Day and Night in Shinjuku

Food everywhere, six-story book stores, multi-level shops, ramen and host clubs for days, After wandering around Shinjuku Gyoen Gardens at full Hanami in a state of bewildered dazzlement, I found myself wandering around Shinjuku the city.

Shinjuku looks a lot like you might imagine, like a concept-art vision of Blade Runner where the artist busted out the Good Watercolors. It’s more adult than Harajuku but still pretty Hello Kitty, with surprises like DVD stores and Mexican Food Casa Tequila as well as old standbys like an H&M where you could buy shirts with Garfield on them. Shinjuku only has everything.

While most of Shinjuku sparkled with a kind of jammed hypercompetitive bravado (Visit our ramen shop, see the Robot Restaurant! Godzilla! Movies!) graffiti and trash floated around in a couple alleys or places you weren’t supposed to notice. I liked this a lot about Shinjuku - the little punkass things in the city felt like hanging out with the goth girl who knits a sweater during the high school musical. When there’s so much panache and light and brigades of masterfully-produced Host Club trucks rolling by you, observing the graffiti feels so sweet. Getting a seat at a 6-person ramen shop feels like winning the lottery.

In buildings like the Taito Game tower above, you could play Pachinko or beefy arcade games the likes of which have never crossed the Pacific and never need to, it would all be just too much. Arcades were also packed full of claw machines, more than you could ever imagine, each claw machine containing just about anything - Sword Art Online figurines, Cup Noodles, Every Pokemon.

I’ve only been in Vegas once, during a layover on the way back to Texas after Thanksgiving. In what seemed like a more-hungover-than-usual terminal of the Vegas Airport, I tried some slot machines out with my husband Marc, mostly because they were themed after Dolly Parton. For a while I seemed to be winning, I actually was not sure what Dolly Parton was trying to communicate to me. Whatever she did, it all seemed good!

I lost, but, did I?

The Dolly Parton slots in Vegas - ahem the Vegas airport - are a bit like arcades in Shinjuku: I had no idea what I was doing but it was pretty fun! What’s ten dollars down the drain for some cool animations?

For every claw machine I tried and where I spent 10,000 yen at ineffective, frustrated grasping, I ended up spying the same stuffed animal in a shop for around 15,000 yen (about 15 or 20 bucks, not bad). All I could think was that when people go into these claw machine joints, they are remarkably okay with the thrill of the chase. Hopefully they aren’t addictive, gambling spirits, but surely, when the prizes are this cute, addiction happens. Otherwise how could there be so many damn claw machines when the logical, 15000 yen Neon Genesis Evangelion figurine can just be obtained online?

I gave it a shot. My arrhythmic heart chugged faster as I maneuvered the claw well enough to grab a Vaporeon, only to feel a brick of disappointment hit my ego when the machine inevitably flubbed the smiling stuffed creature at the last moment. Shinjuku arcade claw machines are a lot like working with computers. The machine just sort of tries its best given input, but you also know there’s a human somewhere in there who made the machine the right mix of perfect-yet-imperfect.

After the arcades I went to a bookstore in the Shinjuku Toho Building (of Godzilla-looming fame), where the bookstore became like a strange dream and the bookstore just kept going. It had not one, not two, but six floors of books, and there were so many people in the bookstore - people of all ages.

Vice in Japan at the Shinjuku Toho Tower

They had a pretty cool selection of computer science / programming magazines too! I definitely texted and slacked this one to a few friends back home:

The Python has a pretty funny hat but hey Tensorflow and Keras

In a half-real state of jetlag back in the States after my trip to Japan, I flipped through my photos while taking the Yellow Line over the Potomac to my office in Virginia. I’d taken so many shots on my poor withering iPhone 6 that I couldn’t download any new apps or conduct Evil Tests, my favorite career task when I am not on vacation. Clip Studio Paint was also crying out like a wounded antelope, wailing for More Space on my iPad, and since losing my artwork would make me jump in the Potomac, I shuffled, migrated, and sluiced all of my Japan photos off my iCloud account like my life depended on it. Shortly after this I ran out of storage space in my Gmail account, which was never intended to be Dropbox, but hey, free things have their limits.

