Tokyo - 26th & 27th August 2022
26th August
We arrived in Tokyo on the 26th, and stayed at the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Nihonbashi-Muromachi, which had quite an impressive view, although it was still raining when we arrived, but soon cleared up.
The Tokyo Skytree in the distance was always helping to orient the view (it's the third highest structure in the world).
At night, several of the buildings had an identical blue sign, it turned out these were all buildings in the same hotel chain.
That afternoon we visited a paper shop, Ozu Washi, which had lots of hand-made paper. Unfortunately they had a sign which said no photographs, which I hadn't seen until after I took this one of their more decorative papers, hopefully taking just the edges of the papers wasn't too bad!
27th August
The plan for the first full day in Tokyo was to get up early and go see the Toyosu fish market over near the docks.
On the way (via the automated raised Yurikamome sightseeing train - it looks like a monorail, but is actually more like a guided bus) was this large building shaped like a ship - the Tokyo Museum of Maritime Science.
Sadly it appears we needed to get up a lot earlier to see the actual fish at the market, so all we got to see was a large empty warehouse and some crates. But there was a model of a tuna fish to get an idea of how big they are (human added for scale). Also pictured is ‘Itchino’, the mascot for the moving of the fish market to the new site (to make way for the 2020 Olympics). Because everything in Japan has a mascot!
