Third day in Tokyo: April 24

 On this third day I had planned to go see Mt. Fuji, but it's been overcast and rainy every single day of our stay in Tokyo, so there's a good chance we wouldn't even be able to see it from the neighborhood I wanted to visit. This was only the first disappointment of the day, I don't want to give the impression that I'm having a bad time here, some things just didn't work out on this day, I'll explain later.

    So, skipping Mt. Fuji gave us a lot of extra time so we went to some places my dad was interested in. We checked out the Tokyo National Diet Building, which sounds like an odd name, but it's called that because it's where the Japanese parliament meets. Diet is the Prussian term for parliament, and Japan adopted the term during the Meiji restoration, which was a period when Japan had just reopened it's borders and made a great effort to take in ideas from other countries leading in their fields and use them to improve Japanese society. Prussia was doing well in politics in their eyes so they used their structure and terms. The culture produced by the Meiji restoration is also the reason Japan has people drive on the left and teach their students English with a UK accent. The UK was doing these things the best at the time so they adopted their style. We also saw the Imperial Hotel, which was originally designed by an architect my dad is fond of named Frank Lloyd Wright. I didn't take any pictures of these because it's pops' forte not mine.

    Then we went to the nearby "suburb" (I put it in quotes because its not as dense as inner Tokyo, but it's more dense than most of Minneapolis) of Kichijoji to go see the Ghibli Museum. As we arrived, expecting a ticket vending machine like every other entertainment venue we had been to, we saw only a ticket redeeming station. We learned then and there that you had to order a ticket online a month or two in advance. I felt so foolish in that moment, that after all my research I had overlooked how to get a ticket at one of the things I was most excited for in Japan. I admit I was dejected from my mistake, especially in the silence of the train ride back towards home base. Despite my melancholy, we are still in this amazing and unique country, so I couldn't be sad for long. At least I got this photo of a robot from Castle in the Sky from a distance. We also walked through an interesting park called Inokashira park, with a spring called ochanomizu, which literally means 'water for tea' because when it was discovered it was said to be the most pure water available and was perfect for brewing tea in.

    After that blunder, we made our way to Odaiba pier, which was interesting to see, but was clearly for people in a tax bracket or two above mine. We saw the amazing Unicorn Gundam, I've never been much of a gundam fan, but I'll never pass up a chance to see a giant mech suit.

    There was also a smaller version of the Statue of Liberty, celebrating the healthy relationship between Japan and France. This one looks a lot better than ours, but it hasn't been around for as long so maybe it'll look a little more ragged after a hundred years.

    Then it was lunch time, there weren't really any smaller restaurants in this part of town, so we went to a hawaiian burger chain called Kua'aina. It was pretty damn good, and cheap especially for Odaiba pier. After chowing down we headed towards Tokyo tower, and saw some cool things on the way. We walked up a big hill to see the Atago Jinja shrine hidden among all the massive buildings in the area. It's a quaint shrine in a massive metropolitan area, it held a koi pond, a massive staircase, and a very old and calm shrine cat. I tried to let him smell me and he truly did not care about my presence, I gave him a pat, and moved along.

    After this small shrine we saw the complete opposite, Zojo-ji temple. A humongous Buddhist temple, and one of the oldest in Japan. Like many old structures in Japan it's been rebuild and restored over the years because of fire damage, but in this case it was due to firebombing in world war 2. I like the contrast of these cultural landmarks against the modern marvels like the Tokyo tower.

    Once we had seen everything to see at Zojo-ji we walked the rest of the way to Tokyo tower to see what it was like at the bottom. I had originally planned to go up the tower to see from the observation deck, but it was so rainy and cloudy that there would not be much to see from up there.

    Then we went to a nearby yokocho called Golden Gai, which is mainly known for drinking, but we found one spot that at least sold food. It was a Japanese take on an american diner, but one of their main dishes was fish n chips, and both me and my dad enjoyed those fish n chips with a sweet butter sauce. Finally, we ventured to home base in the rain to lay our heads down for the last night in Tokyo.