The park is sandwiched between the government bureaucracies of Shinjuku, (home of our hotel) and the crazed consumer culture of Harajuku, Aoyama and Shibuya. Harajuku is ground zero for Tokyo shopping and crazy people watching, and this area is highly recommended over the boring but more famous Ginza shopping strip. The main street, Omotesando, is a great walking street lined with unique shops and interesting cafes, all very expensive but also very engaging. The most fun, though, is watching the Harajuku younger crowd parading about, mostly congregating toward the park part of the street. They go to elaborate lengths to dress up in a completely unique take on fashion. When we were there, the barbie doll look was going strong (bright bleached hair, liberal use of fake tan to give skin an orange glow, and enough makeup to put Tammy Faye Bakker to shame. But there was a heavy goth/punk undercurrent as well, and a surprising number of girls dressed up in formal French chambermaid outfits. Add in a good sprinkling of wedding gowns and nurses outfits and you get the idea. These fashion trends change every couple of weeks, so I have no idea what you'll see now, but I'm sure it will be unique. And the whole thing is so hard to fathom. In the west, a punk dresses as a punk to make some statement, and cops an attitude to go along with the clothes. Here it seemed entirely skin deep and had no purpose other than to entertain themselves. You'll see the biggest activity here is various dressed to impressed teens taking pictures of each other, presumably to copy their looks next week. All very strange and entertaining.

There was a Shinto wedding ceremony while we werer there, which is a key part of most Japanese couples' elaborate wedding ceremony. The Shinto ceremony is big on ceremony and quite solemn. Most of the time this is combined with other ceremonies, like a Buddhist and Western version. The Western ceremony is weird because there are very few Christians in Japan, but Hollywood has drilled the Western wedding into the global conscience so much that few brides can resist the temptation to don a big white wedding gown and walk down the aisle, even though it carries no legal weight and there's rarely a minister or church involved. There's also of course a very elaborate tea ceremony that's integral to the whole thing. In all, a Japanese woman wouldn't be caught dead in less than 6 complete wardrobe changes on her wedding day.

For some reason most of our pics are all bleached out from this trip. They're kind of irritating to look at, so I'm going to make this short. Yoyogi Park is a massive splotch of green in the middle of the city, and a really pretty place to hang out. In the middle of the park is an old Shinto shrine, which is nice, but even if you're templed out, the park is well worth the trip just to get away from the crowds and kick back with the locals.

A couple of photos from our hotel room, high atop an office tower. As I've said before, it's not a very attractive city, but it's a unique bundle of urban energy and craziness that you'll only see here. The Park Hyatt is very much an oasis from what can be a very trying city. The magic starts with the elevator ride up, where the light gradually adjusts in the elevator to help you adjust from the bright outdoors to the moodily darkened public spaces of the hotel. The elevator opens into a three story atrium about 40 floors up, which many of you will know as the scene for much of the movie Lost in Translation. It's a very cool way to relax, particularly at night when the genteel tea drinking atmosphere gives way to a trendy bar scene. You then wind your way through a library/art exhibit space to the reception area. The rooms are large for Tokyo, have the best views of the city and are tastefully decorated, although on the plain side. Like most Park Hyatts, they reserve architectural statements for the public areas, and the rooms can be a bit disappointing. (I'm talkin' to you Park Hyatt Seoul). The swimming pool and gym at the top of the building in yet another atrium, with views in all directions, is also the epitome of cool. Park Hyatt (9)-Room-7, Facilities-9, Service-10, Wow-7 (killer views, the best mood lighting, and lots of intriguing decorating. One of the few places I actually bought some of the stuff in the hotel).

And so we shuffle away from the imperial palace, away from Tokyo, away from Japan. In most countries, I would say the capital city has nothing to do with the real country. In today's globalized environment, big city life isn't that different from continent to continent, and it's the small villages where you can really see the spirit and character of each country come through. But Japan is different, in its turbo charged path from post war devastation to economic superpower, what little is left of traditional Japan is more like an open air museum than the "real" Japan. To me, Tokyo is really what Japan is all about, frenzied, post-modern, jam packed, quirky bordering on crazy, all wrapped up in the most elaborate packaging by the most polite people on the planet.

Our final sightseeing on this marathon Japan blog is, naturally, the Imperial Palace. This was originally the shogun's palace, and unlike other castles, the complicated series of gates, moats and walls looked like they actually thought about defense when constructing this. It was the largest castle in the world until it was destroyed when the shogun was overthrown. The emperor inherited the site for his palace, and a series of new palaces were built and destroyed. The current palace dates from 1964, so it's bound to be ugly, but fortunately visitors can't catch a glimpse of it. The only open area is the impressive gardens surrounding the moat and walls of the imperial compound. Another trivial pursuit fact: In the 1980's the land value of the Imperial Palace was greater than the land value for the entire state of California.

