So I am back from my second time (during this trip to Japan) going to Tokyo. Here is the rundown:
Friday March 10:
The day started like every other Friday at JCMU. Woke up early, did some extra cramming for the test, took the test, then got about 10 minutes of vegetation time before going back to the academic building for the Friday Project. This week’s Friday Project involved some kind of long spear-like weapon that was used by women and men during the Heian period. We all got to get up and demonstrate our lack of coordination and inability to understand directions in Japanese and simultaneously follow them (like yelling ‘LEFT!’ in Japanese and turning left right as you hear it….takes your brain a bit of time to translate what you are hearing). Unfortunately the entire time I was much too occupied with thinking about what I had to do before leaving JCMU to even remember the name of the weapon that we were learning about. Oh well.
When the Friday Project was finally over Brian and I headed back to my room and I did the last few things I had to do before leaving for the weekend (take out the trash, eat lunch, etc). We eventually got out of the building around noon, and biked to the station in time to get on the 12:38pm bus to Maibara (as I had kind of semi-planned). Thus began our 7-hour journey to Yokohama. Nothing really exciting happened along the way, we basically switched from one train to the other, always heading east on the Tokaido line. As we neared Yokohama, we passed Mt. Fuji, but it was unfortunately obscured by heavy cloud cover. Getting to Yokohama right around 8pm, we departed from the Tokaido line, and headed south a bit, to the site of the Yokohama Landmark Tower, which (as advertised on the building and from what I’ve read on the internet as being the tallest building in Japan (of which it is NOT)) is also the home to the Yokohama Hard Rock Cafe. My intention of going there was only to run in and grab a pin (and maybe stop to eat since it would be dinner time for us then) and then get back on the train and head to Tokyo. But instead, when we got to the Landmark Towers, we decided to go up to the top floor (69) and visit the observation deck, which cost us 1000yen to do so. The elevator in the building was incredibly cool, it took us all of 40 seconds to go up 69 floors, and in the process of reaching the top the lights in the elevator dimmed and only the ceiling, which was covered in stars and other celestial bodies, was lit up. They also had a little speed gauge in the elevator, so you could see when we reached the max speed of the elevator (750m/sec, supposedly the world’s second fastest elevator, but I’m not sure I believe them since they lie about being the tallest building in Japan..). Getting to the top, we were able to see a 360 degree view of the heart of Yokohama at night. Below us, in Queen’s Square, was a Ferris wheel lit up with neon lights and also serving as a huge analog clock, along with a giant sailing ship docked at the harbor. However by far the best part of the observatory was the gift shop. Therein they had a totally awesome poster, measuring about 1ft x 4ft which illustrations of a number of tall and famous buildings in Japan, all drawn to the same scale, so that you could see which was the tallest. What was cool about this poster was the fact that I had been to a number of Japan’s tallest buildings (especially its towers) and had gone to many of them with Cassidy, at which time our purpose was to visit a majority of Japan’s tallest buildings….just to say we did it. So I figured this was the best way to commemorate those efforts in the past 7 months, and if it weren’t wrapped up so nicely in its box, I would take a picture of it, but that will have to come after I get back to the US.
Leaving the Landmark Towers, we headed over to the Yokohama HRC, where Brian caved into my HRC obsession and (also thanks to the points on his HRC member card) decided to eat there with me. 
Departed from my usual of a cheeseburger and settled with some yummy parmesan chicken with penne pasta. Of course the Yokohama HRC is the only one of them that charges 525yen for a coke as opposed to 420yen (why? I don’t know, same with why the Ueno Eki HRC has a totally different menu…), but it was still a good $22 spent. 
Of course I also picked up a pin, #4 in the cherry blossoms set.
