It’s 4:00am and I Have Questions #
The Uber arrived at 4:00am. It was a Tesla. It was my first time in a Tesla. I had approximately four hundred questions about the car and I asked exactly none of them - for the first twenty minutes or so. About ten minutes from the airport I couldn’t contain myself any longer. I asked about the car. The driver was gracious about it. I have no regrets.
The kids were inexplicably alert. On a normal day, waking either of them before 10:00am is taking my life into my hands. Apparently international travel operates on different rules.
Three flights stood between us and Japan. The first was a short domestic hop to Toronto Pearson. The second - the one on the 737 Max 8 - took us to O’Hare in Chicago. We had two and a half hours to kill, which was exactly enough time to find food. The terminal had the usual options - chains, diners, pretzels, the full airport experience. And then we spotted a place doing takeaway deep dish pizza. I turned to the kids.
“You do know Chicago is famous for deep dish pizza,” I said. “Since we’re here anyway.”
It tasted like airport pizza. It was fine. But I went to Chicago and I had deep dish pizza, and I’m counting that, and nobody can take it from me.
The third flight was fourteen hours to Tokyo Haneda on a Boeing 787 Dreamliner - the biggest plane I’ve ever been on. The seating was a 3x3x3 configuration, which gave me what I thought was a brilliant idea. I convinced my wife to take a seat in the middle section where she’d have easy aisle access, while I sat with the kids in our own row. My logic: she could get in and out without bothering anyone, I could rotate the kids to the window seat when they wanted a look, and if I needed out I wouldn’t be climbing over strangers.
I thought I’d pulled off the scam of the century.
She agreed surprisingly quickly. In retrospect, this should have been my first warning.
My wife watched movies, caught up on shows, and napped. The couple she was seated with were seasoned travellers - easy, pleasant, no drama. She had a lovely flight.
A comedian once pointed out that everyone should be amazed by flying. You’re sitting in a chair. In the sky. I’ve taken that to heart and I stand by it - fourteen hours to Japan? Bring it on.
I was managing two kids who were, prior to this, relatively untested on long haul flights, on the longest international flight I’d personally ever taken. The boredom set in immediately. There were technical difficulties with their devices. The movies they’d downloaded didn’t work. I troubleshot entertainment systems at 35,000 feet for an indeterminate amount of time.
My wife is a shrewd negotiator.
Welcome to Japan, Please Have an IC Card #
Before leaving Haneda we picked up Welcome Suica cards - IC cards that work as contactless payment across essentially every transit system in Japan. The Japlan had a full page on this, including recommended balances per person calculated in both yen and Canadian dollars, and a map of exactly where to find the vending machines in the terminal.
I told the family I’d go get the cards and asked them to wait for me. There was a row of seats directly in front of us. I left. I assumed they would sit in those seats.
They did not sit in those seats.
There is no page in the Japlan for this. 73 pages of preparation, and not one of them covers “family will silently relocate to an undisclosed location in an unfamiliar airport in a foreign country while you are standing in a lineup.” I have since identified this as a gap in the documentation.
What I had also not accounted for was that my brilliant insight of “get IC cards at Haneda to make things easier later” was apparently everyone else’s brilliant insight too. The lineup was considerable. Procuring four cards took significantly longer than expected. I came back to where I thought the family would be. They were not there. I hadn’t activated their international SIMs yet, so I couldn’t call anyone. We had cleared customs approximately twenty minutes ago and I was already having a full blown panic attack.
Ten minutes of frantic searching later, I found them.
I exercised what I believe to be remarkable restraint by not losing my cool. At least not too badly. I hope.
Must Resist the Urge to Wrestle #
We arranged an airport limo from Haneda - which is not a limo, just a nice car with a professional driver. This turned out to be one of the better decisions of the trip. We had heard horror stories about foreigners navigating Japanese public transit with too much luggage, and I was not about to be those people. The airport limo was, as far as I could tell, the only vehicle in Japan actually large enough to accommodate what we’d brought. Every other cab we took for the rest of the trip, the driver would open the trunk, look at our bags, look at us, and fold a seat down with the quiet resignation of someone who has seen things.
The drive to the hotel took about an hour. We watched Tokyo materialize outside the windows. Nobody said much. We were all running on fumes and adrenaline.
