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Monday, we spent the day in the Roppongi and Akihabara areas of Tokyo. Roppongi is home to the new Roppongi Hills development, a super-modern city-within-a-city replete with shopping, offices, restaurants, and schools all within a couple city blocks. It’s a confusing maze of levels, walkways and corridors that weave their way through typically beautiful yet sterile modern Japanese architecture.

In the afternoon, we took the subway over to the Akihabara district which contains the area known as Electric Town. our first stop was in the Yodobashi-Akiba store. Nine levels of electronics, computers, games, toys, books, and more. In short, it was awesome. My only complaint is that I somehow managed to leave with nothing, while Mindy was able to find some things for herself. Obviously, I’m not trying hard enough. I’m going to have to step up my electronics-buying game.

So, now that we’ve been here for a full two days and seen a couple different areas of the city, our first impressions are of how clean everything is. For a major city, with over 12 million inhabitants, it’s amazing how clean and groomed everything is. The streets are litter free, the subways are wonderfully clean and efficient. While street maps are sometimes useless, it hasn’t been that hard to find our way around. Signs are generally helpful and often subtitled in English. Everyone is very polite. In short, we’ve had a really good experience so far.

Now, if only we could more easily find food we want to eat.

Additional images have been added to the gallery.