Baby, It's Cold Outside

The temperature seems to be dropping every minute we stay in Japan, particularly after the sun goes down.

We first took the subway up to Akihabara this morning to check out the Sega building for some fun games. We basically arrived at rope drop (10:00) and could have had our pick of anything including a new version of some game called After School Audition, which appeared to be some kind of DDR dance game type thing with school girls as characters. Whereas Americans queue to catch a glimpse of the latest Battlefield or Call of Duty games, the Japanese seem to favor fantasy and dancing. In any event, Nicole and I didn't play anything. Nicole was still bitter about being foiled with the crane games during her last visit. #rigged #blamerussia
After Sega, we checked out lenses and cameras at Yodobashi Camera, but came out empty handed. There was a compact digital camera that Nicole liked, but discovered the menus were only available in Japanese.

After Akihabara, we continued to the Yasukuni shrine, a site famous (or infamous) for its political controversies. To summarize quickly, it is a shrine dedicated to the spirits (kami) of Japanese war dead, particularly those from WWII. Numerous Japanese prime ministers have visited the site to honor these war dead, which is seen as a slap in the face to China and Korea, who suffered war crimes and other atrocities under Japanese occupation. We briefly set foot inside the Yushukan museum next to the shrine, but didn't get past the lobby. Like many sites referencing the war in Japan, there's a bit of revisionism -- without taking any responsibility for the war or acknowledging the consequences of their actions. In the brochure I picked up, it mentioned the small Ohka jet aircraft that was used by Japanese pilots to attack American vessels. Nowhere is it mentioned that this was purely a suicide aircraft flown by kamikazes, but sometimes the details just aren't important . . .

Later in the evening, we walked through the Shiodome subway stop to see these christmas lights and then continued on to Akabanebashi to see the Tokyo Tower, which was also supposed to have a display starting at 730p, so we went to look for dinner first. Nicole had a hankering for pizza, so we had a place picked out, but despite the available tables and chairs, we were told by the host that because we didn't have a reservation, we couldn't be seated. This is because Italians are, by nature, quite lazy and do not want to do any more work than they have to.


We killed some time and returned to the subway stop just to stay warm until it approached 730. For whatever reason, the winter display on the Tokyo Tower is a single heart that lights up on the side of the observation deck. I guess it is a sort of tradition for couples to visit the base of the tower when the lights shut off at midnight as it is considered good luck and eternal happiness to witness this event. But in the winter, one only has to stay up to 730pm, to see the lights turned off and the heart lit up. We then had pizza at a restaurant next to our hotel since we could no longer handle the cold. And that is that.