So I had a lot of photos. While organizing the photos at Starbucks later that day, I realized that while in Shinjuku I had apparently been wandering around in circles for an entire day and deep into the night, the photo at the top of this blog being nearly the same place as this photo below, with the bright pink sign on the left standing out like a bookmark in transcontinental time.

Related Blogs:

Shinjuku Gyoen National Gardens

Nezu Gardens

Animate in Akihabara - Comics are alive in Tokyo!

Artist’s Paradise: Sekaido

Shinjuku Gyoen National Gardens March 2019

The Shinjuku Gyoen National Gardens were in full bloom when I visited on March 23rd 2019. Here are some highlights! Carefully trimmed and wild-and-free plants grow all throughout this campus of blooms in the modern ward of Shinjuku.

A bridge from island to island over a koi pond feels like a painting out of a fantasy map.

It’s only 500 yen or about $5 USD to get into Shinjuku Gyoen National Gardens. The nicest security people and policemen I’ve ever seen were outside the gates, helping everyone get through quickly and easily. It was almost like the police were entertainers with megaphones, proudly announcing the the same message over and over: “Please line up and have 500 yen ready!” I’ve never seen someone with a repetitive job perform a repetitive task with such bravado. The lines on this bright and sunny day were long but fast-moving, and full of several tourists like myself who were looking forward to seeing some blossoms.

To plan a springtime trip to Japan and hit the cherry blossom season just right, this website proved extremely helpful: https://www.japan-guide.com/sakura/ . While weather can change easily, reviewing the data on this website helped me a lot. It’s also in English!

The forecaster at japan-guide.com helps predict when cherry blossoms were opening for which cities in Japan.

You can use the guide to see average timing and a forecast to get plane tickets and plan ahead. I found that the Sakura map from Japan Guide was very precise, with some cherry blossoms in Tokyo opening as early as 3/24 this year. Since the blossoming starts in the south and moves north, it’s easy to catch a train to see spectacular views even if the blossoms aren’t open in your region of Japan yet. Airports and subways in Tokyo also have a ton of information on the best places to go to see the blooms. Like an influx of butterflies or falltime leaves on the east coast, these blossoms are an event in the truest sense!

While I love crowd photos, portraits, and people, I worked hard to get these photos of Shinjuku Gardens in bloom with as few fellow visitors as possible. Many folks were taking portraits or were just as dazzled as I was, and several standout trees had asteroid belts of photographers crowded around them. One particularly dazzling tree even had a short line, where parkgoers had voluntarily queued up for their turn at the perfect cherry blossom photo!

It’s hard not to love and adore cherry blossoms since they bring springtime to us. Living through the particular swampy misery of DC winter is worth it when you get to see cherry blossoms and tiny blooms start to form despite morning frosts. Blossoms in Japan have all the good feelings of spring associated with them as well, and I’d say that everyone is great at basking in blossom glory in both places.

I wondered for a moment if the cherry blossom obsession I was having was a sign of myself becoming a bit older and more sentimental somehow, but when I flew back to DC this changed. On the flight back from Tokyo, a very polite teenager was seated next to me. Somewhere over Russia, he put away his computer and spent 25 minutes quietly scrolling through his formal cherry blossom photos of himself and his girlfriend and applied filters with meticulous care. I didn’t mean to spy but it was hard to NOT glance over when his phone was emitting dazzling cherry blossoms in an otherwise completely dark cabin. He had the whole netless flight to get the right filter, and he revisited it a couple times. Sleep, blossom filters, sleep, blossom filters. I realized at this moment that, if you’re in Japan, or even if you’re near DC, Cherry Blossoms Are For Everyone.

Shinjuku Gyoen National Gardens is just one place to see the blossoms! Many more places in just Tokyo had amazing views: Roppongi, the resplendent Ueno park and zoo, Nezu Gardens, and just about every shrine and temple had a blossoming tree or two of its own.

Related Blogs:

DC Cherry Blossom Festival 2018

Nezu Museum Gardens

Akihabara Comics

Who wrote this?

I’m a painter, I make comics, and sometimes I do computer stuff!

- Becky Jewell