2025-11-18

After all of about three hours of sleep due to the aforementioned ear problems, I managed to find a 24-hour pharmacy and some hardcore Japanese cold medicine with basically every pain and congestion-relief ingredient known to modern science. It got me up and going so we could head into Shibuya and meet up with some friends from home who’re traveling in Japan at the same time.

It was definitely a slog, and no one had much energy left by the end of the day, but we made it.

Shinjuku

For the first leg of the trip we’re staying in Shinjuku, about a mile east of the main train station.

It’s a busy ward, but we’re staying in a quieter neighborhood near the big public garden with some nice cafes and walking routes. (Not that I’ve found many places in Tokyo that weren’t eminently walkable.)

Shibuya

We ventured into Shibuya to check out the famous “scramble” and take the kids to the “Pokemon Center” where they designed their own T-shirts and bought gifts for the friends back home.

teamLab

This was the main activity we planned with our friends from back home. There are a bunch of teamLab installations around Japan; this one is called “Borderless”, and was basically a huge set of live light painting and projection exhibits.

Several featured very traditional Japanese folk characters and styles, but the tech was 100% modern: thousands and thousands of high-resolution projectors, RGB LEDs inside globes and on long strings, and (our favorite) a tea house where overhead cameras detected the location of your food and drink on the table and projected animated flowers, vines, and butterflies growing out of and around it.