Our tour officially starts this evening with a meet & greet with our guide for the next 2 weeks. Since we had the day to ourselves, it was a good opportunity to do another walk through the Imperial Palace grounds and then head over to the Tokyo Skytree for some cool views of the city.

So, about Tokyo.  Way back when, 1600-1800, it was known as, “Edo” and was the capital of Japan. The ruling shogunate, Tokugawa, was ruler from 1603 to 1868. A “shogunate” is a military dictatorship ruled by a “shogun” (go figure) as the supreme military leader. There had been many “shogunate” rulers in Japan prior to Tokugawa but he was the one that unified the country. He implemented an “isolationist” regime (kinda like our current war lord) and a strong caste system that kept everyone in line.

Unfortunately, because of this caste system, merchants started to amass great wealth and eventually decided the shogun had to go. So, late 1800’s, so endeth the shogunate.

Now it’s 2025 and Tokyo is the largest city (by population) in the world. Even greater than Delhi, India! Tokyo has a population of 37 million, while Delhi has a mere 28.5 million! Crossing Tokyo by car can take as long as 6 hours during heavy traffic times, 2hrs if you do it at 2am Sunday morning. Feeding all those folks is approximately 137,000 restaurants, 2,824 7-11 stores, over 3,000 McDonalds, 1,165 KFC’s, AND roughly 2,820 homeless people (2024 survey).

Some observations: there are no trash cans anywhere, yet there is no trash on the street! Even with this large population, no one runs into you while crossing the street. (They don’t even touch you!) There is no constant horn honking, no yelling (of any kind), no loud conversations or music, no graffiti, and no disrespect for others.

Back to our hero… Off to the Tokyo Skytree. Picked up our tickets and was escorted to an elevator that will whisk us up 350 meters to the 360 degree observation deck. There is an option to go to the 450 meter deck but we thought the view would be the same so we bought the cheap tickets.

Cherry blossoms are starting to show

Beautiful day for a wedding by the river

The Skytree

Betsy and Collette

The glass floor

Where do 37 million people live…

as far as you can see…

Been there, done that. The rest of the day was spent wandering the streets of Tokyo for a little lunch / dinner, before heading back to our hotel for a good bit of sleep. Tomorrow, we start our tour so we need to be fresh and ready.

Chicken skewers with cheese

Eggplant

Mo chicken

Assorted snacks from 7-11. The small packages at the bottom are almonds and fish, and dried squid jerky

Yum! Almonds and tiny little fish!

Atode min’na