Well, this isn't working, as predicted. The text is way too long and I could go on much longer still, so I'm going to wind this up pretty quickly and maybe meander a bit more on a subsequent Tokyo trip discussion. For now, I'll just close with two obvious sights that we visited. The first, pictured here is the Senso-ji temple in Asakusa. This was the spiritual heart of the common folk in Tokyo for centuries, but completely destroyed in WWII. It was rebuilt faithfully and continues to serve as a giant community center. At front under the huge paper lantern are Somchai and our friend Madoka from Tokyo. Importantly, at this entrance you can pick up a rickshaw, which are manned by very goodlooking Japanese athletes who are a tourist attraction on their own. After the rickshaws and the paper lantern, you proceed down a jam-packed shopping arcade and into the almost as crowded temple. The temple has all sorts of activities going on: fortune telling, people giving offerings or burning incense, students praying for good grades, etc. It's sensory overload, like Tokyo.

I guess I'll just cover a few parts of Tokyo, where we spent the most time on this trip. Pictured here is the visual monstrosity of Shinjuku, home of our boring Century Hyatt hotel. The whole of Tokyo is a cross between Las Vegas and Times Square, but it reaches its pinnacle in Shinjuku. Which is strange, because most of this area is taken up by boring government buildings. Shinjuku is considered to be the strongest foundation of any part of Tokyo, meaning it falls apart most slowly in an earthquake. For that reason, it's the only part of the city where high rise buildings are allowed. It's also home to Shinjuku's main train station. If you're feeling ambitious and staying at either of the Hyatts in Shinjuku, you can take the train from the airport into Shinjuku station. Just remember that 2 million people enter and exit that same station every day, and it's an enormous maze that ultimately leads to over one hundred exits where you can emerge into the city. But so long as you can read Japanese, you may stand a chance at finding your hotel.

33. Tokyo

And so finally we come to Tokyo, and I really have no idea how to cover Tokyo in this blog. It's one of my most favorite cities in the world, but also one of the ugliest, with very few traditional sights. So we have relatively few photos but I could write forever about the place, and since I know you prefer pictures to words, that's a problem. I also go there frequently on business, and Somchai and I have gone together a few times, so it will pop up several times if I do this chronologically, which will be pretty disjointed.

I'm going to stall for time while I figure this out by doing a (very) little history.

As I'm sure you remember from the Kyoto discussion Japan was always ruled by shoguns while the emperor played in Kyoto. There were various shogun dynasties who ruled from different cities, then generally fell during rebellions from their lieutenants, only to be replaced by a rival shogun. But the most powerful shogun dynasty of all was the Tokugawa shogunate, which ruled Japan from its base in Tokyo (then called Edo) from 1600 until 1868. Actually, a very, very distant relative of mine, Commodore Matthew Perry, was instrumental in the downfall of the shogun, as his American fleet humiliated Japan in 1853. On that date he forced Japan, which had been closed to foreigners for centuries, to open its ports to trade and establish diplomatic relations with the West. This exposed the weakness and backwardness of the shogun's regime, prompting reformers to ultimately rise up and topple him in 1868. This was done in the name of the emperor, who they then forced to move to Edo, which they renamed Tokyo. They then locked him up in the old shogun's palace, renaming it the imperial palace, and this new group modernised and militarised Japan. That's all the history you'd need to know as background to the Tokyo discussion to come, other than the fact that this increased militarism eventually led to the second world war, which led to the destruction of Tokyo, which accounts for its ugliness today.

27. Nikko

We finally left moved our base from Kyoto to Tokyo, checking in at the Century Hyatt. The Park Hyatt is one of my five favorite hotels in the world, and where I usually stay in Tokyo. Unfortunately, it was full and on this trip we ended up at the Century Hyatt, something like the Park Hyatt's ugly stepsister. The only thing the Century Hyatt shares with the Park Hyatt apart from its last name is its inconvenient location in Shinjuku. The area around Shinjuku train station is a very lively shopping and nightlife zone, but apart from that, it's mostly government skyscrapers that hold little tourist appeal, and both Hyatts are stuck in that area. But the Century Hyatt is probably ten times bigger than the Park Hyatt, and does nothing to dispel the feeling that you're in a huge bland factory of a hotel. Like our hotel in Kyoto, it's not horrible, just boringly bland, and from my blog's perspective that's the worst because I can't even write anything interesting about its faults. I'll talk about the Park Hyatt later, but I can also recommend a dozen other hotels over the Century Hyatt.

We stayed in Tokyo for about a week and also took several day trips. It's a bit confusing to go chronologically since Tokyo is interspersed among the day trips, so I'm going to put off Tokyo to the end and dive into the day trips. The first, and most impressive, was Nikko, a huge complex North of Tokyo, the gate to which is pictured above.