The Dai-ichi Hotel Ryogoku looks exactly like a western hotel, which is what we booked so I wasn’t bothered. The lobby is unassuming - except for the full size sumo ring embedded in the floor. A real one, regulation size, right there in the lobby. I believe it’s meant for guests to appreciate the scale of the sport in person.
I stood at the edge of it and briefly imagined squaring off in the ring - against who, I’m not sure, my wife maybe, one of my kids - and then I imagined that this being Ryogoku, the sumo district, the hotel probably had a professional sumo wrestler on standby for exactly this kind of situation. Just waiting behind a door somewhere. Ready.
I stepped away from the ring. It was the right call.
Check-in was its own adventure. The staff at the front desk were lovely and genuinely helpful - they just didn’t speak any English. They used Google Translate. I used Google Translate. We pointed phones at each other for several minutes and somehow made it work.
I walked away from the desk with a room key and a mental note to prepare some phrases in advance for the rest of the trip. Useful ones. Practical ones. Things like “which way to Akihabara?” and “my family seems to have wandered away, can you please help me find them?”
In a strange way though, I loved it. I’ve travelled before, but I’ve always gone to places where English is spoken in some capacity - where the language barrier is partial at worst. Standing in a hotel lobby genuinely unable to communicate without a phone pointed at someone felt different. It felt like we’d really gone somewhere. Like this was a proper adventure.
The Volume Knob Remains a Mystery #
Faulty logic, maybe. The hotel looked like it could have been a Holiday Inn. There was just the one sumo ring in the lobby.
The rooms were a reasonable size - much better than the chain hotel we’d originally booked and cancelled, where the rooms had looked barely large enough to store our luggage let alone live in. We’d asked for adjoining rooms with a connecting door. We got adjoining rooms. We did not get a connecting door. I’m not sure if this was lost in translation or if connecting doors simply aren’t a thing - either way, I was in one room and my wife was in the other.
The AC controls turned out to be a small vintage unit on the bedside console - solidly 1980s hardware by the look of it. No snowflake symbol, no blue for cold, nothing that corresponded to any North American equivalent. I used Google Lens to translate the display, got back a word that was technically English but not obviously related to temperature control, made my best guess, and it worked. I did not think to mention this to my wife before she went to sleep in the next room.
Her first night in Japan was spent in conditions I can only describe as aggressively humid. I felt bad about this.
This is also when I discovered the bathroom phone.
There was a phone in the bathroom. A volume knob too, labeled “VOLUME CONTROLLER,” which raised more questions than it answered. Every time I went in there I thought about picking up the phone. I never did. My specific concern was that it was a direct line to the front desk and if I picked it up and immediately hung up, they would assume I’d fallen and couldn’t get up and would send someone. I was not willing to find out if this was correct.
Japan runs on 110V AC, which meant no adapters needed - a genuine gift. I did notice that none of the outlets appeared to have grounding prongs, which is the kind of thing most people don’t clock but I couldn’t unsee once I’d seen it. Japan has sorted so many things so elegantly and then there’s just - ungrounded outlets, apparently. I chose not to think about it too hard.
The phone remained unpicked-up for the entire week. The volume knob remains a mystery to this day.
It Was Still Daylight (And We Had a Mission) #
We’d been in Japan for approximately two hours when I made an executive decision.
It was still daylight. The family had just survived three flights and twenty four hours of travel. The easy call was to say “ok, everyone to bed” - and I was absolutely not making that call. The sun was out. We had IC cards. The Japlan had accounted for this exact window of free time. And our hotel was ridiculously well positioned - walk to Ryogoku station, two stops east, you’re in Aki.
I had reasons. Getting to Aki on Day One guaranteed we’d make it there at least once, in case something forced a pivot later in the week. It also meant we’d start figuring out the transit system immediately rather than dreading it. And - I won’t pretend this wasn’t part of the calculation - maybe, just maybe, we’d find Monoma on Day One and the whole quest would be over before it started.
I should explain Monoma.
Before we left for Japan, we’d sat the kids down and given them an assignment. In Mexico they’d spent their souvenir budget on novelty trinkets - the kind of things that seem essential in the moment and end up in a drawer by the time you clear customs. We weren’t doing that again. Each of them had to identify one thing - a memento, something meaningful - that they wanted to find and bring home.
