Before I get into the post, let me confirm two things to be absolutely true:
Thing #1: Sumo runs the entire day, which means we technically could have gone first thing in the morning and stayed until the final match.
Thing #2: Our children would not feign interest long enough - we’d end up leaving early out of sheer boredom before the tournament built to anything worth staying for.
So, we came up with a different plan - a genuinely well-crafted one, built entirely on prior experience with exactly these two children. Morning would go to Solamachi, where they could shop and eat their way through whatever they wanted, getting that itch fully scratched before it had a chance to surface later. Afternoon would go to Sumo, once appetites were satisfied and legs had already done their wandering for the day. The Japlan had its own must-haves lined up for the morning too - a Pokémon Centre stop, cosmetics for my daughter, and the lifesize Macross Valkyrie it had filed away back home as one of its “ambitious additions.” If I’m honest, the rest of the list was mostly cover for wanting to see a giant robot in person.
Breakfast, 7-Eleven Style #
Before any of that, there was breakfast, and breakfast meant 7-Eleven. By this point in the trip it had become a daily fixture rather than a one-off curiosity.
Somewhere back before any of this trip was even booked, a coworker had heard me joking about Japan being an impossible, unrealistic, someday-maybe-when-the-kids-are-older kind of trip, and had calmly dismantled every excuse I’d made for not going. Cherry blossom timing, room bookings, the actual cost breakdown of flights versus everything else - and then, with a specific kind of urgency that I did not understand at the time and absolutely understand now, eat the food at 7-Eleven. No, seriously. YOU HAVE TO GO TO 7-Eleven. We took that instruction seriously. We went every single day.
I’ve mentioned 7-Eleven before in this blog, so let’s actually get into the differences between 7-Eleven in Japan and Canada.
There are distinct similarities of course - the logo, the quick convenience nature of the store, the snack food and candy. (Not entirely consistent - I don’t think I could find spicy cod flavored snacks in a Canadian 7-Eleven). Where Japanese 7-Elevens shine is the prepacked food - notably famous for things like egg salad sandwiches (egg sando), onigiri (rice triangles with things like tuna stuffed in the middle), bento boxes, sushi, and an entire wall of drinks of every variety - including melon soda, which my kids fell in love with. 7-Eleven also serves as a ticket hub, a post office, and a small pharmacy. There’s no Tim Hortons drive-thru equivalent in Tokyo - locals stop at 7-Eleven on the way to work instead, and presumably on the way home too.
Instead of doing what every local around us was doing - walking in already knowing exactly what they wanted, grabbing it, paying, leaving, the entire transaction completed in under ninety seconds - we treated each visit like a tasting menu, four different people with four completely different agendas. I was there for the egg sandwich, every time, no exceptions, no negotiation. My wife fell hard for the onigiri, working her way through every filling like she was conducting a survey. I developed a genuine relationship with canned coffee that I’m not totally over yet. The kids were in it for the pastries and the frozen fruit drinks that need a solid thirty seconds of aggressive shaking before they’re drinkable, which they treated as part of the entertainment rather than an inconvenience. At some point we even talked ourselves into trying takeout natto, fully expecting to regret it, and walked away mildly surprised that it wasn’t the ordeal its reputation promised.
This is where Japanese politeness, famously bottomless everywhere else on the trip, finally hit a wall. The staff started beckoning us along - not rude, but not subtle either, the universal gesture for please, for the love of all that is holy, pick something. The people in line behind us were not even pretending to be patient anymore, doing that specific kind of polite-but-pointed sighing that needs no translation in any language. We were, unmistakably, the problem. We were the slow-moving obstacle in a system built entirely around not being one.
For the record - and I will die defending this - every single cliché about 7-Eleven food in Japan is true. All of it. The egg sandwich is exactly as good as the internet promises. I did deviate once or twice from the egg sando (usually due to lack of availability), and can confirm the strawberry and peach sandwiches were also surprisingly good. Worth every dirty look it took to find that out.
The Park Before the Mall #
The weather that morning was perfect - cool, sunny and dry, and we opted to walk to the Solamachi shopping complex instead of figuring out public transit - after all, we could see the Skytree from our hotel, how far could it be?
