uncharacteristically green
today i went to two different massive parks: shinjuku chūō park and the shinjuku gyoen national garden. as you can probably surmise from the names, they are both in shinjuku. i also visited map camera, a staple of my previous trips.
i spent 99% of my day with youtube music going in my headphones, letting the algorithm decide what i would be listening to. i don’t usually post music recs on this site, this song played while i was standing on a crowded train looking out the window at this sprawling mega city. millions of people in their own little worlds with their headphones on, so close we are literally forced to be touching, yet so mentally distant from one another. i would encourage you to hit play on this while you read the rest of it. i even went to the effort of downloading the song and posting it here. no snitches, i guess.
i found out this lady is playing a concert at the balboa theatre in san diego the day i return from japan. i kinda want to go to this.
shinjuku station
the place i am staying is quite close to a train station, so getting around tokyo is so much easier than the first place we stayed as a group. the place we stayed at initially was about a 20-25 minute walk to a train station. the place i am staying now is like a 3 minute walk to one, and it connects to the yamanote line in 3 minutes. so getting to shinjuku station is easy. but navigating once i am there will be a journey.
i think i have talked about this before, but the scale of shinjuku station is really crazy to comprehend.
someone made a 3d visualization of shinjuku station you can zoom in and out of here. theres also this crazy looking map image:
i want to avoid saying a lot of the same stuff i have probably said before, but
this station is so damn huge. it serves over 3,500,000 passengers per day. there are over two hundred foot traffic exits to this station. there are 50+ train platforms. its 15 acres / 2 kilometers. it is so massive that even japanese people call it a labyrinth. and yet, it doesn’t take much practice with the japanese transit system to figure out how to navigate it. google maps will tell you “take x train (departs from platform y / the train route is color z), then get off and follow signs for the south exit” etc. everything is displayed very well in english.
the very first time i came here in 2024, i got very lost and needed help. but i kinda get it now. you can just look at the signage and figure out which exit you are supposed to find. it is much easier to escape this train station than it is to enter it and find the correct platform.
map camera
i didn’t actually intend to go to map camera this trip. i feel like i kinda have all the camera gear i need. if i had infinite money and storage space, i would probably buy an ultrawide lens of some kind, like an 18mm or something. but suitcase and backpack real estate are at an all time low, and i dont want to spend like $500+. so i just window shopped in the store for a bit. for the first time ever, i have entered and exited this store without spending any money.
shinjuku chūō park / central park
shinjuku chūō park is an 88,000 square meter park right in the heart of tokyo. it is about 88,000 square meters, or 58 acres. based on the name and my immediate assumed comparison to central park in new york, i thought it was going to be like, huge. but it is nowhere near the gargantuan size of central park in nyc, which is like ~40 times larger. but they still call it central park all the same. it isn’t even the biggest park in tokyo, or even the biggest park in shinjuku. its like the 40th largest park in tokyo.
it is surrounded by office buildings, so there are many office workers clearly enjoying their lunch break alongside the tourists and local visitors in this park. it is a really beautiful place. many families set up picnics in the park. a local company was selling giant koi fish. and i saw a few homeless people, which is a rare sight in japan. including the 5 i saw today, i’ve seen maybe 10 or 15 in all the time i’ve spent in japan.
at one point, an old man with a cane walked up to me and held up a little handheld translator that said “won’t you seek salvation with god today?”. seems like they exist everywhere, huh?
Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden
on the other side of shinjuku station, there is a massive curated garden that is almost 7 times bigger than shinjuku central park.
this park is really beautiful. the amount of effort that must go into maintaining it is insane.
highly recommend visiting here. maybe not on a saturday, as it was incredibly packed. but i did manage to get my favorite 2 pictures of the whole trip. i like these more than the monkeys, and thats saying something.
the strengths of my new camera really pay off here, because the much higher megapixels compared to previous cameras i’ve used allows me to really aggressively crop. so i can get enough detail to do this without it looking super grainy and terrible:
calling it early
i’m glad i went to both of these parks in one day. tokyo is not a very green city, they tend to cluster the nature into parks like this. tomorrow is going to be kind of a huge day, so i called it early here and went back to edit photos and chill. the bright side of these extended 30 day vacations is that i dont feel nearly as much pressure to constantly be doing stuff. i am spending much less time in the room compared to previous trips this time though. i think the last couple trips, i have burned a few entire days and nights in the room resting.
