Day 8 in Japan: A Piano playoff at the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building

Brent, Joel, Ciaran, and I began our day at Senso-ji, the oldest temple in Tokyo. Dedicated to the Bodhisattva Kannon, the complex is known for its iconic five-story pagoda and is believed to be the most visited religious site in the world. Compared to the temples we saw on previous days, it has an uncharacteristically steep roof, and photography is allowed inside (though I would say there is not much of a point to it as the interior is not very ornate). Brent and Joel went to one of the wooden stands to buy omikuji: paper sheets with random fortunes written on them. According to tradition, if the fortune on the sheet is bad, the person who bought it can tie it to a nearby rack and it will be burned by a priest.

From Senso-ji, we continued by metro to the gardens of the Imperial Palace. These are freely accessible to the public, and the only holdup at the gate is the security check. The gardens themselves are not particularly scenic. There is a large walled mound within the complex that used to be the base of the largest fort in Japan, but this building was pulled down after the country’s unification. The palace itself can be visited, but tickets must be booked far in advance or acquired by queueing at a specific hour of the day in very limited numbers, and we did not think our chances of succeeding at the latter were very high. It became the residence of the imperial family in 1868 during the Meiji Restoration, when Shogun Tokugawa Yoshinobu was turned out of the building.

Since Joel and Brent had lunch plans, we split into pairs. In addition to having lunch, the two of them went to see an exhibition of tanuki statues, which depict a mythologised version of Japanese racoon dogs with outsized testicles that, according to legend, these animals use to store money, bounce around, and even fly. Meanwhile, Ciaran and I took the metro to Prince Shiba Park. We did not expect much from the park itself, but it was nice and cozy, with a well-shaded little hill and a large clearing from which we took pictures of the iconic Tokyo Tower. The tower was built in 1958 using the Eiffel Tower as inspiration, but unlike the Eiffel Tower, it is painted red and white to comply with air safety regulations.

Because Prince Shiba Park is a little out of the way for most tourists, Ciaran and I struggled to find a restaurant that would cater to my vegetarianism. The first restaurant we found was hopelessly full, with a long line snaking across the pavement and doubling back on itself until the streetcorner. A little farther away, we found a sushi restaurant advertising a vegetarian menu, but after sitting down we were told that we could only order from the lunch menu, which was all fish. Finally, we called it quits and sat down at a ramen place, where I tried to communicate the concept of vegetarianism in a few sentences of broken Japanese (the waitress seemed unfamiliar with what I thought was the Japanese word for “vegetarian”). In the end, I ordered some dipping noodles and gave my one slice of chicken to Ciaran. Unfortunately, the waitress noticed that I was not dipping my noodles in the chicken broth and showed me how to do it, after which she spent the whole of our meal hovering around to make sure I was eating them properly. I was left no choice but to pretend to dip my noodles, all the while going “hmmm yum, yum.”

In the afternoon, Ciaran and I visited the two observatories of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building. On a clear day, these offer views of Mount Fuji, but we were not in luck. We were, however, in luck for all the various accoutrements of the place, which included a café serving matcha ice-cream that Ciaran simply had to try. The second observatory also had a grand piano for visitors. When we arrived, a middle-aged man was playing cover after cover of Queen hits, but as he was going through the final bars of Radio Ga Ga, a challenger emerged in the form of a prim lady with long grey hair. She walked through the pathway created by the retractable belt stanchions, gave the man a short tepid clap when he finished, and almost impatiently switched him out at the piano for a lightning-fast rendition of Chopin’s Fantaisie-Impromptu.

The crowd attracted by this concert piece did not faze the first pianist in the slightest. He merely walked back to the front of the one-person queue and waited for his turn, which came soon enough – both because the lady had been very fast, and because there was a five-minute limit for each performance, which the two uniformed ladies in charge of the piano strictly enforced (in fact, there was a whole list of rules about how to use the piano, which the ladies showed visitors when they lingered by the stanchions). Ciaran and I spent perhaps twenty minutes entranced by this piano playoff of pop songs alternating with Chopin and Beethoven. At one point, a large American tourist sat down and eased the tension with a bit of Jazz, but as soon as he left the two musical maniacs were at it again. At long last, Ciaran and I left about six or seven songs into the contest.

We reunited with Brent and Joel at a temple near Akihabara and continued to Akihabara itself to meet Kevin. Foreign tourists know this part of Tokyo mostly for its video game stores and maid cafes, which enlist women wearing animal ears and tails or dressed as children (and in some cases both) to advertise in the streets. I was glad I did not have to spend too much time there, as I was set to meet another friend in Ginza, but from what I have been told, Kevin and Brent took a full half-an-hour trying to save the president’s daughter from kidnappers on a gaming machine from the nineties. Over this span of time, they fed the machine about one dinner’s worth of coins.