Leaving the HRC, we made our way back to the train station to continue our trip to Akihabara, where our capsule hotel was awaiting us. Everything was copasetic until we made it onto the Yamanote line in the heart of Tokyo, where at a station a man started walking towards the doorway that Brian and I were standing directly next to, and not once but twice fell in-between the train platform and the train car. Someone else asked him if he was ok, but he just continued to stumble into the train car, at which time I think I had a look of horror on my face. Never IN MY LIFE have I seen a person more intoxicated and still conscious. And the fact that he made it onto the train is amazing to me. Naturally, he decided to stand directly in front of me, and the first time the train moved he stepped directly on my foot. Quickly shuffling to another area of the train, poor Brian then had to stand directly behind him, while he alternated from hanging onto the bar next to the door to half bending over looking like he was about to vomit. I felt like a horrible person but couldn’t help but laugh at the absurdity of it. Brian wasn’t helping either with his comments of “Oh jesus no, I only brought one pair of shoes.” 
Somehow he managed to stumble off the train at the last second a few stops later, and that’s the rest I saw of him. I’m curious to find out if he made it bad to his home/apartment and how often he does something like this. At least he was taking the train home while completely drunk, instead of driving like I’m sure people do in that state in the US.
Still talking about that guy while alternately walking past fresh piles of regergitated stomach contents inside of Akihabara station (I guess its not uncommon to be totally drunk while riding the trains, especially on a Friday night) we finally left the train system (and thanks to the Seishun 18 ticket, went all the way to Tokyo for 2300yen!) and hit the streets of Akihabara. I had some printed out directions on how to get to the capsule hotel, so we decided to make our way there to drop off our luggage (let me just say that for this trip I packed as light as I ever have, everything fit into my backpack with room to spare, go me). The directions that I got directly from the Japanese portion of the capsule hotel turned out to be somewhat incorrect, and who would have guessed but the intersection with a marked Lawsons turned out to be the most helpful way of finding it (for those not in Japan, there are about 4 Lawsons every block, city or country, it doesn’t matter, there is a Lawsons within 1km of you no matter where you are(I’m really only exaggerating a tiny bit 
)). I was starting to feel a little worried that maybe staying in a capsule hotel with a bunch of other people I didn’t know was going to turn into some strange and awkward experience, but I wanted to do it at least once, so we went in and filled out our little registration cards, and were told the rules and regulations of the capsule hotel. The place had 10 floors, each floor not really all that big, with floors 8-10 reserved as the women’s floors. What was interesting was that Brian got his little wristband/room assignment, which contained 1 key, for his locker. Inside of my wristband/room assignment I had 3 keys: one for my locker, one for the entrance to the capsule room on floor 8, and one for the women’s shower room. Inside of the elevators and all over the place there are notices saying that floors 8-10 are for women only, and even when you would get to floor 8-10 they had curtains set up so that immediately getting off the elevator, all you saw was the curtain, and you couldn’t see the lockers and doorway to the capsule room behind it. It was great, reverse gender discrimination in action! Dropping off my stuff in my small locker, I found 3 towels, 2 toothbrushes, and a yukata waiting for me. Checking out my capsule, I found it to be a lot bigger than I had expected. I could sit upright inside of it with plenty of room to spare. There was a tv, which was great, along with a radio (that I didn’t use) and an alarm clock, along with light controls and a few other things. My capsule happened to be one on the floor right next to the door, which was good since I wasn’t sure that I really wanted to have to climb up to get to sleep. Everyone else staying there that I saw turned out to be other Japanese people, and not mostly tourists like I had expected. After I finished checking out the place, I went back down to the lobby and met up with Brian, where we then decided to head back to Akihabara station to check out anything that we deemed interesting. To leave the capsule hotel we had to give the people at the counter our wristbands, and they would give us this little plastic thing with our capsule number on it, along with the lock to the shoe locker that was next to the front door. The process would then be reversed when you returned to the hotel.
