It’s shit. I have never and I mean never seen a city that’s flipped like this in my life…
It was like someone had created what they thought Tōkyō would be like without actually ever going there.
One second I’m in a busy park, surrounded by museums, locals and I’m sure tourists too, soaking in a part of the city I pretty much ran from yesterday after a brief foray with a typhoon. While I can tell there’s tourists around me it’s predominantly people of Asian origin, a few white people but not many.
I decided, righto I’ve done a museum and I suspect the natural history will be chocka block with families on a weekend day trip so I’ll head over to work renowned Shibuya Crossing to check it out for some photo ops.
Upon arriving at Shibuya station I was met by construction chaos… so pretty much like arriving at any large train station in the uk… I manage to find my way around the mess of tunnels and walkways and pop out on a mezzanine above the world famous land mark and my first thought is…
“Well that’s a bit shit, I thought it’d be bigger?”
Since arriving in Tokyo I’ve not really felt any reason to be unsafe or anxious (other than the underlying stuff covered in blog #1), but let me tell you Shibuya put me on high alert from the get go.
Now it is a Saturday so there’s that to consider but in all honestly it was like walking into major tourist hotspot, in any major city. Whether it’s Times Square or London Bridge or in this case a road crossing, it was just people soup and man did it smell like people soup (or more closely it smelt like my pea when I forget to drink the electrolytes) and it was just hoaching.
I did spend a good while wandering about and having a look in some shops including the Nintendo store and Pokémon Centre both of which activated what felt like my fight or flight ironically.
But from the moment I got there to moment I stepped on the train away all I wanted to do was get the f*ck out of there.
Don’t get me wrong doing the actual crossing was cool and if you wanted to go shopping it’d be worth a visit, but I’ll not be back on this trip anyway.
The rest of the city is super nice, very clean and chilled out to be honest. I’m really enjoying exploring it, but in this case it was a swing and miss!
Can’t win ‘em all can we.
Addendum
I realise now that this reads as my impression of Tokyo as whole, when in fact this is purely a reflection piece on Shibuya and the Shibuya Crossing area in particular.
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