Tokyo is large and contains multitudes. Actually, large is an almost comical understatement: Tokyo is an endless conglomeration of distinct patches of hundred-storey buildings connected by the winding streets of residential areas lined with thin, tall houses or one-room-mansion apartment buildings. Coming up on the Nozomi Shinkansen, which topped out at 300 km/h, from the cloud and blizzard obscured Mt. Fuji through Tokyo Station, the dense metropolis rolled over the bases of mountains and up to the edge of the sea without pause.

The Sunday morning newspaper slid under the door of the hotel room I shared with Miles said that the city had a Michigan-level snowfall of 25 centimeters. Imagine Saturday’s sightseeing, now. My feet were cold, snow blew into my eyes two flakes per second, and trains were delayed or stopped unpredictably, but Tokyo was gorgeous in the snow.

We arrived just after noon on Saturday to spend as little time dropping off our bags at the hotel as we could. Straightaway we went to Shinjuku to get a bite to eat and found a Korean restaurant on one of how many ninth floors connected to the train station. Then we navigated the snowy streets, cabs still whizzing by at their normal pace, to the headquarters of Square Enix and its Artnia cafe, gift shop, and museum.

That night we were taken to dinner with KCJS alumni at a French-inspired restaurant reserved just for us. I ate my fill of simple food done very well, poured beer for others so they would pour for me, and talked with people who managed to take their experience in Kyoto and turn it into a life in Japan. Mostly I listened to stories which alternated between funny and frightening. The snow continued to fall that night such that the cab companies eventually stopped operations, so it was right back to the hotel for us afterwards.

The next day, I woke up at 5:00 in the morning to go to Tsukiji fish market. But when I got downstairs to meet up with the professor who was taking us, she told us that Tsukiji is actually closed on Sundays. I went back to bed.

That was the last disappointment on Sunday, however. After a Japanified continental breakfast, I went with a couple of friends down to Yokohama to see the port and to go to the largest Chinatown in Japan. While the snow was deep, the sky was clear and blue and it got warm quickly.

Yokohama really doesn’t look like Japan to me. Downtown near the port looked like an American city—the snow and water made me think of Chicago—and Chukagai looks like Chinatown should.

After Yokohama was the Tokyo Skytree: we didn’t go up because it was gonna cost ¥3500 and that’s extortionary, but I was made to feel small and took this picture.

Evening falling, the group I was with went to an indoor amusement park that I wasn’t feeling excited about, so I instead got on a subway and went to an Andy Warhol exhibit at the Mori Museum of Art on the 53rd floor of Roppongi Hills’ Mori Tower. While I think Warhol’s Pop Art can lack emotional power, I enjoyed this exhibit greatly for three reasons:

1) I hadn’t seen Warhol’s later works that return somewhat to handmade art with drawings superimposed over screen-printed photographs; check out the Endangered Animals series.
2) The commerciality of his work juxtaposed brilliantly with the Roppongi area, one of Tokyo’s most upscale shopping and nightlife areas. The women dressed up to go to the museum could have been hung on the walls.
3) One of the rooms had one large window, the lights dimmed, and aluminum balloons floating around the room like clouds over the twinkling city of Tokyo.

Then from Roppongi I decided to retrace old footsteps in Azabu Juban, where Connor’s family lived when Mom and I visited nine years ago. At first I recognized nothing but the way I felt about the area: a homey international hamlet with real personality, populated by real people eating at real restaurants and shopping at real grocery stores—all with towering skyscrapers above the treeline.

I had a light dinner and a glass of wine at a nice little place off the main drag and rested my feet for a while. But when I was finished, I found myself at the subway station and followed instinct to walk up a tall hill, past a fenced in schoolyard and down a thin street to take a creepy picture of a house currently occupied by someone I don’t know. From there I found the conbini where I learned to buy candy in Japanese, the remarkably large Arisugawa-no-miya Memorial Park, and the many embassies in the area, then I got on the subway at Hiro-o and went back to the hotel to finally take off my shoes and rest my feet.

One very special thing that the Ghibli museum does: your normal ticket is exchanged for one that contains actual film from one of the movies, and everyone’s is different. Mine here is the scene early in Ponyo when all the miniature fish babies are conglomerating. Friends had scenes from Princess Mononoke, Howl’s Moving Castle, and Tales from Earthsea.