Heading back out on the street to waste some time before going to sleep, we walked back towards Akihabara station, and found a huge line of people leading into this ginormous electronics store called Yodobashi-Akiba. They started at the door to the store, which happened to be sort of inside of the train station (underneath the tracks but not inside the gates of the station), and curved around and went down at least half a block. Judging by the fact that 95% of them were men, I assumed it was probably for some video game, and we thought maybe Final Fantasy XII (or whatever number it is, I don’t know) but that didn’t come out for another week. So we resorted to asking a secutiry guard who was standing around watching everyone, and he told us it was for the Nintendo DS Lite (which I guess is like the regular DS, only…lighter). Interestingly enough, amidst all of the people lining up, there was a group of people setting up some kind of display booth for Canon cameras and photo printers. This turned out to have nothing to do with the people waiting in line, and the next day when we walked by they were giving away stuff and I suppose promoting some new product. (But what really struck me as awesome was at night, they had all this pricey new computer equipment, printers and TVs covered in sheets with *1* security guard just…standing here. In the US, someone probably would have beaten up the poor security guard and stolen it all, but not in Japan!!) Since it was about 11:30pm by this point and there wasn’t much open along the route to our hotel (besides random porn places….hey, its Akihabara). We went to the Lawsons across the street from our hotel to buy breakfast so that we could make it out early the next morning. Getting back to the capsule hotel, we parted ways and I went up to the women’s shower area and took a shower and dressed in my yukata, then went back to my little capsule and watched a little bit of TV before going to bed.
Saturday March 11:
Woke up at 6:30am, got dressed and made it down to the lobby by 7am, which is when we were going to meet up to get on the train to head to Kamakura. I waited and waited and was starting to get worried that maybe Brian hadn’t woken up and was pondering what I would have to say to the people at the front desk to convince them that I had to go to the men’s floor. Luckily about 20 minutes later Brian popped his head down and told me he’d be there in a few. Turns out a cold that started to develop on Friday night had gotten a lot worse, and would only get worse throughout the course of the rest of the weekend. We headed for the train station and made our way to Kamakura, about an hour west of Tokyo. Our first stop of the day was to Kotokuin, the temple housing the Daibutsu. The Great Buddha of Kamakura is the second largest Buddha statue in Japan, second only to Todaiji. It was built in 1252, and was originally housed inside of a temple. However, a tsunami in the 15th century washed away the building, but the statue inside remained. Since then it has been sitting outside, facing the elements, for some 600 years. When we got to Kotokuin, it was still pretty early, maybe before 9am, and there was nobody there, which was great. Since it was outside, the Kamakura Buddha seemed to me to be almost larger than the Buddha at Todaiji, and being made of bronze, now has this wonderful greenish patina to it. It is also a statue of Amida Buddha, as opposed to the Dainichi Buddha (cosmic Buddha) of Todaiji, and is seated in seiza with his hands in the Mida no Jouin position, which corresponds to the Buddha’s meditation under the bodhi tree which lead to his enlightenment. (Really interesting website on the hand gestures here.) Besides the Daibutsu, Kotokuin had some other small shrines, a small statue of Jizo, and was just altogether very peaceful and beautiful. It was wonderful finally going to a shrine without the huge crowds and noise.
Leaving the Daibutsu, we walked back towards the railway station (Kamakura has kind of this mix between trains and streetcars in the fact that the trains stop at streets if the light is red in the train’s direction). A block or two away from the Daibutsu was Hase Kannon Temple. Hase Kannon is a Buddhist temple famous for its wooden carved gold-gilt figure of Kannon, the largest wooden statue in Japan. The story of the statue is that in 721 a monk carved two images of Kannon, both with eleven faces, out of the same massive camphor tree. The Kannon made from the lower half of the tree is enshrined in Nara, while the image made from the top half of the tree was set adrift on the sea with prayers that it would reach a place that it had the most karmic connection with. 16 years later, it washed up on shore in Kamakura and is now housed in Hase Kannon Temple. What’s interesting about this image of Kannon, is it is holding the staff of Jizo, who is the protector of travelers and still-born/aborted children, and at the Temple there are thousands of small statues of Jizo scattered about, and while we were visiting the temple we witnessed two women having a ceremony performed with another small Jizo statue. A monk was seated facing the large Kannon statue, and was chanting and hitting a metal gong at regular intervals, and then switched to a wooden gong made from a camphor tree.
