It has been a while since out last trip to Tokyo, pre-COVID to be precise, so it is to be expected we would miss-remember things, get scales wrong and generally get wonderfully lost as we wind our way, but the things that we discovered, suburbs that blew our minds and the pleasure of discovery through walking cannot be over stated.
My previous memory of Shinjuku consisted of a train stop, emerging outside of a BIC camera (more on that in a moment), a wander under the train bridge to the “crazy” side, then back. It was late in the evening, a cooler time of year and one of our first trips.
This time we came at it from the Harajuku direction, on a brilliant sunny day and the business area, a zone of massive buildings and pristine streets, bisected by the little commercial side streets all Japanese cities need to survive was mind boggling in scale, especially when you take into account it is only a part of a bigger whole.
BIC camera was a slight dissapointlemtn. No Domke bags! I picked up a F3x in olive rugged ware in Tokyo, never have I seen one anywhere else, other limited edition bags also, now it is a dissapointing offer of PD, some Mind Shift and generic Japanese brands.