[COLUMN] Marty’s Tokyo Travelogue #1 | by Marty Sliva (Patreon)

Hey all! So if you watch our streams and/or pods, you might know that I’m currently a few days into a two-week vacation in Tokyo. I haven’t been here since 2018, and it’s the first time I’ve ever been purely as a vacation, and not on assignment covering the Tokyo Game Show, previewing a game, or visiting a studio. With that, I’ve been able to completely lose myself in the city in a way that I haven’t before, which has led to an absolutely amazing time of wandering around neighborhoods, getting lost in parks, taking in the sights and sounds, practicing my god-awful Japanese, and just enjoying every single second of it.

So I figured it’d be nice to share some of that with y’all, including plans to make a Patreon-exclusive travelogue video of some of my favorite experiences.

My flight was an uneventful 14 hours that I spent most of finally getting around to watching Jujutsu Kaisen – spoilers, that’s a pretty good show. Once in Japan, getting from Narita to my hotel in Shinjuku was relatively painless thanks to a combination of muscle memory from my previous visits, pre-loading a Suica card on my phone, and the cheat code of Google Maps.

It goes without saying, but the public transportation here puts our pitiful infrastructure in the US to shame. The train system here in Tokyo is cheap as hell, reliable, and able to get you to pretty much anywhere you’d wanna go in a short amount of time. Yeah, if you go during rush hour you’ll be crammed in like a newly-opened pack of Lucky Strikes, but I’m constantly impressed by just how incredibly quiet everybody on the trains are. 

Also, being 6’3” means that I can’t help but catch glimpses of games that folks are playing on their phones – lots of Pokemon TCG Pocket, SD Gundam G Generation Eternal, and then a bunch of games that I’ve never seen before. Sadly I’ve seen zero Suika Game, and I also haven’t spotted a Switch in the wild (which makes sense, given the aforementioned packed nature of the trains), but I did see one person jamming out on Vita. Nothing but respect for my 2012 king.

Another nice bonus is that for the current 40th anniversary of Super Mario Bros., the video screens on the trains have been running random Mario-related trivia segments. I have no idea what most of them are saying, save for the occasional “which game is this?” section that keeps featuring Super Mario Bros. USA, aka, Super Mario Bros. 2. Shout out to that Italian – always nice to see a friend from work.

So far I’ve done some thorough explorations of Shinjuku, Ikebukuro, Harajuku, Kichijōji, and Odaiba, with plans for Shibuya, Akihabara, Ginza, Nakano City, Yokohama, and a bunch more spots in the coming days. I initially planned to spend a day or two outside of Tokyo in either Osaka or Kyoto, but given how little I feel like I’ve scratched the surface here, I’ll probably kick that can down the road to the next trip. 

There have been too many highlights so far to list, but a pair of standouts came from unexpected places. The first was discovering that there was a movie theater a block away from my hotel that not only has showings from 7am-midnight, but is also probably the nicest theater I’ve ever been to. I’ve been averaging about 12 miles/day of walking, so after getting back to my hotel exhausted as hell one evening, I decided to catch a late-night showing of The End of Evangelion, which was back in theaters here as a part of a big 30th anniversary celebration of the series. 

There were obviously no English subtitles, which wasn’t too much of a problem given how many times I’ve seen it before. But this was my first time catching in theaters, and seeing it in a mostly-packed 11pm showing was a trip. There are a million things I love about the movie, but experiencing the live-action segments shot in a Japanese movie theater + the movie’s iconic abrupt ending thanks to its credits running at the midway point made this viewing extra special. There was also an introduction from an introduction from a nice woman in her 60s, who I would later discover was Megumi Ogata, aka, the voice of Shinji Ikari.

The other highlight was also Evangelion-related, and I make no promises that the next one of these travelogues will be free from the influence of Hideaki Anno) That came in the form of the Small Worlds Miniature Museum in Ariake, which is touted as the largest miniature museum in Asia, and consists of 7000 square meters of giant city-spanning displays in all different flavors – historical settings, modern Japanese cities, a functional airport, fantasy/sci-fi scenes, etc. 

As a kid who grew up playing with Star Wars Micro Machines and helping my dad put up a miniature Christmas village/train set every holiday season, the creativity and craftsmanship on display here left me awestruck. The level of detail on both a micro and macro level was astounding – you could peek into windows of individual buildings of a cityscape spanning an entire room.

And one wing was dedicated to Evangelion, with a sprawling model of Tokyo-3 that featured the skyscrapers sinking underground and emerging every few minutes. I was the first one here at 9am on a Friday, so I had the place to myself for the first hour or so, which was absolutely perfect.

Apart from that, I’ve eaten a ton of great food (y’all ever hear of sushi?), drank at some of the strangest and most accommodating bars I’ve ever been to (including one themed after everyone’s favorite gentleman thief not named Mortimer Rafflesworth Everwind-Smythe, Arsène Lupin), wandered through impossible gorgeous parks and shrines (shout out to Inokashira), been delightfully surprised to see that Snoopy is way more popular here than Mickey Mouse (but sadly zero Garfield sightings so far), and have quickly become a regular at the 7-Eleven in the base of my hotel (I’d die a thousand deaths for these egg sandos). 

So yeah, not a bad first few days. I’ll check back in again after the weekend with more stories of my travels, and like I mentioned up top, planning to take some of these highlights and turn them into a video once I’m back home.