April 18, 2026

Tokyo, Japan

Good morning, another early day. Still fighting the time shift. We are going to visit Asakusa & Ginza today. The truth is we aren’t visiting Asakusa but we are visiting the Senso-ji Buddhist temple. They claim is that this is the Tokyo’s oldest and most iconic Buddhist temple. The claim it was founded in 628. It may have been founded in 628 but it was completely destroyed on March 10, 1945 during WWII. It was rebuilt in the late 50’s and the pagoda was built in 1973.

Even knowing the lack of historical reference it is impressive. It occupies a fairly small area, surrounded by a bustling Nakamise-dori shopping district. The unfortunate part is that the tour did not include much of any description of the area or temple. We were basically driven there, dropped off and told to look around. This is nothing like Kensington guides we had in Egypt and Jordan.

The temple site is obviously much more than a tourist attraction. There were more Asians than Europeans. Some of them, just a few, and the guide said they were there for the tourists, were in traditional Japanese Kimono dress. The kimono is primarily used for weddings and other significant ceremonies, and it did appear there were people there for those events. It would have been nice to have more information, but we were there for only forty-five minutes.

After visiting the temple, we went to the Ginza. Tokyo was totally destroyed in WWII. Today the Ginza is a mall. It could have been plopped down in Kansas City or New York City. Except for the signs being in Japanese, and English, the stores were the same. We walked around a bit, and stayed to have lunch/dinner at Eataly! It was on the sixth floor of the Number Six Ginza shopping mall. Nothing special.

We would have been up for trying something Japanese, but it was too difficult to understand what we would be ordering. It would have been much better if someone could explain these things too us. After eating we took a taxi back to the hotel. We stayed in for the night. The bags had to be in the hallway by 22:00. So, we repacked things, so we just had our small backpacks for the touring tomorrow.

Buonanotte e Ciao,

Enrico e Maria