On the way we passed a small park along the river that stopped us without any plan to stop there. Part of the river had been stocked for public fishing, which I’d genuinely never seen before in an urban park setting - a small, clearly intentional gesture toward giving people in a dense city somewhere to actually use the water rather than just look at it. The park also sat beside a newer bridge, and rather than demolishing the old bridge’s footings when it was replaced, they’d left portions of them standing nearby - not maintained as a functioning structure, just preserved, almost like a small sculpture marking what had been there before. It wasn’t flashy and it wasn’t trying to be a destination. It just existed, doing exactly what a good small park should do.
By the time we arrived at Solamachi the day had warmed up considerably, we were hot and tired, and in need of something cold to drink.
Solamachi Itself #
Solamachi is enormous in a way that doesn’t translate well into a floor plan - it’s less a mall and more a layered ecosystem, and we got lost in it more than once trying to find our way between sections. My personal north star for the morning was the lifesize Macross Valkyrie, in GERWALK mode, because of course it was.
Before we could do anything however, we stopped early at an ice cream café featuring some kind of bubbly, impossibly cute character none of us recognized. The drinks themselves were almost too adorable to drink - elaborately presented, clearly designed to be photographed before consumed. We photographed them. Then we drank them anyway, because we were hot and they were ice cream, and reverence only goes so far in thirty degree heat.
A robot security guard wheeled past us at some point - roughly five feet tall, moving with the unbothered confidence of something that has patrolled this exact route ten thousand times and will continue doing so indefinitely. Nobody else in the mall reacted to it at all, which somehow made it more remarkable rather than less. Another reminder that even though we were in a setting that felt vaguely familiar, we were absolutely no longer in Canada.
The bathrooms deserved their own kind of amazement too. Nice bathrooms are fairly standard across Japan, but Solamachi’s were a tier above even that - heated seats, the whole suite of features North America still treats as a novelty, including toilets that play ambient sound to mask whatever needs masking. My daughter came out of one beaming, proud to report she’d found the nature sounds button and it sounded like she was in the woods. Hard not to think back to the bathroom at O’Hare on the way there, mid-layover, where they’d shut the running water off entirely - no flushing, no handwashing - while a terminal full of people stuck there for a mandated layover window made it very clear, loudly, that the washrooms were not good.
At The Intersection of Animated and Actual Robotics #
In pursuit of the Macross Valkyrie, I followed a sign promising something robot-shaped, on the theory that any sign with the word “robot” on it was worth chasing down, since the real prize clearly wasn’t going to announce itself with a map and an arrow. The exhibit turned out to be tucked away on one of the top floors, and getting there was its own small ordeal - wrong elevator, wrong escalator, a hallway that looked promising and wasn’t, the kind of building logic that seems designed by someone who has never once needed to find anything in their own mall. It led somewhere I hadn’t expected: a showcase run by the Chiba Institute of Technology, set up right there in the mall, and almost entirely empty except for us and the person running it. His eyes lit up the moment we walked in. Not politely. Genuinely. It was a weekday morning, school still in session for everyone except us, and the mall around him was about as quiet as Solamachi gets - which meant we weren’t a couple of tourists interrupting a busy exhibit.
Unprompted, he gave us the full tour. Robots that play soccer - actual matches, actual strategy, not a remote-control toy bumping a ball around. Robots built for earthquake search and rescue, the kind designed to go into spaces that have just stopped being safe for people. He walked us through hands-on demonstrations and then through more conceptual displays, the stuff still a few years out from being anything you could put your hands on at all. This was serious research, presented with real enthusiasm, to an audience of four people who had wandered in by accident looking for a cartoon robot.
I didn’t have the heart to tell him that. My kids, who had even less invested in either Macross or earthquake rescue robotics than I did, were ready to leave within minutes, and I don’t blame them - there’s only so long two roughly-teenage kids can be expected to nod along to autonomous gait control. I stayed longer than they wanted me to. I don’t regret it, because staying is what put me in position for the part of this story I genuinely did not see coming.
Still hunting for the actual Macross display, I wandered further into the exhibit and ended up in a corridor lined wall to wall with robot photography - genuinely lost now, but it felt like more effort to turn back than to keep going and hope the corridor resolved into something familiar. It didn’t. It just kept going, robot photo after robot photo, captions I couldn’t read, no signage pointing back toward the mall I’d started in.