Other components of Hase Kannon Temple include the Amida Hall, featuring a wooden statue of Amida Buddha very much like what I saw at Byodoin, only this time the base and halo behind it were still intact. Another really interesting aspect of the temple grounds was a carved grotto, the walls of which were carved with the images of Benzaiten, the goddess of feminine beauty and wealth. The tunnel leading to the exit of the grotto was so low that we had to walk slightly doubled-over, but it was a pretty interesting experience as this was the first time I had seen something like that in Japan. Another interesting aspect of the temple was the sutra repository. Inside of a building was a revolving sutra library that held Buddhist scriptures, and it had these jutting out wooden beams which you could push to make it rotate. Supposedly, rotating the library is represents reading the entire Buddhist cannon and gives you spiritual merit! There were also a few (early) flowering sakura trees on the temple grounds, which brought out a lot of people with their very expensive looking cameras.
Leaving Hase Kannon, we had to return to the railway stop and travel back to the JR line, to Kita-Kamakura, where we would next be visiting Engakuji, the head temple of the Rinzai sect of Zen Buddhism in Japan. Situated directly across the tracks from Kita-Kamakura station (this was in fact the first station that I had to walk directly over train tracks to cross), the temple complex was built in 1282 by a Chinese Zen monk, and supposedly its name came from the unearthing during construction of the temple of a copy of the Engaku-kyo, the sutra on Perfect Enlightenment. During the Edo and Meiji period, Engakuji was a center for zazen courses, and today they are still held. The complex starts at the base of a large hill, and its buildings extend upward, making up 18 buildings in all. The most prominent feature of Engakuji is the Shari-den, a building built in the 16th century that supposedly houses the tooth of the Buddha, as well as the Ogune, a 2.5 meter tall temple bell. By the time we got to Engakuji it was getting to be around noon, and since we had planned on going to a spa/onsen in Hakone (a trip that would take us 1.5 hours from Kamakura), we didn’t have a huge amount of time to explore the place. We walked all the way up to the top of the temple complex, and also went inside a few of the side temples, as well as through the San-mon, the main gate of the temple (of which there were stairs leading to the top that started on the second floor of it only, I wanted to climb it…). Many of the main buildings required you to pay extra to get into, so we contented ourselves with looking at the scenery and then quickly returning to the train station after about a 45 minute walk through.
Getting back on the train, we headed this time back towards Yokohama, because before going to Hakone, we would be making a stop at ‘Sirotan Town’. Yes, its actually called that on the Mother Garden (home of Sirotan) website. Since I was going to be in that area, I had to go. That and, the store was located on a man-made island that also housed a huge aquarium and theme park called Paradise Island! The trip back took us about 45 minutes, and when we got to Yokohama we had to transfer to a monorail line out to the second-to-last stop of Hakkeijima. From there we walked across a long bridge and made it onto the island. Searching for the store, I was really really disappointed to NOT find a large sign saying ‘Sirotan Town’ anywhere, and the place turned out to be a normal-sized store inside of a larger building. Ah well. They did have lots of cool Sirotan stuff though, while I helped myself too. And before you say anything, I also bought a lot of souvenirs for people. Luckily all things Sirotan are incredibly cheap, even for Japan, so I don’t feel tooo guilty after visiting a Mother Garden. It was getting to be past lunch time at this point, and Brian was starting to feel very unwell, so after a long while of searching to find a restaurant that wouldn’t make us go broke, we discovered a food court where we ordered some udon. We sat down and rested for a while, and decided at that point that since Brian was feeling so crappy that we would go back to Akihabara, and by the time we would get there it would be check-in time for the capsule hotel, so we could take a little while to rest and then head back out. We figured at that point that we would try for the spa on Sunday morning early, so we could get there and make the most of our time, instead of getting there at the last minute and only being able to be there a couple hours until it closed.
