Day 20, in which we meet a bright yellow bird in a nappy

After breakfast we decided to finally visit Senso-ji Temple, just up the road from our hotel, which the guidebook describes as “Tokyo's most sacred and spectacular temple”. It turned out today is a public holiday and the place was swarming with locals dressed up in colourful traditional costumes, including cumbersome wooden shoes which no-one seemed to know how to walk in properly (picture a wooden flip-flop glued on top of a child's alphabet building block). The temple itself is reached via a long red arcade of stalls selling tourist tat – packed densely with people trying to buy sticks of yakatori, postcards of Mount Fuji or Pokemon characters – but today the temple itself was sheathed in scaffolding and plastic wrapping and we didn't like to intrude.

We walked to Ueno and took the train to Komagome to see the Rikugi-en stroll garden, which was built by a Japanese playboy in the seventeenth century and supposedly recreates 88 miniature landscapes, each the subject of a separate 33-line poem. Unfamiliar with these poems we just enjoyed the very unnatural recreations of nature, with trees so carefully pruned and twisted to meet the Japanese concept of perfection that limbs which hang too low were propped up on stilts, while limbs that were too high were weighed down with ropes and anchors. In a couple of very extreme examples cedar trees were lost under the elegant rigging that was keeping them in shape, beautiful webs of rope with a living tree at their core.

We had a long and large lunch at a superb tapas restaurant – where I discovered just how much I missed flavours such as fresh olive oil, chili and garlic – before returning to Asakusa and crossing the river to view Philip Starck's Super Dry building. Known locally as the 'Gilded Turd', it's hard to imagine what else Starck might have meant it to be.

Travelling home from Nikko the other day, Paul mentioned that he was obsessed with sumo wrestling on Channel 4 as a child. Oddly, it hadn't until that point occurred to him to see whether or not it was possible to see a sumo match while we were in Japan. Fortunately for us, it turned out that the National Sumo Tournament was due to start the following day, and so today – day two of the games – we found ourselves trotting into the National Sumo Stadium.

I had never watched sumo as a child and so had no idea what to expect. It turns out the wrestling started as part of the harvest celebrations, and so is closely associated with Shinto, the pagan religion which pre-dates Buddhism in Japan, and largely continues to live alongside it. Every sumo wrestler in the country fights on every day of the tournament, but the actual wrestling still takes much less time than the various Shinto rituals surrounding them: the gyoji chanting out a prayer and waving his fan, the bowing and drinking of sake, the tossing of salt to purify the ring, etc. When two sumo wrestlers actually come together, it takes about ten seconds for one of them to either fall to the ground or be thrown from the ring. Sometimes this was rather drab – a stray hand hitting the sand, for example – and other times it was spectacular, such as when a 30 stone man was hurled out of the ring and into the audience, crashing into a tiny old Japanese lady watching from the ringside. I thought perhaps she might require an ambulance, but instead she was all smiles. I think some women might shell out for the expensive ringside seats just to cop a feel of their heroes.

All told, we watched three hours of sumo and I remained interested and enthusiastic throughout, which is more than can be said for the football, cricket or any other sporting matches I've endured in the past.

We ticked another box in our I Spy Japanese Cuisine book in the evening by visiting Denny's, a Japanese variant of the American chain which specialises in yoshoku, or 'western food'. Despite its name, yoshoku is nothing like what we eat in the west, having been adopted over a century ago and corrupted since. My meal was a rather disgusting pork burger doused in a bland brown gravy served with five chips and a battered prawn, while Paul had a burger topped with a mound of spring onions, a pile of drained tin corn and some KFC-style chicken.