By the time I found the actual lifesize Valkyrie, I had a small pang of guilt about it. I’d just dragged my family through an entire robotics exhibit under mild false pretenses, and we were about to spend our reward standing in line to take a photo with a giant fake robot.
Being a Macross nerd, I’d half expected the kind of line that wraps around a building - hundreds of people, hours of waiting, the whole spectacle. What I found instead was a handful of people taking their turn, no real wait to speak of. Maybe the crowds were bigger when it first launched and the novelty’s worn off since. Or maybe “lifesize anime robot” and “Japan” just go together closely enough that nobody’s all that surprised by it anymore. Either way, the line that did exist was unspoken, completely understood by everyone in it without a word exchanged. You saw the line, you joined the line, you got your photo, you moved on so the next person could do the same. Fashion shoot energy - get in, get the picture, get out, because there are people waiting behind you.
It came and went so fast it barely feels real now. I’m glad this wasn’t the whole reason we’d flown to Japan, because I don’t think I actually took the time to be in the moment - it was a side quest we picked up because we were already going to be at Solamachi anyway, not some hyper-nostalgic pilgrimage I’d been building toward for years. I’m genuinely happy I did it. It just wasn’t the moment some part of me had hoped it might be.
I only found out about this a year later, going back through photos while writing this post: the signs were all there. Literal signs, right in front of me, laying out the connection between the CIT Brains exhibit and the Macross figure down the hall. I just can’t read Japanese, so translating them on the spot never happened - and if I’m honest, I rarely go back and actually read the signs I photograph anyway. Why I keep taking pictures of them is genuinely beyond me. Found out about the whole connection a year later instead, which got a real laugh out of me while writing this.
Technically, Still Cosmetics - Just Not What We Expected #
Locating cosmetics in what is clearly a high-end shopping centre should have been the easy one. Before leaving Canada, I’d added “Cosme Kitchen” to the plan for Solamachi, assuming it’d be similar to the one we’d found in Harajuku.
It was not similar at all. I’d say adjacent at best, and even that would be generous. Cosme Kitchen turned out to be its own boutique concept entirely, sharing nothing with the larger Cosme but the name - and not even much real estate, just a small kiosk floating in an open walkway, not so much as its own storefront. We checked the floor plan to make sure we hadn’t simply missed the real thing somewhere else. We hadn’t. This was it.
My daughter took the letdown reasonably well, mostly because she’d already decided this trip owed her a cosmetics haul and one disappointing kiosk wasn’t going to change the terms of that deal. She informed me, with the confidence of someone who has read the room correctly, that I would absolutely still be taking her cosmetics shopping before this trip was over. She was right. It just didn’t happen at a three-floor temple to skincare - it happened at a Donki, the 24-hour everything-store that sells groceries and electronics and Halloween costumes and, it turns out, an absolutely staggering wall of facial creams with UV blockers. Turns out you don’t need a dedicated cosmetics megastore at all. You just need a store that sells literally everything, which Japan has an alarming number of.
Gotta Catch Em All (Just Not That One) #
The rest of the mall hadn’t been especially busy that morning, which made it all the more surprising to walk into the Pokémon Centre and find it packed. No lineup to get in, at least, but very little room to move once we were inside. I’d braced myself for a wall of influencers narrating their own arrival into their phones - hey gang, so I’m at the Solamachi Pokémon Centre - and was pleasantly surprised to find none of that. Just a genuinely busy store full of people who actually wanted to be there.
We were immediately crippled by choice. Six-inch plushes of every standard Pokémon you could name, shelves of them, more than enough to satisfy any reasonable request. My kids are not reasonable requests. Here’s a fact about my children that drives me a little insane: they don’t want the standard Pokémon. They want specific, rare sub-evolutions - the kind nobody actually uses competitively, which means nobody makes an eighteen-inch plush of them, because why would you. I have personally stood in front of a Japanese Pokémon Centre employee attempting to explain that no, I’m not looking for Eevee, I’m looking for a specific Eeveelution, and not the six-inch one you clearly have in stock, but the eighteen-inch one you clearly don’t - could they perhaps check the back?