Heading back to Akihabara, we indeed returned right at about 5pm, check-in time. We agreed to meet back in the lobby around 6pm, and during that hour interval I sat in my capsule and worked on a little homework and enjoyed some Japanese television, something I haven’t been able to watch very much of the past 7 months I’ve been here. After naptime was over, we headed back out this time to the huge electronics store right next to/in Akihabara station. This store was BRAND new, and kind of dominated the look of the area, and from what I had read basically housed every kind of electronic item ever made. Going in, the place was a complete mad house. The first floor was dedicated to computers, and there were certainly a ton of them. What amazed me the most (besides the brand new, $2k Sony Vaios) was the fact that when you wanted to go buy a computer, you walked over to the front desk where directly behind the cashier were boxes and boxes and BOXES of hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of computers, just…sitting there. No cage, no bars, nothing. I guess its a testament to the sad state of the US that the first thought that came to my mind was how easily someone could crash their vehicle into the store and clean the place out. I had hoped to seek out the floor containing all of the mp3 players because I was seriously pondering one if I could get it for cheap. When we found that floor it was as equally swamped as everywhere else. This store had everything. There was a room just for Bose speakers, the video game floor was insane, and somehow they even managed to squeeze in makeup and designer handbags on the ‘personal comfort’ floor. Walking through I pretty much decided that there was no way I was getting an mp3 player, however the PSP section of the video game store tempted me greatly for a while, even if the people working there weren’t very knowledgeable about it (asked if it would play US games, they told me no, I was pretty sure that was incorrect so we looked it up online on a computer in the store and found that they games from anywhere, just only R2 UMD’s).
(skip this paragraph if you don’t want to hear my ranting about pizza….)
Finishing our expensive toy browsing, we were getting hungry, and so in my never-ending quest to find a Pizza Hut, we first took a trip to Tokyo station to find an ATM, and then went one stop down to…somewhere or other (Kando or something) where SUPPOSEDLY a Pizza Hut existed very close to the west exit of the train station. I say supposedly because this is what Google Maps Japan AND Yahoo Maps Japan told me, based on information on Pizza Hut’s own website, so I trusted it to be correct. So, heading out from the station we walked in the direction it was supposed to be. I even had my trusty bilingual atlas of Tokyo with me, open to where we were trying to go. So we walk and walk and walk, and we aren’t seeing it. We walk all the way around the area where its supposed to be, with no luck. We even went inside a koban (police station) to ask for directions, which I felt a built guilty about but they looked a little bored to begin with. The police officers told us that, in fact, there was no Pizza Hut in this area. One guy just kept saying “piza huto….piza huto…” like he was deeply pondering the subject of Pizza Huts. After about 20 minutes of map pointing, address writing, and advice on how to get to the nearest Pizza Hut from there (which, didn’t exist on the Pizza Hut site when I later checked, and would have been quite a trip from our current location), we decided it would be easier to just go back to the capsule hotel and get the pizza delivered. Naturally, when we get back to the capsule hotel and I look up the Pizza Hut menu and we decide what to order, I get a “dekimasen, dame desu” from the people at the counter. Sigh. I would have attempted to order it myself, however there was no way I would be able to describe to the person on the other side of the phone how to get to the capsule hotel. So, defeated, we wandered back towards Akihabara eki because at this point we were about to fall over from hunger. Walking a few blocks we came upon a mall-ish type building with a food court on the first floor, and what restaurant to we see first? A PIZZA PLACE. Naturally we went in, except when we were first seated we thought we had made a terrible mistake. The place inside oozed fanciness. That and there were maybe 4 other customers in the place besides us. We opened the menu, expecting to find foi gras and other expensive Italian food waiting for us, but luckily it turned out to be 1300yen pizzas instead. The menu was in Italian and Japanese and I apparently made the stupid mistake of not reading the Japanese description of ‘quattro fromagge’ pizza, which I ended up ordering because hey, four cheese pizza, sounds pretty normal right?? Hahah WRONG. What was delivered to our table (by that time we were the only people in the whole place besides the manager and 4 waiters/waitresses) was this wafer-thin crust of a pizza with…cheese on it. Only cheese. No sauce, nothing. There wasn’t even that much cheese, and there certainly weren’t four kinds of it. I stared at it for a while in astonishment, and disappointment. Brian had made the correct choice in his pizza by ordering zucchini pizza which was, naturally, pizza with sauce and cheese and zucchini. So I laughed at the absurdity of the previous 3 hours, and ate my cheese and crust, and quietly admitted my defeat to the searching of decent pizza in Japan. I guess I’ll just be patient and wait a month, to a time where I can pick up my phone, and the person on the other line will understand my plea of “I want cheese pizza, please deliver it to my house…”. And it will then be delivered 45 minutes later, cold, and with anchovies, even though I didn’t order anchovies. And after I discover this fact, the delivery person will of course already be gone, and I’ll have to call up the Pizza Hut to complain, and an apathetic young person will answer the phone, and the cycle will repeat. Ah…America.
