Tokyo was a riot.

On the first night, upon arrival we met up with Logan and his friend Nathan. Logan is a Kansai Gaidai friend of ours from South Carolina in America, greeeat guy! So much fun. We made our way to our hostel, checked in, dropped our 19837198371982kg’s of luggage and headed out for a bit of a night, some Japanese barbecue and a Wendy’s which didn’t have any meat left so we went to Maccas instead. Shunjuku was alive, lots of things to do and things to see, if we had the time and the energy.

Tokyo is an extremely and ridiculously large city, the likes of which I would claim that if you put every capital city in Australia together, it would STILL be smaller than Tokyo, my guess would be quite a bit smaller too. Tokyo is made up of various districts, districts such as Shinjuku, Shibuya, Harajuku, Ginza, Roppongi…. And the thing I love about Tokyo and its districts is that every district is famous for something different, such as Shinjuku’s nightlife, Shibuya’s shopping, Roppongi’s Nigerian infested nightlife (neutral comment, make of it what you will), Ginza’s the business district, Harajuku’s crazy fashion….

So, the next day in Tokyo we were gonna check out Shibuya, the famous shopping district with that big famous scramble crossing that I’m sure a lot of you have seen somewhere. On the way there we asked a young/middle aged Japanese couple for directions. They were a very good looking couple I must say, Handome Japanese man with a beautiful, but slightly aged Japanese woman, both wearing nice clothes, he wore her as an accessory as she clung to his arm – they looked happy, they looked good. They were also going to Shibuya, and so they said to just follow them and they’d take us there. We got talking to them, they spoke a bit of English. They asked where we were from, we told them and when they heard Paul and I was from Australia they piped up and said they went to the Gold Coast last year (40 minutes from where I lived). So we talked about that. They were the Saigo’s, but I can’t remember their first names (Kaichido and Kaoru I think…). We made it to Shibuya and we said our goodbyes.

I loved Shibuya, I loved the building, the layout, the shops, EVERYTHING. Amazing district. We walked around a lot and found a bunch of cool stuff. However, Shibuya offered something different to me… Different enough that I ended up saying a temporary goodbye to the convoy of Annie, Paul, Logan and Nathan (actually maybe Nathan had left). Me, my camera, and my Nintendo DS went on a journey. A spirit journey.

I have a game on my DS called “The world ends with you”, made by Square Enix and to this date is the best game I have ever played on my Nintedo DS by a long shot, NOTHING has come close. Where’s this game set? Shibuya. Using the game as a guide, DS I hand, I followed the directions in the game to find the various locations that are depicted in the game – to much success. Here’s what I found (They changed things slightly, probably copyright issues):

Ahh! A game come to life! Moving on…

I met up with everyone at an English pub where we drank guiness and watched K-1. It was new years eve by the way, and new years is a big deal in Japan. But we didn’t know what to do. Logan had left on a bus back to Osaka and we were tired, and sick. We were gonne head back home, it was around 11pm, we wanted sleep. So we started walking to the JR Shibuya station, when we came across the scramble crossing. There were people EVERYWHERE! They were hanging around for some sort of Tokyo New Years Action! We thought we’d join, we didn’t know what was gonna go down, but it looked intense, there were cops everywhere and we wanted to be part of it.

Things got more and more rowdy and a bunch of Gaijin begun making a lot of noise and carrying on. It was kinda fun. Ok, a minute till midnight… There was a big building which is famous for its advertisements on it’s LCD multistory advertisement display. Surely there’d be a countdown! … … Nothing. NOTHING HAPPENED! New years came, no countdown (bar a few groups behind us counting down), nothing. A bunch of people started running across the scramble for a bit of action and a show dodging all the policemen. Yep, that was our new years. Slightly disappointed we went home, but it wasn’t THAT bad, it was still kinda fun, but just anti-climactic.

The next day we planned on taking it easy, maybe catching a movie and seeing Avatar in 3D. We left the exit and walked towards the subway, but who walked out? The Saigo’s. We were surprised to see them and we started talking again. They told us that the Cinema’s would be closed on New Years day, everything was, but there was a shrine at Harajuku that we should go and check out. We thanked them and left for Harajuku, however we were all really tired.

Harajuku is known for its crazy fashion and the locals dressing up and hanging out on a bridge, escaping reality. However there wasn’t any of that. Just hordes of people flocking towards the shrine, actually quite depressing how many people were there. I was tired, so was Paul and Annie, but I didn’t want to deal with people. I was sick, Annie was coffing from the dust being kicked up by the people on the walk there, Paul didn’t look any better. We got about 200 metres away from the shrine, blocked by people. The walkway was probably about 20-30 metres wide, and it was blocked, completely, for about 200 metres upto the shrine. The crowd controllers said there would be a 1 hour wait – no, FUCK that. We went back. Mission failed, I was shitty and tired, we all were. We went back to the hostel.

Ciao for Now!