Day 19, in which we see a dog with a very clean bottom

Sunday is a day of rest, so I relaxed in the hotel with a book while Paul went for a walk along the apparently barren and industrial riverside, before scooting over to Ebisu to visit an exhibition at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography.

We met up again for a bento box lunch in Ueno Park. I'd heard good thinks about Ueno, but I guess everyone else had visited it outside of winter, when the endless rows of trees would be covered in spring green, summer blossom or autumnal browns. As it was, in winter we had row upon row of brown twigs, and nothing to distract us from the fact that the park is almost entirely concreted over with roads, pavements and squares. It was reminiscent of a very large and relatively pretty car park, but I suppose it makes life easier for the poor schmoes who have to sweep up all the blossom and autumnal leaves each year.

Kbo told me Ueno Park was rather like Hyde Park, and I suppose for all its concrete this makes sense as it appears to be a park where people go to be seen and to promenade. We saw some relatively unusual people during our brief time in the park, including a collection of Teddy Boys standing by the pond listening to very, very quiet rock and roll; a happy man in his mid-30s strolling with a large grey rabbit perched on his shoulder (and a special portable rabbit hutch on his back, for when Bunny got shy); and a woman whose pug dog fouled the pavement, and not only did she clean up the mess but then surgically removed a wet wipe from her hand bag and carefully polished its arsehole.

At the north end of the park sits a series of exhibition halls and museums which fly under the flag of the Tokyo National Museum. Their Asian Collection (sitting in a classical building to the left) was a rather small and drab set of broken pots, spiced up only by a couple of Cambodian statues and a superb series of artefacts sourced from (an apparently Asian) Egypt. The main museum – which is built in the traditional Japanese style – smelled so bad we had to leave almost immediately upon entering, so we went instead to the archaeological pavilion at the rear of the complex, where there was a fine collection of idiotic terracotta figurines.

As night was already falling, we strolled down through the park and south to Akihabara – the so-called Electric Town – to see the chaotic clusters of neon signs that mark out this region (although in truth, you get large amounts of neon pretty much throughout the city). Akihabara was heaving with people, in contrast to the rest of Tokyo which is generally much more civilised, and we were glad to come out the other end and get some space.

We continued our stroll down to Tokyo Station (passing on route the Nihonbashi Bridge, an historic bronze bridge which formally marks the centre of the city, but which is now almost completely forgotten, buried as it is directly below a double-flyover which snakes its way directly over the river). For dinner we had dhosa and curry at Dhaba India near the station, and while the quality of the meat was disappointing our taste buds were eternally thankful for some much needed stimulation.


Cultural Aside #002: A lot of Japanese etiquette concerns hygiene and the avoidance of disease, with the guide book advising that it is socially unacceptable to blow your nose in public, and many people in the city wearing gauze masks to either contain their own disease or to avoid contracting someone else's. Despite this, I've been surprised to see that it is completely acceptable to cough without covering the mouth – even when they're standing directly over me on the tube, and usually with a heavy focus on moving phlegm – while Japanese men (I cannot speak for the women) do not wash their hands after using the toilet. This is not just a matter of personal preference – in 90% of toilets there is no soap to wash your hands (including museums, public transport and – more worryingly, restaurants, where chefs are at work with food I will eat), and in all but a handful of cases there is no means to dry your hands, presumably making the assumption that you won't wash them in the first place. All I can say is, thank goodness Paul packed several litres of hand sanitiser to get us through the holiday.