“Um, Bill where are you taking me…”

We arrived and checked into the Mitsui Garden Hotel in Shiodome (She-oe-dome-ae) on 1/01 after the 1 hour commute from the airport. Why this hotel? Well it is a 1 minute commute to Anne’s work, it is literally the building right next door. We explored the city, watched a bunch of the TV series Lost and 30 Rock. The hotel only had CNN in English and after an hour it essentially looped the same info. Trust me when I say you can only watch so much of the same story on the war in Gaza before you get a little restless. We also started to explore a little of the city. We had a couple appointments to see apartments on 1/05. We've been told that navigating in Tokyo is difficult so we decided to do a dry run on 1/04. I had the concierge give me directions and a couple maps for each place. Feeling comfortable, since we could see our first building, we began our adventure.

The first building was a 15 minute walk. Pretty easy. The second building… well even with 3 maps and directions from 2 different front desks we got lost. At this point I want to warn potential tourists of the uniqueness of Tokyo. We have been told that Tokyo was built with invasion in mind. For that reason navigation is very confusing. Many of the streets do not have names. There are many bulletin maps on the streets, but they never seem to line up with the city maps (I am sure locals can do this, but I can’t seem to). Also, most blocks are different sizes. So 1 US size block might have anywhere from 0-4 streets going through it. Also many of the busier city streets might not have intersection streets for several blocks so it makes it very difficult to get to the streets behind them.

Subways… Tokyo has the most subway lines of any city I have ever seen. This subway map does not include the even more detailed Railway Lines. The subway stations do not sell tickets based on the name of the stop, but rather the cost of getting to that stop. So you wouldn’t buy a ticket from Kamiyacho to Akasaka-mitsuke, you would buy a ticket for 160 yen. How would you know that it is a 160 yen ticket? Well they have maps showing the cost; unfortunately we either didn’t see these the first time or didn’t know what they were. Fortunately we found someone kind enough to walk us through it.

Long story short, what would have taken us 1 hour to see (just the outside) of 3 buildings took us all day. We asked (in our best Japanese, which is terrible) over 10 people, including various concierges, for directions and help. We now understand why the vast majority of cars here have GPS systems.