After pizza, we came back to our capsule hotel and settled in for the night. I spent a little while watching TV in my capsule (Japanese TV, on the whole, basically sucks) and caught this interesting music show where they happened to be counting down the current top 10 music DVD chart, and #4 just happened to be a band I like. I think it might have been some kind of subliminal messaging but, for each DVD they played all of maybe 15 seconds of it as a teaser, but getting to #4 they played a full minute of it, then went back to 15 seconds each for 1-3. That video clip kinda stayed in my brain all night……
Sunday March 12:
Getting to sleep in a little this morning, Brian and I met up in the lobby around 8pm, and he was feeling even worse today. So, our plan to go to the spa in Hakone was cancelled, which I can’t say I was saddened by. Instead, our first stop (after has browns at McDonalds!) was back to Tokyo station, where we bought our Shinkansen tickets back to Maibara (unreserved, so that we could come back whenever we felt like it) and I deposited most of my stuff in a coin locker so I wouldn’t have to drag it around with me the whole day. We ended up wandering around in the maze that is the underground plaza of Tokyo station, and took a little detour to the moat surrounding the imperial palace for a food break. Getting back to Tokyo station, we traveled back to Akihabara where our plan was to just wander the streets for a couple hours and check out the otaku culture. I was really surprised by the fact that anime was just…EVERYWHERE. There were stores where they sold nothing but anime DVDs. There were of course other stores selling only computer parts or only video games, but the amount of advertising for anime everywhere was amazing. I’m talking billboard-sized advertisements on the side of 7-story buildings for the latest show. Naturally all these stores are kind of laid out so that they occupy these very skinny, tall buildings, and the only way to get up/down them is through death trap-like stairways and 1-person escalators. Everything was also incredibly expensive. The only anime item that I bought during the day was a cute little tachikoma keychain, since all the cool t-shirts from Ghost In the Shell: Stand Alone Complex were all men’s size L. 
At one point, inside of another multi-story anime store, we discovered that the top floor was in fact a maid cafe. If you’ve never heard of a maid cafe, its what’s currently the rage in Akihabara. Basically, its your normal cafe, except all of the waitstaff is female, and they dress like maids. Spreading from maid cafes, lately there are also maid hair salons and maid massage parlors. Personally, I find it to be a little creepy, and I don’t really like the fact that it kind of promotes this subservient view of women, but Brian wanted to go to one so I thought what the heck. I guess I was a little anxious at first, but in the end it wasn’t really that weird at all. There were groups of just Japanese women coming to the cafes, but the main demographic of the place was certainly the male otaku (anime fan). I even saw several guys with their maid cafe guide books and anime artbooks, sitting at the tables eating their cake. It was lunch time but the place mainly served dessert, so I ordered strawberry shortcake and ice tea, and Brian got cheesecake. We enjoyed out cake, and then hit the streets again, this time finding the main drag in Akihabara closed off to street traffic, and with a ton of cosplayers everywhere. Mostly there were women dressed as…maids. I saw a couple of guys in some sweet costumes as well, but they seemed to be doing their own thing, not standing our waiting for tons of guys to come up and take their picture while making random poses. We stopped and watched everyone for a bit, and eventually did a little bit more shopping. I was determined to find a music/DVD store because I was interested in finding out just how expensive the concert DVD I had seen a bit of on TV the night before was. After several attempts (one of which, I’m in the store looking and looking in the ‘M’ section of the cd’s for this band (its called m-flo), and I’m not having any luck. So I ask someone at the register and they direct my to the E section for the CD. Silly me, since the letter M is pronounced like ‘ehm’ NATURALLY its in the E’s, how could I miss that??!?) I finally get into one store and find the DVD in question, and as far as Japanese DVD prices go, this one wasn’t too high, so I thought what the heck, at the very least it would be entertaining to watch, and I bought it. At this point we were both kind of broke and didn’t really have anything else worthwhile to do in Akihabara that wouldn’t involve money (basically, there’s nothing in Japan that doesn’t involve money).
