Japan Day Twelve and Thirteen – Shijo-dori and Cat Shrine

A little bit more shopping and relaxing before heading to Tokyo to see some maneki-neko.

Day Twelve

Our last full day in Kyoto was mostly a relaxing day. A proper one, this time! We went out to Shijo-dori for a little bit of shopping and in the afternoon went back to the hotel to relax and prepare for tomorrow’s train to Tokyo.

Making Our Way to Tokyo

Day thirteen – we’re on to the final stretch! We took our last Shinkansen to Tokyo.

At one point during the train ride Chantal spotted Mt Fuji in the distance. Of course this happened at the exact moment Chris needed to use the bathroom so he mostly missed the view.

So Many Maneki-neko

The most important thing we wanted to get done after arriving in Tokyo was visit the Gotokuji temple which everyone knows as the “cat temple” for the thousands of lucky cat statues. These are those famous cats you would have seen in Japanese (and other Asian) restaurants and are called maneki-neko (beckoning cat).

Some fun facts about the maneki-neko figures; you’ll usually see them with either the right or left paws raised (you can spot some with both but that is less common). If the maneki-neko has its left paw raised then it is for good fortune (luck), while the right paw is for money.

The temple grounds were meticulously crafted and beautiful and we took our time to navigate through it until we got to the main piece, thousands of maneki-neko statues! It was impressive to see the large number of statues but also the different sizes, each one with only their right paw up.

After getting our fix of maneki-neko we wrapped it up and attempted to make our way back to the hotel via Shinjuku Station.

Shinjuku Station

Normally we wouldn’t write a lot about a particular train station but this one gets an exception.

From the Gotokuji station near the Gotokuji temple, we took the train out to Shinjuku station, where we’d need to do another transfer from there to where our hotel was located in Nishi-Shinjuku.

This was our first time doing a transfer at Shinjuku station and we were terribly optimistic that this would be an easy thing to do. For context, Shinjuku station is MASSIVE with multiple different lines and providers operating. In addition to this, there’s construction in various areas so different routes were required. It also won the Guinness World Record for the business train station in the world.

Please appreciate this map for some context and what haunts our dreams now.

In addition to this, we somehow got ourselves stuck. There’s a logical reason we don’t fully understand yet; we exited from one section and into another through different gates where we shouldn’t have technically been able to. This meant that our SUICA cards gave us an error when we tried to exit via the gates and we were technically trapped in the station. No exits would open for us.

After having a minor breakdown, we eventually found a station attendant who couldn’t understand English well, but enough that he understood “exit” and overrode the SUICA cards to let us out. We exited the train station, then immediately entered back in so that we could travel through to the correct train we needed to transfer to.

This was about an hour and half of walking through for transfer, getting trapped, exiting, and then getting back in for our correct train. And by this point we were both tired and stressed. We’re considering counselling, couples counselling, and another holiday to recover from the ordeal.