Day 20: Returning to Shinjuku, Tokyo
Kanazawa was a nice city to visit and if we had more time it would have been nice to stay there a little longer. It would have been great to explore the local area and tourist sites some more. Although it was a short visit, it was a great place. Today we made our way back to Kanazawa station to take a train back to Tokyo, Shinjuku district.
Read Linaka’s article here: ”Day 20, On to Tokyo and Ghibli Museum“.
The journey to Shinjuku
Traveling by train was nice, especially when on the Shinkansen. The journey from Kanazawa to Shinjuku, Tokyo took over 4 hours. That was quite amazing considering the Shinkansen is a very fast train. The fact that it also took so long to get back to Tokyo also indicated how far away we were.
As we made our way back, we passed by many cities and towns. Off in the distance you could still see mountains. Perhaps the best part of this journey was seeing Mount Fuji once more. Speeding on the train made it difficult to take pictures out the window, but many of the passengers had to take those final epic photos of Mount Fuji. It looked so close, yet so far away. Lucky for me, I was able to snap a few pictures before Mount Fuji was finally out of view.
We left early in the morning and arrived in Shinjuku in the afternoon. It was not long before we recognized the buildings and area that we had seen just a couple of weeks before. But the difference now was that we were more educated and familiar with many of the stores which we had seen along our journey. Seeing Shinjuku again was exciting and at the same time a little sad. We knew that our journey in Japan would be coming to an end soon. Still, we made our way out of the station and found our hotel. After settling in, it was time to make one more journey to visit the Ghibli museum.
A trip to the Ghibli Museum
It is hard to describe how amazing the Ghibli museum was. Both Linaka and I are big anime fans. We have seen many of the movies from Ghibli studios and visiting the museum was another highlight of our journey. Unfortunately, photography was restricted here, so we could only take pictures outside of the museum. There were many amazing exhibits inside. We saw live animations, movable models and plenty of artwork on display.
We got an opportunity to watch a short film inside the museum. It was about 20 minutes long, but it was a nice film. Although it was completely in Japanese without subtitles, I got the main meaning behind the film. Most of the museum showcased the many characters developed by Ghibli. Additionally there was a shop and book store inside which was way over crowded. Earlier on our journey we visited a manga museum which was not very crowded, but compared to the Ghibli museum, you could see the contrast in popularity. Ghibli was extremely pack with many visitors. At the end of the day we left the museum and had a leisurely walk to the local train station to take us back to Shinjuku, Tokyo.
Conclusion
We had a great day. It was a long morning with a journey that took over 4 hours from Kanazawa to Shinjuku, Tokyo and a great afternoon visiting the Ghibli museum. For any fan of Ghibli, then the museum is a must visit. Afterwards, we returned to our hotel in Shinjuku and relaxed for the rest of the evening. Tomorrow we spend our last day exploring a few more sites which we missed on our first visit to Tokyo.