On Saturday morning, I woke up late, just after 9am. I was relieved that all my work on the business trip was over. So, I wanted to enjoy a Japanese city that I rarely get to visit for the next few days. So, I decided to go around Tokyo on this day. After eating bread in my hotel room, I took the blue and white Sobu line train from Chiba Station to Tokyo Station, changed trains there and got off at Ueno Station. I went into the Tokyo National Museum and looked around at the old Japanese crafts. I was fascinated by the beauty and intricacy of the exhibits, which was beyond my imagination, and by the time I left, it was past 3pm. The last thing I did was to stop by the museum's shop, where they had "Miku Postcards of Beautiful Women Looking Back," so I bought one to write and send to my sister and my colleague Janet. When I saw this, I felt something of real-time Japan, which was interesting.

After that, I just wandered around the crowded shopping street called Ameyoko, where many people gather. There, I saw seafood that I had never seen before, even though I live far from the sea and only salmon and trout come to mind when I think of seafood. I took the Yamanote Line from Okachimachi Station, which was a short distance away, and got off at Akihabara. There was a large manga specialty store next to the station, so I took a quick look inside. The entire seven-story building was packed with manga, magazines, video software with anime and voice actor concerts, CDs with anime-related theme songs, soundtracks with sound effects, audio dramas, and character goods. However, since I cannot read kanji, even if I buy manga and magazines, I can only look at the pictures and imagine the contents, which is a shame. As it is the home of manga, the price of one volume was about half that of the English translation sold in my country. I thought that if I could read Japanese to a certain extent, it would be heaven. However, even if I go through a lot of trouble to learn it once, there are not many Japanese people in the city where I live, and it is difficult to find opportunities to learn and speak the language, so I think I will forget it. If you go to an international tourist spot in the mountains, a little over 100 kilometres from the city, you will find a fair number of Japanese people, so you may need to try to speak to them in Japanese in the hotel or souvenir shop. Enough with this delusional digression, let's get back to the point. After buying a few soundtrack CDs for a certain anime, I stopped by a store selling used computers in a corner of a crowded backstreet away from the station. It was not a store on the main street that had well-maintained computers with a one-week guarantee of operation, but a so-called "junk shop" where most of the computers sold had no guarantee of operation and you had to connect them to the power cable in front of the store to diagnose and check their condition. There I bought two laptops for my own use for about 40,000 yen. They were the models I was looking for that could be operated with both a touch panel and a pen. Of course, I knew that storage such as hard disks and SSDs had been removed to protect confidential information, with the exception of a few, so I looked for new ones at another store. Thinking about the future, I decided to take the plunge and buy one with a 1 terabyte capacity. After doing some research, I found out that this model has an 8th generation Core i7 and can use an NVMe-connected M.2 SSD, so I told the clerk the model name just to be sure and bought it. I asked the clerk,

"Do you have a 1 terabyte NVMe-connected M.2 SSD?"

pointing at the price list posted in front of the cash register and asked him to bring it out. The clerk in front of me said something, then stepped back, and another clerk came out with a box of disks.

"Is this it?"

he replied in English. I guess the first clerk didn't understand what I was talking about so he took over. So I told the clerk,

"I'd like two, please."

"Also, can I use this SSD in my ThinkPad X380 Yoga?"

He said,

"Of course."

I took out my credit card and paid. It was about 16,000 yen for two, which was cheaper than I expected. In my country, if you buy it online, it never costs less than 100 dollars per piece. Then I went to another store and bought some 256GB microSD cards as souvenirs for my colleagues. In Akihabara, they cost about 2,500 yen each, but in my country they sell for about 40 dollars. I then went around to a few second-hand shops that sell anything related to anime and manga, and bought some acrylic stands, key chains, and tote bags with illustrations of my favorite games, anime works, manga artists, and animators, as well as characters from those games. There are only a few games that I like, so I ended up buying about 15 illustration books.

After finishing my various purchases in Akihabara, I returned to the hotel and used the novelty screwdriver I received from a company at the exhibition I had just visited to open the back of the laptop I had bought and install the SSD. I put the lid back on and pressed the power button to open the BIOS, which was properly recognized, so I inserted the USB memory I had prepared and installed the OS. One machine had Windows 11, and the other had Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. In the meantime, I had dinner and a shower. I went to bed after making sure everything worked.

On Sunday morning, I left the hotel at around 7am to go see the Shibuya Scramble Crossing, which I had heard rumors about. I was overwhelmed to see the huge number of people passing by every time the traffic lights changed, looking down from the station's connecting passage, so I decided to cross it myself. I wonder what the locals who pass by here on their daily commutes, to school, and for leisure are thinking...are there a thousand different types of thoughts for each person?

After that, I went to Shinjuku and climbed up to the observation deck of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building. I felt like I was in a big city, with buildings and houses stretching out endlessly, far beyond the horizon. Although the population of my city has recently increased and it is now one of the top five cities in the country, it is only around 1.3 million, which is 30 times the population of the Japanese capital region, including Tokyo, so it is no wonder that it seems to stretch on forever.

Then I moved to Ikebukuro. I walked about ten minutes east from the station to a second-hand bookstore in a section commonly known as "Otome Road." There, I looked at the list of doujinshi Janet had asked me to read in her email yesterday and bought about twenty of them. She has a wide range of interests, and she's into not only love stories between men and women, but also friendship stories between boys and girls. I also went to a nearby maid cafe, which I had heard about and managed to make a reservation for in the morning, and enjoyed a light tea. I liked the relaxing atmosphere and cute uniforms. A while after I ordered tea, the waitress came. I couldn't help but feel a little excited when I saw her pouring hot water into the teapot. I'd like to wear Janet in this black dress and white apron uniform...I'm sure it would look good on her. I wonder what she'll look like if she actually comes here someday.

I returned to Ikebukuro Station and took the subway to Yokohama. I got off at the last stop, Motomachi-Chukagai Station, and went for a snack. I bought sweet bread from several bakeries in Motomachi Shopping Street and ate it on a bench on the sidewalk, and in Chinatown, I bought steaming steamed dumplings, hot baked xiaolongbao, and bubble tea while weaving my way through the crowds. I sat on a bench in the nearby Yamashita Park and ate them while staring at the sea. I felt the sea breeze, which I probably won't feel again when I go back home. Looking closely at the sea, I could see Gundam, a giant robot that appears in a famous anime. I managed to take a picture with the telephoto lens on my smartphone, so I posted it on social media. From here, I walked for about ten minutes across a long pedestrian bridge about 700 metres long, which was converted from a freight railway line. And I walk to the former Red Brick Warehouses. On the way, I saw the passenger ship terminal that once directly connected to the port of my country by regular service. The former warehouses had no signs to preserve the scenery, so it's hard to imagine it from the outside, but inside it was a stylish shopping center. There is apparently a similar place in a big city in the east of my country, so I would like to go there someday. Even though it's within the country, it's quite far away, taking a little over four hours by air, two full days by car, and three full days by train and bus. I bought a set of postcard depicting the streetcars that once ran through around downtown Yokohama at a souvenir shop in the city hall, I took a train from Sakuragicho Station, changed at the next stop, Yokohama Station, one of huge terminal of Japan and returned to my hotel in Chiba. On the way back, the many high-rise condos visible from Musashi-Kosugi Station were spectacular. Even though this is a suburb far from the city center, there are more than ten high-rise condos over 100 metres tall all together. This place also had a near-future sci-fi feel. After arriving at the hotel, I wrote postcards for today for my sister, friends, and colleagues.