If New York is the city that never sleeps, Tokyo is one that doesn’t even dim the lights. Some of the best parts of the trip were simply wandering around the city. It’s overwhelming how much there is to see and do there. And unlike some big cities, the streets are impeccably clean, it doesn’t smell bad, people are incredibly nice, and there’s no homeless people (where do they go?)

The clean part is what I don’t get. There’s not a speck of trash to be seen in a city full of smokers and vending machines. So there must be trash cans everywhere, right? Wrong. There’s hardly any to be seen, and if you do happen to see one, it’s of course, miniature. Where does it all go?!

Ginza Shopping and Entertainment District

After we finished our half day tour of Tokyo, our tour bus dropped us off right in the heart of Ginza, one of Tokyo’s biggest shopping districts. Most of the stores here are luxury brands from around the world (Gucci, Prada) as well as several American brands (Abercrombie & Fitch, GAP). Pretty much everything that we have back home – but bigger and glitzier.

Each large building contains several stores – or even whole department stores.

Large crosswalk intersections in Tokyo come from all sides, with pedestrians converging in the middle, which is cutely named a “scramble”. You’d think it would be chaotic and uncomfortable for the overly-polite Japanese, but there’s hardly any people-crashing, and it’s overall very efficient. “Scrambles” are fun. We “scrambled” several times, sometimes just for the sake of “scrambling”. (Image courtesy of Getty Images)

You can even get into these things called “People Jams” at rush hour which I secretly wanted to be part of even though I knew that was something to avoid.

Some of the streets in Ginza are closed on weekends for pedestrians, so we had some fun taking photos.

I think this may be one of my favorite photos of us.

I had one of those “I CAN’T BELIEVE I’M IN TOKYO!” moments. The city is so surreal. It all felt like a dream when I woke up the first day I came back from my trip.

There was a guy handing out samples of bamukuchen, which are popular layered cakes in Japan.

If you were to ask me what Ginza smelled like, I would say it smelled like this – a mix of sweet scents wafting from freshly baked goods in high-end pastry shops. Well, maybe not these pastries, since these are plastic. Looking at plastic food still makes me hungry.

Nissan Showcase

Nissan had a showcase in Ginza, which we wandered into to see the new, all-electric, Nissan Leaf. It will be coming to the US in Dec 2010.

Mike trying out the car – but suddenly remembering that the driver’s seat is on the other side.

Car batteries.

Yeah, I’ll take it.

Sony Showcase

Sony’s flagship store/showcase is also in Ginza. There’s consultants sitting on every floor to assist you with your purchase (they’re like car dealers or something). It was pretty cool to see the entire family of Sony products, especially new technologies and things exclusive to Japan.

There was a demo for something called “Party Cam”, which was live video that would take pictures once it recognized a face – it’s fast and accurate, too. Mike’s trying to throw it off by covering half of his face.

The people behind us are wondering what the crazy Americans are up to.

Nifty new Sony video camera with flip up screen.

An interactive exhibit to help you quickly realize how inferior your current TV screen size is.

Japanese personal electronics are really…personal. I noticed a lot of glittery, shiny things targeted towards women.

Akihabara “Electric Town”

One of the things we were looking forward to the most in Japan was going to Akihabara, a district in Tokyo where anything and everything electronic is sold.

Akihabara is nuts. If something could have a blinking light on it, it did. There were tower after tower of electronic stores, enormous arcades, anime stores, and ads blaring out of loudspeakers (the Japanese are very quiet people – until they advertise). The whole place felt like Vegas on steroids.

You tend to get lost in Akihabara – in a feel-good, boozed-up-in-Vegas kind of way. Every store looks and feels identical – dense, colorful, and seizure-inducing.

We spent a while in one of the large department stores that sold something different on every floor (Digital cameras on floor 2, TVs on floor 3, and so on). This store was 7 stories high. And this was only one of the several department stores in Akihabara.

The Japanese can definitely tolerate and process more light, sound, and density than my poor American eyes can take.

At stores like this, you see the sign before you even see the product. The way everything is organized and displayed makes it feel like a secondhand store, when in fact everything is more expensive there than it is here.

Pentax apparently makes SLR in every color of the rainbow. You can even get say, a lime green camera body, and a bright pink lens. Then again, cameras are more than welcome in Japan – I never got stopped for taking photos like I do here. The last thing you want in the States is a brightly colored camera to get you noticed.

You never, ever see Macs displayed this way in the States. There are very few Apple stores or kiosks there, so this is how I saw most Apple products. Even so, I felt pretty proud that Apple is from America – with so much great technology in Japan, Apple products still seemed more advanced.

For some odd reason, they do this thing where they display more than one item of each product – sometimes marked at different prices, sometimes not. Maybe this is second hand, I don’t know.

Phones are a big deal in Japan, and they do much more than ours. I’ve seen people buy drinks at vending machines with them, and swipe their phone across the gates at the metro to get in and out. There’s also a LOT of different cell phones to choose from, and unlike our system, it doesn’t look like cell phones tied to a carrier. Cell phones come in every crazy shape and color you can possibly imagine, and the lifespan on these things are about a year. Newer is always better. I think the phone on the left is very Lady Gaga.

Logitech is called Logicool there because the name Logitech is already taken in Japan. I thought it was hilarious to see an entire section of Logicool branded stuff.

We came across a store that sold lights. ONLY LIGHTS. Every lightbulb you can ever want, ever.

It feels like Akihabara runs on more electricity than anywhere else in the world.

Mike likes lights. A lot.

The biggest collection of indicator lights you’ve ever seen.

The biggest collection of switches you’ve ever seen.

Need wires heat shrink tubing? (Correction by Mike)

Only in Japan.

Like any big city, there’s people handing out flyers. But in Japan, people are so polite, they kindly ask if you want a flyer, and apologize if you look like you don’t want one.

I saw a bunch of people dressed up like this (lolitas?) – probably because Akihabara is a teen hangout.

There are dedicated rooms just for vending machines and smoking. It’s like they’re trying to contain the dirty part of the city in spots like this – which are of course, sparkling clean.

We walked down the steps to this store, just to walk back up. Hentai is weird stuff.

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