Friday 19th September 2025.
Opened our curtains this morning and saw that a small cruise ship was coming in to the dock at Osanbashi Pier, where our ship will arrive tomorrow. Crack out the binoculars and see it’s called Asuka 2, a Japanese cruise line that does 3 and 4 night cruises. By night it was still there and looked very pretty all lit up.
The train system is very complex but not too difficult to navigate, all the various lines being named and designated a colour. The line nearest to us is the blue Minatomirai line that runs to Yokohama, about 4 or 5 stations. Then it turns into several lines, all of different colours. And the trains get busier and more crowded the closer you get to Tokyo.
Our plans for the day never sound like much on paper, but they certainly fill the day, a lot of time taken up with wandering train stations looking for the next line we need to change to. The plan for today is to go 2 stops on the train, blue line, to go to the shop in Minatomirai’s Landmark Tower that sells Studio Ghibli merchandise, except we got there at 10am and they don’t open till 11. We’ll have to come back on the way home.
Our universal power adapter has seen better days and we find a shop called Yodobashi near Yokohama that sells them and like many shops here, it’s HUGE!! There’s no way we’ll find what we want without help.
Back to the train for the orange line to Shimbashi to change to the orange line to go to Suehirochiro, take exit 3 and walk about 5 mins, hopefully in the correct direction, to the maid cafes in Akihabara that I’d read about and thought it might be a bit of fun, so I tracked down one that was recommended both for the chicken and the atmosphere. Very unimpressed on both counts though. I wouldn’t bother going again and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. It felt like a place that sad, lonely men went to talk to pretty young girls. And no photos allowed unless you paid extra. Of course Trevor took a sneaky shot.
Next on the list is the Japanese Sword Museum, Trevor’s request when I asked him what he wanted to see or do. So that involved walking up the street to Akihabara station to take the yellow line 2 stops to Ryogoku station, by the river and the Sumo Arena. I must have been off in a dream because I saw the river and the crowds near a very big building, I even commented on it. Didn’t get off at Ryogoku station though did we!! Had to get off at the next stop and double back. Saw a couple of Sumo walking towards the Arena and Trevor posed with a Sumo statue.
Our choice was to walk along the road or through the Kyu-Yasuda garden, so we chose the garden and so glad we did. Japanese gardens are a cut above, simply beautiful. In the small lake were so many turtles and lots of big Koi, and a few ducks swimming around.
The sword museum was actually in the grounds, so it worked out well.
Trevor really enjoyed watching a video of the forging of the swords and perusing all the swords on display. They were works of art.
My phone battery was starting to get low so I quickly scribbled out the trains we had to take to get ‘home’. From Ryogoku it was back to Akihabara on the yellow line again, then switch to a light blue line to get back to Tokyo station. We couldn’t see the sign for the line and we were looking at the notes and all around the platform when a sweet elderly Japanese man asked us if we needed help. We told him we needed the light blue line to Tokyo station so he took us to the stairs that led down to where we needed to be. His English was pretty good but heavily accented, even so we managed to have a little chat along the way and he wished us well for the rest of our trip. It’s what they do here – help whenever they can. We try to do the same at home, but at home, nobody forms into an orderly queue to get on an escalator! From Tokyo station we jumped on the orange line back to Yokohama and blue line back to Minatomirai for the Ghibli shop, where I could have done some serious damage to the credit card!!
Another konbini dinner and another baseball game on TV saw our day out.
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