Things to see in Odaiba - a Guide for Tourists

Odaiba is the newly built entertainment area and hot dating spot in Tokyo, built on reclaimed land. Accessible through the Yurikamome line which not only have driverless trains, they also give a great view of the Tokyo harbor and bay area, especiall at night. Also, it is possible to take the water bus from Asakusa to Odaiba, taking in the sights in the Tokyo bay while getting there.

While there, there are quite few amazing sights that you can take in:

• An amazing replica of the Statue of Liberty, about a hundred times smaller than the real one and a thousand times less impressive


• About a million couples there on dates


• A really lame "amusement park" called Joypolis (one step above Hello Kitty Puroland in terms of excitement)


• A fountain


• If you're lucky; either a clown or a guy tormenting a hostile monkey to do tricks for trinkets


• A guaranteed minimum of 30 dog strollers per hour spent there


• An average of 1.5 dog per stroller fully dressed up in clothing dying to get out of their stupid dog shirts and strollers to run free and pee

I really should write a guidebook...

The real Hurt Locker? Lock up your cats?

Ok, this one (look at the picture) had me quite confused for some time and I think that I might finally have figured out what it's about. But to give all my readers enough context to consider this themselves; this picture was taken from a locker at a standard row of bag lockers in one of the shopping malls in Odaiba (yep, it was taken at this time). Nothing special about the row of lockers except for this sign plastered on one of the top lockers.

It literally says "This is a cat locker", "This is the cat locker" or "This is a locker for cats", the Japanese language is a bit ambigious when it comes to stuff like this so I can't say for sure what was meant. But it was nothing special about this locker and nothing at all that made me think that it would in any way be a suitable place to put a poor little cat inside for storage purposes (and yeah, even if you did bring a cat to Odaiba, would you put it in a locker even if they had special ones?).

Then below that text it says in a bit smaller letters "we are the mark". This confused me for quite some time, but I think I finally figured it out; the cats must be the symbol for that section of lockers and probably there to differentiate this row of lockers from the bunch of other locker areas. I did not look, but I guess there must be "The dog lockers" and maybe even the "Elephant lockers" in other areas of the mall.

But the next time I happen to bring a cat I want to put away while shopping, I might just use this particular locker just in case that it's actually meant for cats and it was just 100 yen in any case! If anyone happen to have the definite conclusion to this one please let me know since I am quite curious!

The glory and splendor of Japan with old friends!

I have had a quite busy weekend with a couple of old friends, "Double D" as I call the two of them collectively, came to visit me in Japan from the old country and I played the tour guide. I haven't really socialized with them in over 15 years, but it was a nice surprise to see that we could still have fun together and that they were basically the same as before.

Throughout the weekend I took them around Tokyo and showed them the sleaze of the deepest parts of Shinjuku (beware of homosexualities), the cool modern hipness of Shibuya at night, the wonders of the Japanese cuisine and alcoholic beverages,the deep cultural heritage of the Kaminarimon at Asakusa and the hyper-modern Odaiba. Basically I took them on a roller coaster of all that is Tokyo today. Through it all they kept politely impressed and seemed to enjoy seeing the sights asking questions and so as we went along.

But... the thing that got them most excited was the excursion to a Japanese supermarket... Although I intellectually can understand that it is fun and interesting to visit a Japanese supermarket as a visitor to Japan, I was still extremely impressed by their enthusiasm for something which to me is a very mundane part of life here in Tokyo... In total, we probably spent the biggest concentrated amount of time in the supermarket as they ran around among the shelves, picking up and looking at everything and forcing me to translate labels for them. When checking out, they probably were the cashier's nightmare, with tons of different purchases, all in the smallest packages available so they could buy different stuff... Oh, and yeah, let's not even mention the time spent in the liquor section...

So now I've basically realized that next time I have friends coming over; I can just put down the serious planning of researching amazing events in Tokyo and just let people loose in a local supermarket and that will probably be a huge hit. What puzzles me though is how they expect to fit all the stuff they bought in their bags for the trip home; I'm not sure they fully realized this when they went shopping...