Day 21: Last Day in Tokyo - Akihabara and Harajuku

The last day in Tokyo and so much left to see. We decided to spend the day running around Akihabara and Harajuku as these were the places we felt we had to see if we could see nothing else before we left Japan.

First stop we went to Akihabara via the JR line from Shinjuku station. Akihabara described in one word would be “vibrant”. The colours, objects, streets, buildings. It’s as if someone decided to splash colour everywhere.

Near Akihabara station there are a lot of stores with 6 floors or more filled with merchandise for various anime, manga and games. From old style Dragonball Z to newer anime that I’ve never heard of these stores have just about everything and would take a long time to cover completely.

Somehow out of the blue, Jose managed to spot a Robot Shop on the 6th floor of one of these buildings from the outside. It had the latest robots and parts ranging from a few thousand yen to hundreds of thousands of yen (£30 – £1500). It had been one of our goals to see a robot and whilst we saw one at AnimeJapan this one was actually purchasable.

We also found many doll collector shops and I have no idea how my fascination with these dolls began but it was great to see the variety of dolls and various accessories and outfits for them.

After Akihabara we dropped off stuff at our hotel and headed on to Harajuku, the home of modern fashion in Tokyo. The streets were packed with hundreds of people, an endless multitude, traversing the main streets.

Tokyu Plaza (that’s correct, Tokyu!) is fashion designer central and has a beautiful mirrored ceiling that changes what you see as you move up the escalator and it’s absolutely beautiful and probably very difficult to clean! Still it’s something that you don’t see and it was wonderful to see it.

Takeshita Dori (Takeshita Street) can be accessed straight from the station and is full of various shops including places that sell Lolita outfits (in Japanese sizes only!) In fact their size system sets 4XL as a size 14 in the UK or something, not sure but their biggest size is smaller than the western sizes. They do have a tonne of cute clothes though!

Overall a good last day spent in Tokyo. Very productive and very long day. Today we used up the last of our yen on food and a few trinkets.