Trip to Tokyo 2025 Part 1
Once we arrived in Tokyo, we headed to our hotel, Mimaru Tokyo Station East via a private transfer. At the bottom of this hotel has a 7-11, but Lawson and Family Mart is close by as well. We bought some snacks to stave us off for dinner as by the time we got settled it was already past 8PM and we were pretty exhausted from the flight, so we got ready for bed after we ate something simple.
Day 1: roaming around ginza
As expected, we started our morning pretty early, which meant we had some convenience store breakfast, early walks around the city which is always so refreshing to see the city slowly wake up. Our go-to’s are:
7-11 Egg Sandwiches, soft serve ice cream and usually where I get the Ohayo Creme Brulee ice cream.
Lawson has my favorite ikura onigiri and has a lot of amazing pastries
Family Mart has delicious chicken!
In terms of drinks, this trip I was able to try the 7-11 smoothies which were delicious and a welcome alternative to drinking pop and tea. The kids love drinking Yakult 1000!
There’s also a lot of random vending machines. Just in our area alone, we had one selling coffee beans, soy sauce, and soup stock.
After our lazy morning, I had a meeting in Nihombashi so we headed that way for a little bit. After my meeting, we had a delicious tempura lunch at Tenmatsu, my friend Kit recommended it to us. It wasn’t busy thankfully as it was still around 11ish, right before the lunch rush! By the time we left, there was a line out the door.
Tenmatsu Nihombashi 1 Chome-8-2 Nihonbashimuromachi, Chuo City, Tokyo 103-0022, Japan
For a lot of tendon (tempura on rice) restaurants, they often have a lunch menu that is at least half of the price of the dinner menu, so I usually recommend to go during lunch instead. They do take reservations at night, and nowadays you can make reservations via Tabelog, their website for restaurants.
After lunch, we promised to bring Chase to somewhere fun, so we went to the Hakuhinkan Toy Park in Ginza. It’s 4 floors filled with many toys of all kinds!
Hakuhinkan Toy Park 8 Chome-8-11 Ginza, Chuo City, Tokyo 104-8132, Japan
Ginza is generally a more upscale area with lots of luxury brands and fancy shopping malls, so it was fun to explore this store and pretty much, it was tough to get the kids out of that store. I mentioned this before in my previous post, I love that in Asia a lot of toys are actually outside the box for kids to test out and play in the toy stores, which I think is really important because you kinda want to test it out whether or not you even like a certain toy.
I do think that when you’re in Japan, you should stick with the Japanese brands of toys because their import taxes are quite high when they’re international brands. For example, when I saw the Brio railway there, I thought it much more expensive than expected. It is truly fascinating though seeing what’s popular in other places in the world - like Transformers, Gundam and similar transforming robot type toys - the “otaku” culture in Japan is strong! When they get obsessed with something.. each brand literally gets a line of products you won’t see elsewhere.
For example, during this trip, Jasiel found an interest in Curious George. Now I’ve seen their books and some of the shows before but I didn’t know it was a “thing” until I went to Japan, and there’s stores for Curious George and tons of merch and gashapon machines on it, too. If you like collecting train merch - you’re in for a treat as they have so many, from shinkansen to Tokyo Metro to gashapon to even Thomas Hakuhinkan Toy Park
After this, we went home for a brief break as I know the kids were tired from waking up so early! Later on, we did go to Ginza area again and I got a chance to do some shopping.
C-pla Ginza - this seems to be the only store in Ginza that focuses on gashapon at the moment
Itoya - this is one of my favorite stationery stores in the world, with over 10 floors of stationery items! The kids also love going to the first floor to make their eraser bento box. Jasiel fell asleep, so I had all the time to shop!
Uniqlo - I didn’t go to the flagship this time as that store was just way too busy, and we were fairly close to this one while we were walking, so we went here instead. Uniqlo items are so much cheaper in Japan, especially if you do the tax-free service.
For dinner, we should honestly have just gone home to rest and eat something simple, but I had made a reservation at a Yakitori Restaurant so we went even though everyone was jetlagged haha.
Jidoriya Gokuu Hana Japan, 〒105-0004 Tokyo, Minato City, Shinbashi, 2 Chome−13−3 杉田ビル ２階
It was one of the few yakitori restaurants that would take reservations in our area (and that would accept children), as a lot of yakitori restaurants cater to the adult/drinking crowd. But the kids were too tired to fully enjoy this place, but the food was really delicious. I was really excited to try the yakitori and they had a delicious oyakodon (only the top part) and they use Jidori chicken, which is a very clean-tasting breed of chicken in Japan.
day 2: ikebukuro
The forecast said it was going to be windy and rainy, so I had planned this day to head to Sunshine City in Ikebukuro. But what I didn’t expect was that it was full on snowing. Actually, the day started with some thunderstorms, then it was snowing! We were very grateful and excited to go into the warm mall after being outside for a short amount of time, cause the snow was just everywhere and we were not ready for all the snow!
