10- Asakusa / Karaoke in Shibuya

Asakusa Batting Cages Saturday, 2pm. We were supposed to meet Kenji at 1pm. Since most of the day was lost to Friday night, we decided to move to 3pm. I made a quick coffee in these cool disposable pourover things^[1] and we were off to Asakusa to see a cool area of Tokyo for a walk, some shopping, [light] day drinking and batting cages.

We were late, so Adrien decided to naruto run^[2] to speed up- it didn’t help. Kaminarimon Gate. This place felt straight out of the 80s. Everything seemed retro. The roads are wide here and there are a bunch of men carrying people in wagon-carts. I didn’t really notice them, they just blended into the tourism collage, so I forgot to take a picture and regretted it after. Dylan said that it was a crazy job and one of the cart guys heard him, pointed at himself with the most psycho smile and said “YES, CRAZY” and for the first time I felt unsafe in Japan. This would’ve been more concerning if we didn’t have a tendency to bring strangers to the edge of snapping so we shrugged it off and made our way through the area. There was a cool gate and then some shopping in the lead up to a temple. Definitely worth checking out on a nice day^[3].

Theres a really cool intersection with a view of Tokyo Skytree. Apparently temples like these are incredibly wealthy- they get donations by the second because they have coin buckets and they sell talismans and assorted souvenirs. Combine that with not paying taxes. A peak finance job in Japan is managing temple funds, they are huge accounts at many firms. Although I’m notoriously unimpressed by temples I was moved to take some pictures of it (below ^[4]). https://maps.apple.com/?ll=35.713295,139.794328&q=Taito%20-%20Asakusa