My oldest daughter knew immediately. She wanted a specific figure of Monoma from My Hero Academia - his signature unhinged villain laugh pose. If you know, you know.
We would not find Monoma on Day One. We would not find him on Day Two, or Three, or Four. What followed over the next two weeks was a quest. Thirty five figure stores - conservatively - across Tokyo, Nakano, and Kyoto. Every lull in the Japlan became an opportunity. Every Aki detour had Monoma as the primary objective.
But we didn’t know that yet. We just knew we were going to Akihabara.
Ryoguku is Not Ryogoku #
Getting to Aki from our hotel should have been simple. Walk to Ryogoku station - the JR station, east-west line, two stops to Akihabara. Straightforward.
There are two stations in the area. Ryogoku and Ryoguku. One runs north-south. One runs east-west. We wanted east-west.
You can probably guess what we did.
We tapped our IC cards, went through the gate, looked at the platform, and said oh no. We tried to go back through the gate. This did not work. We ended up in a conversation with a subway worker in a booth who had, based on his energy, seen this exact mistake from foreigners approximately four hundred times and was not delighted to see it again. We stumbled through an explanation using Google Translate and a lot of apologetic bowing. He sorted us out. We were grateful and embarrassed in equal measure.
To be fair to ourselves: we had been awake for the better part of a day, had eaten airport deep dish, and were attempting to navigate a foreign transit system on pure enthusiasm. I can’t blame him for being tired of us. We were being a bit ridiculous.
We Are Not in Canada Anymore #
We made it to the right station eventually, and from there it was two stops to Akihabara.
The contrast between the two Ryogoku stations is worth noting. The north-south one - the one we accidentally tried to use - feels like something straight out of Exit 8. If you haven’t played it, it’s a horror game set in a seemingly endless Japanese subway station that went viral for perfectly nailing the vibe. Liminal, slightly unsettling, the kind of place where you expect something to be slightly wrong. Which, for us, it was.
The east-west line feels different - more of an elevated subway, open air, perfectly functional. Cool in its own way, but not distinctly Japanese in the way you’re hoping for on your first evening in the country.
Akihabara station is something else entirely.
It’s massive. Escalators everywhere, people moving in every direction, food options in every corner, anime-inspired advertisements covering every available surface. Every escalator had a sign warning about people taking upskirt photos - blunt, matter of fact, on every single one. Notably, this was specific to Akihabara. I have working theories about why. Most of them involve maid outfits and cosplay. The theory remains untested, and probably for the best considering the subject matter.
I wanted to photograph the signs but could never find a moment in four visits when it wasn’t packed enough to make that feel like a reasonable thing to do. You’ll have to take my word for it.
We were not in Canada anymore. After thirty five years of wanting to go to Japan, standing in Akihabara station on the first evening, it suddenly felt completely real.
One Hundred Dollars of Tiny Plates #
I’ll write about Akihabara properly another time - it deserves its own post, and we went back enough times that there’s plenty to say. What I’ll say about Day One is that we wandered, we looked at everything, my daughter spotted a specific figure cube in a specific shop and said “I want to check that one out later” - and we never found that cube again.
The secondary quest had begun.
I also made the mistake of suggesting we eat at a restaurant near the main strip.
One hundred and twelve dollars Canadian. Tiny plates. Two drinks.
This is how we learned, on our very first evening in Japan, that tourist areas do not make for good food choices. Japan has extraordinary food everywhere - you just have to walk thirty seconds off the main drag to find it at a fraction of the price. (Any reddit post surrounding travel to Japan says exactly this. I generally take everything reddit says with a grain of salt, but there is truth in this particular suggestion)
I Don’t Know What I Expected #
We got back to the hotel. I had another look at the bathroom phone. Nope, not chancing it.
The shower, after twenty four hours of travel, was transcendent. The water pressure was phenomenal - I’m not sure why I expected anything less, but it caught me off guard anyway.
I went to bed having been awake for somewhere around twenty two hours. Japan had been open for business for approximately four hours and had already exceeded every expectation.
Day Two was going to be something.