So, last thing of the day that had to be done was, of course, visit more Hard Rock Cafes! I had two more pins to pick up to complete my (almost) set of sakura pins (again, no pin from Fukuoka, its too far away to just buy a pin). First stop was to Ueno, since its right on the Yamanote line and the HRC is inside the train station. Basically went in, bought my ticket, and left. Onward to Roppongi! This required a trip on the Yamanote line and then the subway, and a short walk to get to the HRC. Worst moment of the day: random old, overweigh Japanese dude walks past me and says (in English) “you are hot”. Ew. And no, don’t say “hey it was a compliment, you should be flattered”. Anyway, continuing on the HRC I bought my pin along with (my second impulse buy of the day) a limited edition bear wearing a kimono. The only reason I got it is because I have one at home that I bought in 2004 and its wearing a blue kimono, while this one is wearing red. Its #122 of 240! (And yeah sorry Brian, I lied when I said I was getting it as a gift for someone, but I just didn’t want you to think I was a total HRC nut in that moment. :P) This was our last stop of the day, and so we headed back to Tokyo station via subway (I discovered that we had unnecessarily taking the Yamanote line to get here when we could have just taken the subway the whole way for 160yen cheaper, oops). Gathered my things from the locker and went to buy Tokyo Banana cookies and chocolate as per the request of those people back home. (My Japanese teacher says they are a famous omiyage (souvenir) from Tokyo, but I’ve yet to ever eat any of them, so I don’t know if they are great or not). It took us a little bit of searching to find out the information as to when the next Shinkansen would be leaving that we could take to Maibara (it was about 3:30pm at that time and initially we had planned on getting back to Maibara on a 7:38pm Shinkansen). Luckily we found one that would be leaving in about 20 minutes, so I figured we should buy food before getting on, and this time I was determined to finally fulfill my goal of eating a traditional bento box meal on the Shinkansen. Luckily, the little stalls are everywhere so I got a tasty looking meal *in a bamboo basket*, and we quickly walked to where the Shinkansen was sitting at the platform waiting for us. I think this was probably the most crowded Shinkansen I’ve ever been on. It was also the slowest ride I’ve ever been on. Since Maibara isn’t exactly a main stop on the Tokaido Shinkansen line, there are only a certain number of Shinkansens that stop at it. Naturally, these are the slowest ones because they stop at every single stop. This one, however, seemed to be extra ’slow’ just in the fact that every time we would stop at a station, at least 3 or 4 other trains would pass us in rapid succession, and we would have to wait at the platform for our turn. All in all it took us about 3.5 hours to get back to Maibara, but during that time I was able to pretty much finish all my Japanese homework and write the first page of my speech, which was due the following morning. I got back to JCMU around 8pm, where I took a shower, and pretty much vegetated the rest of the night before going to bed early.
Yokohama at night:
The Kamakura Daibutsu:
Hase Kannon Temple:
An ema that we left at Hase Kannon Temple, right before the grotto. Brian wrote for world peace, and I wrote for my mom’s health. 
Engakuji Temple:
Paradise Island and Sirotan Town!:
Akihabara:
Capsule hotel!:
A funny sign found along the journey to Tokyo:
