When we last left our intrepid heroes, they were at odds over whether to spend their last full day in Tokyo seeing the sights of the city or riding the rides at Tokyo Disney. And now, the thrilling conclusion of Tokyo Disney on 2 Weeks' Notice!!!
We had a CRAZY last full day in Tokyo, and when you get finally get to the last paragraph of this installment 6 weeks from now, you won't believe it all happened on the same day!
The only thing officially on the schedule for today was a tour of Tokyo's Imperial Palace, and this had been on it since the moment I got to the page in
The Rough Guide to Tokyo that said it was not open to the public and could only be toured by appointment made online up to two months in advance. We got lucky (sorta) because the day we wanted to go had been excluded from the online calendar by mistake and no one had been able to book it yet. Since this was the only place in Tokyo I'd called that had no English speakers on staff, we got a friend who speaks Japanese to contact the Imperial Household Agency, explain about the calendar problem, and get them to open it up so we could book. One $24 phone call later, we had our reservation
If you're interested in booking a tour, you can click here:
http://sankan.kunaicho.go.jp/order/index_EN.html
In the morning we grabbed breakfast at the convenience store and walked from our hotel over to the Imperial Palace.
There was a large group gathered outside the gate, but it turned out we got to go to a much shorter line because they were part of a tour like the one we'd been on in Kyoto. In fact, we were completing a grand tour of Japanese palaces with this visitfirst the seat of the Shogunate in Kyoto (that was the one with the nightingale floors), then the modern Imperial Palace in Kyoto (that was the one we took all the boring pictures of), and now the former site of the shogunate's castle in Tokyo, which became the site of the Imperial castle when power was restored to the emperor in the 1860s and the capital was moved from Kyoto to Tokyo.
We stood in line and self-consciously ate our breakfast standing up. Really, where DO these people eat all this takeout food? Finally, we were once again lined up and marched through the gate by a group of officials.
They deposited us in a charmless concrete box of a building to await the hilariously stiff and formal pre-tour video. There were lockers for our stuff (¥300 with free ins and outs!), bathrooms and a tiny gift shop. Patrick and I picked up our English-language listening devices, which start working with the video and last for the whole tour.
LOVE the ancient computersfeels like we're in a California public school!
If you go, pay attention during the video, cuz it's the only time you'll get to see inside any of the palace buildings. When they flashed some faded still photos of the inside of the main building, I realized that Epcot's Mitsukoshi department store interior is modeled on THOSE, not on any of the Mitsukoshi branches.
So the tour itself mostly consists of being herded around the grounds in a huge pack by a guide who's more like a bored security guard with a bullhorn than, say, an historian.
At each stop, he'd use the bullhorn to call out the number on the listening device and then stand there examining his fingernails while we dutifully listened to each clip. We shuffled here and there observing the low-slung 60s box that is the palace (including a subterranean parking lot that can hold up to 150 carsyes, you read that right,
150 cars!) plus some older buildings that are only watch towers. So much of it was destroyed during the war that there's not a lot of old stuff to see. But rest assured, what there was to see was exhaustively documented by us!
I love the fact that this "graffiti"family symbols carved by the shogun thousands of years agois still here today. I guess I don't get out of my 234-year-old country much!