Ghibli Museam, Shinjuku, and Nakano - June 24
We checked out of the ryokan in Asakusa in the morning and headed off to Mitaka for the Ghibli Museum. It was a reasonably short ride and we didn't have any real problems getting there. We arrived at the museum before noon so there was no real line to get in. I presented the tickets I had gotten from a travel agency back in the States, and we got in without a problem.
The museum was pretty cool. There were no tours or anything, they just let you wander around. The first room we stopped in had a wall with plaques for each Ghibli movie and we were all surprised at how many Ghibli movies not one of us had seen. It was a dark room, and there were some cool exhibits scattered here and there. A few movies were being played with real film, and there was a moving display with a strobe light flashing on it to give it that animated framerate.
There was at least one school field trip there, and there were a ton of kids running around. There were people of all ages, however, and a good chunk of foreigners. We even ran into a guy from Tennessee who was visiting with his family. Apparently he had grown up in Japan, but his English was perfect. He took a picture of us in front of a giant statue of the robots from Laputa: Castle in the Sky, which none of us had watched at the time. One of the coolest things to see, though, was a small room in which they made what appeared to be original storyboards for Ponyo and Arriety available for visitors to page through. I found it very cool to be able to browse through these books and try to decipher the notes that covered each page.
After browsing for a while, we grabbed ice cream at the food places in the museum and prepared to move on to Shinjuku. Our first order of business in Shinjuku was to find a hotel for the night, and we wandered for a while hoping that one would jump out at us. We ended up wandering through the red-light district of Kabukicho in the afternoon, so all that awaited us was a bunch of hourly love hotels. After some discussion we decided to table the hotel and search for the ざうお (zauo) restaurant instead, where we planned to eat dinner. It turned out that the restaurant was on the lower floors of the massive Shinjuku Washington Hotel, and we figured we might as well stay there. We decided we could squeeze into a 2-person room to save money, and ended up getting the room for the remaining 3 nights we planned to spend in Tokyo. The hotel ended up working out great, and had a great view to boot. It even had direct access to the network of underground walkways that stretched across Shinjuku and connected us to Shinjuku Station.
After grabbing the room we decided to head to nearby Nakano and hit up the Nakano Broadway building, a multi-story complex with plenty of anime and manga goods. We browsed through a bunch of the shops and even played some Mario Kart in one of the arcades. Everyone bought some manga, but we decided to leave the heavy shopping for when we got to Akiba. We hit up a meal ticket restaurant for dinner on the way back to the station, where you buy a meal ticket from a vending machine out front and give it to the chef when you walk in. He calls out each dish as he makes it and you pick up your food when its ready. It was a neat system and a solid meal.
We headed back to Shinjuku Station after dinner, and we soon learned how complex the underground tunnel system in Shinjuku was. Shinjuku Station is one of the busiest stations in Tokyo, with almost ever line stopping there, and is therefore quite massive. We gave it our best shot, but ended up surfacing in a completely unfamiliar spot. I decided to stop at a vending machine for drinks while we tried to find our way back to the hotel, and we ended up sitting on the curb by the machine for a few hours just talking people watching.
Eventually we moved on and made it back to the hotel. There was only enough room on the bed for 3 (sleeping perpendicular to the length of the bed), so we had a coin-flipping tournament seeded by fortune (from the shrine in Asakusa) to determine who slept on the ground. Kirt, with "bad fortune", ended up winning. Go figure. This meant that Brian, Tim, and I had to rotate sleeping on the ground for the 3 nights we were there, and Tim went first.
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