But once we were inside, we had so much fun. Honestly I don’t think we even got to explore the whole mall, just portions of it! We went to Toys-R-Us, Mcdonalds (You gotta try Mcdonalds wherever you go!), Pokemon Stores, the Bandai Namco main store, and so much more.
At the Toys-R-Us we were in search of some good shoes for the kids, especially Jasiel. I’m not sure why, but the shoe game in Japan especially for kids is especially good. You can get flexible sole shoes everywhere, not just from small businesses online. In Canada, we don’t have too many stores that sell all the various brands of shoes for kids outside the baby age.
For some reason in Japan they also really like using umbrellas, especially for adults - rainwear is not as common. I loved seeing all the various options of raingear for the kids, and yes, flexible sole ones too for the boots!
I was so grateful that Jasiel fell asleep while I was at the gashapon main store cause it was just so much fun going through the various machines without too much disruptions haha. I was very pleased to see many of the ones I wanted to get, as this store was much more stocked that the C-Pla Store in Ginza. I personally was in search for some of the stationery ones, and I couldn’t believe that I found them here and I was able to get what I actually wanted, woohoo!
And because this was such a kid-focused mall, there were also tons of options for food, although we were craving some sushi bowls! They were delicious!
The kids also wanted to try some strawberries on a stick, but I think they just wanted to eat strawberries? Cause when they were encased in the hard sugar, they were not too keen on eating it. haha.
By the time we came out of the mall, the sun was out, all the snow had melted.
The kids were pretty tired, so we decided to take a taxi back home. Alternately, you can also take an Uber home when the transit takes more than 30 mins!
That night, Clement and Jasiel stayed home, while Chase and I went on a little date to the Tokyo Station for dinner and some shopping, too! It was so much fun to have one-on-one time with him. He enjoyed checking out the Tomica/Plarail shop! Brought home a simple dinner for daddy/Jasiel. We found the Kenele Stand which is a specialty gashapon store at the Tokyo Station, and found a set of mini Uno cards, so cute and tiny!
day 3: harajuku/shibuya
The reason why we even decided to go to this area this trip was because of gashapon hunting, lol! But also, C wanted to go to Rapha in Tokyo, so I made a few stops for us along the way.
Ikea Harajuku - this one was right outside the Harajuku station, so we grabbed ourselves some of the mini Ikea bags, so cute!
Gashapon hunting - there’s a few of these stores right on Takeshita street, so we checked them out! We checked out Capsule Lab, C-pla Harajuku Takeshita Street, and also the Daiso so I could get some of clear containers to display my new mini collection.
3 Coins - I love these beige stores that sell home goods!
For lunch we went to Kura Sushi cause it’s an easy option for food, and since it was before noon, there was no line! Technically you can make a reservation to go, but I wasn’t sure about the timing of when we’ll head there so I didn’t reserve in advance. You can make a reservation up to a week.
Kura Sushi in Bellevue is so expensive, honestly I don’t think it’s worth it! But the ones in Tokyo are a lot better and a lot more reasonable in price.
Soon after, we found ourselves on Cat Street, where Rapha Tokyo is located. Clement was so pleased to get some limited edition Tokyo merch, while the kids loved playing in the middle of the street because there was a mini skatepark and playground.
We then walked around Shibuya area, visiting some arcades and more gashapon shops, and also Loft Shibuya, which is one of my fave stores for stationery and home goods. But of course, shopping with kids can be tough - I usually take turns with Clement. Especially Jasiel! She needs someone 100% watching her at all times.
That evening, I went out on a little solo-shopping trek which was very satisfying. I headed over to Ginza, because I had to grab a Refa Carat for a friend (so I picked one for myself, too!), I visited Ginza Loft as well to look for the Bongen coffee beans because they weren’t available at Shibuya Loft. On the ground floor of Ginza Loft, they have a huge section for local coffee beans and matcha, if you’re ever looking for some! I also took a pit stop at Ginza Hands (all the stores were just a few blocks from each other), and got all my stationery fixes for notebooks, even for Traveler’s Notebooks! All these places had tax-free shopping, so make sure you bring your passport with you so you can apply for it.
On the way home, I grabbed some Saizeriya pizza for the kids and some sushi for Clement, yum! They had so much fun staying home and relaxing and playing with their new toys, while mommy had time to shop, yay!
xoxo, K