They checked. There was no back stock. I apologized for the inconvenience and left, and somewhere on the walk back to the group it hit me: I’d spent the whole morning congratulating myself for not being the influencer standing in the middle of the store narrating to a phone. I was, instead, the guy asking staff to source a specific plush from a menu of hundreds like he was placing a custom order. We weren’t better than the influencers. We were just a different flavour of annoying customer.
We still left happy, more or less. I found a Snorlax sticker - Snorlax is my spirit animal, no notes, no further explanation needed. My wife found a Psyduck keychain, which is hers in the exact same way. The kids each left with a plush too, just not the one either of them actually wanted, and definitely not the Pokémon Centre exclusive I’d tried explaining the appeal of while we were standing right there in front of it.
Neither one was listening to me by that point, because I’m an adult, and there is no conceivable way an adult could understand Pokémon the way they do - despite the fact that I was going to Pokémon movies in actual theatres before either of them existed. I’m possibly a little jaded by the whole experience.
An Acceptable Substitute for the Ghibli Museum #
The Solamachi moment that’s stuck with me longest came from a stop that wasn’t on the list at all. We weren’t looking for the Ghibli shop specifically, but when a lifesize Totoro catches the corner of your eye, your body starts walking that direction before your brain has fully caught up. I’d already told my wife I wanted a Totoro figure for my desk - the classic pose, umbrella and all. Snorlax is my spirit animal. Totoro is a very close second.
They had a ceramic version that was genuinely lovely and equally expensive. Tucked in beside it was a plastic one with a 2000 yen price tag, roughly twenty Canadian dollars, and only one left for sale. I grabbed it without thinking twice and was halfway around the store still carrying it before I’d even fully decided I was buying it. I didn’t know it was a piggy bank until I looked at the box properly. Didn’t matter. Deal of a lifetime, whether or not I understood what I was buying.
The box was about ten inches tall and six inches wide, which doesn’t sound like much until you remember I’d already filled most of a suitcase with model kits and my daughter’s anime figures. My wife raised a reasonable concern about luggage logistics. I assured her it would be fine. I’d decided the logistics problem was a future Greg problem to solve.
What stuck with me wasn’t the figure itself, it was watching the staff wrap it. They inspected it carefully, rewrapped it with real attention, treated it exactly the way they’d have treated something ten times the price. I wasn’t thinking about anything clever in the moment - no comparisons to other stores, no grand theory about Japanese retail philosophy. I was just genuinely impressed that someone working what was, by any reasonable measure, a mall kiosk job cared that much about the process. Back home, I can’t picture a seventeen-year-old working a part-time retail shift giving a twenty dollar item that kind of attention. It stuck with me. The piggy bank sits on a shelf in my office now, a little dusty, still doing the job of reminding me that somebody took it seriously, even when I mostly haven’t since.
The Robot We Couldn’t Justify #
The hardest thing to walk away from in Solamachi also wasn’t on the agenda. It was a kiosk selling small, round, genuinely affectionate-looking robots, roughly the size of a small dog, designed purely to be loved rather than to perform any practical function. They sense when you’re near, they make eye contact, they raise their arms to be picked up, and they come with a small wardrobe of outfits because apparently if you’re building something designed to be adored, you might as well let people dress it.
They were around four hundred Canadian dollars - or so we thought, translating the sign from yen. The entire family wanted one, unanimously, with no debate required. What stopped us wasn’t the price. It was the very real question of how you get a small interactive robot with cameras and sensors through customs partway through an international trip, on top of luggage we were already pushing past capacity. We talked it through, agreed it wasn’t happening this time, and left without one.
Googling them again while writing this, it turns out we only translated the number, not the text around it. That four hundred dollar figure was almost certainly a subscription fee, not the robot itself - the actual price is closer to four thousand dollars. In hindsight, we got off easy. Trying to seriously talk ourselves into a four thousand dollar robot at one tenth its real price would have been a special kind of embarrassing.
I think about it more than is probably healthy. If we go back to Japan, and the kids are old enough by then to fully appreciate the absurdity of the attempt, I’d put real money on one coming home with us.
My wife and I suffer from a thing I like to call mall fatigue, and at this point our limit had been reached - plus we had Sumo business to attend to. Having spent the past few hours in an air conditioned mall, we’d clearly forgotten about the scorching heat, and opted to walk back to the hotel. I can’t recall exactly how many 7-Elevens we stopped in for drinks on the way back, but a safe number would be “all of them”.