those of you that follow me on Twitter would have seen a series of daily collages featuring the two of us in Japan. This post features those photos with description.

This was the first, taken at Adores arcade in Ikebukuro. I took the snap of Bernard first, then as we were leaving posed myself with the intention of reproducing the pose of the girl on the right, forgetting Bernard had done the same thing. When I reviewed my snaps later that night I noticed the similarity and a blog series was born!

These were taken outside Tokyo Tower. We’re both standing in front of a large poster put there undoubtedly for selfie purposes. Making these photos daily required scaling and occasionally rotation of the base images so they were best when taken from a distance.

This was taken at the very top of Skytree, which had a special Kingdom Hearts 3 exhibit. We’re both holding the keyblade in a diorama once again installed for photo purposes. I very much like the lighting on Bernard in his shot.

At Akihabara out on the street. This was a window display outside one of the first big game centers near the station. When we returned several days later these posters had been replaced!

Taken at Tokyo Disney, specifically in the Cinderella walk-through exhibit in the castle. The back of the seat has LED lights built into it that animate through a pattern, so we had to time the shots to get similar lighting. I like my pose πŸ™‚

Taken at Nakano mall, posing at the photo-op board featuring their mascot Pipi. It was for kids and we had to contort ourselves to get low enough to put our heads through. Bypassers looked at us curiously…

Once again in Akihabara, standing before a giant poster advertising the new Hatsune Miku cosmetics line. It was very pretty art, but she’s devilishly holding a lipstick with ‘Eat Me’ written on it!

Looking through my snaps, in the 600 or so photos I kept from Japan there’s only 4 that feature the two of us. Three of them were already shown in my blog posts during the trip but I particularly like this last one of us taken on the final full day:

Japan was a nonstop and fantastic end to an overall amazing 25-day vacation. Australia and Japan in one trip?!? How am I going to ever top that??

Tokyo Seven

Busy evening right now: packing and writing the last of the post cards whilst pushing through the exhaustion!

We spent the day in Akihabara. We shopped till we quite literally nearly dropped, and as you can see a decent percentage of Tokyo joined us πŸ™‚

We won’t speak of the failed UFO Catcher attempts. As Bernard says, we may as well have thrown our money into the street!

And yet we persevered, and ultimately both won an item or two πŸ™‚

First and second lunch only gave us enough to keep moving, and even now after second dinner I’m still feeling the draining effect of 8 hours in Akiba and another 2 in Ueno. I’ll sleep well tonight!

Tomorrow we fly home. Maybe I’ll do one more post before we leave this fine city!

Tokyo Two

Today was Operation Two Towers, where we visited not one but two observation towers in the same day!

We started with the old one:

Built way back in ’58, this now-iconic structure is the second tallest in Japan. It wasn’t busy and half the viewing platform was closed (for 2+ years so far!) but nonetheless we enjoyed the view from the main deck which is ~150 m from the ground. We sent postcards from a postbox that has a custom postmark, but later found out we hadn’t put enough postage on so who can say if they will arrive :<

We then crossed the city – pausing briefly in Asakusa for a little tourist gawking in light rain – and then head to the now famous – and much newer – Skytree:

This is by far the highest structure in japan and the second highest on earth. It towers over the surrounding area and as we approached from the street we were dazzled by the height.

We ascended to the principle observatory at 350 m, then further still to the higher (and more expensive) one at a staggering 450 m. We were very literally above the clouds, as we were looking at the rain on parts of Tokyo from above.

And then… this happened:

It didn’t take long for word to spread and very quickly the entire gallery was on the same side snapping photos of the rainbow πŸ™‚

Skytree is great. It’s almost certainly the premiere observation tower in the world and the views are extraordinary. If you visit Tokyo, be sure to go up and see for yourself!

Tomorrow it’s time to descend into mania once again and visit Akihabara…