Boys Trip!

After our last Toronto holiday at the end of July/beginning of August, we had no other travel plans in the works for the rest of the year. I had some thought around making another work trip to meet up with contacts in Southeast Asia, perhaps a city other than Singapore, and we had started to think about where to go for Christmas, but the focus in the near term was to get back into our Hong Kong rhythm, get the kids acclimatised to their new schools, and see how our next few months stacked up.

It was only when we took a closer look at Miles’ school schedule and noticed he had a week off at the end of October that the idea of doing a mini-trip with him came up. I had plenty of leave saved up from the last couple of years, and Miles is at an age where he’s able to both enjoy and appreciate new places and handle some of the rigours of international travel. It was still a daunting thought initially, the prospect of taking Miles on my own somewhere and being the lone responsible adult, but it was also quite an exciting idea, and one of the perks of living in Asia is you’re always just a few hours’ flight away from somewhere interesting and, equally as important, safe.

I bandied about a few potential destinations – Singapore, Taiwan, Osaka – but Miles had so much fun in Tokyo on our last trip there in March that it was a no-brainer for me. The fact that Tokyo is also quite possibly my all-time favourite city was a big factor as well, surely. So I booked a hotel across the street from Tokyo Station, mapped out a few cool museums and viewpoints to take him to, planned a day-trip outside of the city so he could experience riding a Shinkansen, and then waited patiently for his school break to arrive.

Toy Museum and Train & Bus Museum

Tokyo has a plethora of museums perfect for kids Miles’ age, and I had to choose just a couple of them to squeeze into our itinerary. Different museums will have different opening hours and days, and the city itself is just massive, so I mostly had to plan around those two mitigating factors. I also didn’t want to pack our schedule with too many items, in case Miles needed a bit of a break between one place and the next, or if he decided he wanted to go someplace else on a whim.

The first museum we went to was the Tokyo Toy Museum, a celebration of toys from around the world housed in an old school building in Shinjuku. The museum is spread across three floors of the school building, with different rooms focusing on different types of toys and ways to play creatively. I was not sure how interested Miles would be, especially since most of the toys were pretty “basic”, but actually he didn’t want to leave. He spent ages just playing with wooden blocks and beads, a simple model village, a board game we half made up the rules to, and a little kids-sized shopping area, and when I asked him afterwards about his Tokyo highlights, this museum was very near the top.

The second museum we went to was the Denbus Train and Bus Museum in Kawasaki, which was a bit of a trek from where we were staying. It took us about an hour to get there by local train, made even longer by the fact that Miles wanted to ride the Yamanote Line (his favourite Tokyo metro line) on the way, which required a bit of a detour. Despite the distance, I knew Miles would go bananas for it (as hinted by the fact that he has a favourite Tokyo metro line), and being the little train lover that he is, even the journey there was a highlight for him.

This was the highlight of the trip for Miles. It’s not a very big museum, but it’s got enough old trains and buses for a little kid to live out his transportation dreams for a good long while. Miles, like probably most kids his age, can make do with 99% imagination and 1% random object, so to have the opportunity to sit in his own train with nobody else rushing him off just gave his imagination a super-boost. When he was ready to move on to other activities, the museum had three different train simulators to keep him occupied, with his favourite being the one where he could drive a little model train around a room-sized diorama.

A moment of kindness

After the train and bus museum, Miles and I walked over to a nearby kaisen-don stall I’d found just on Google Maps to grab some lunch. It had pretty good reviews, the only caveat being it was a takeout-only restaurant, and I was a little unsure where we would actually be able to eat after ordering our food. Japan is not big on eating outside on the street, so while I wouldn’t hesitate to just perch on the sidewalk with a rice box in Hong Kong, I had the feeling doing so here would be committing a big faux pas.

I got Miles a kaisen-don with salmon sashimi and a tuna one for myself, and then we just walked a little bit away from the shopfront and I fed Miles standing up first so I could quickly eat afterwards. A few bites into Miles’ meal, however, I felt a tapping on my shoulder, and it turned out to be the proprietor of the shop. He beckoned us back into his stall and proceeded to clear off a display table and pull out a couple of stools so we could eat inside, while also pulling out a bottle of his own tea to share – so nice!

That alone was enough to win me over, but when he saw that Miles had finished eating his salmon sashimi, he took his bowl back into the kitchen and loaded it up again with big chunks of other kinds of sashimi! There was tuna, scallop, shrimp, and some other fish in there, and he did not skimp at all. Our original orders were already pretty packed to the gills with sashimi, and I was blown away by this guy’s generosity, both with the limited space inside his shop and with his own quality ingredients. This trip to Japan with Miles was mostly driven by me wanting him to see and experience the trains and the food and the culture of the place, but I’m so grateful that Miles also got to witness the kindness of strangers as well.

Bird’s Eye View

Tokyo is a city that stretches on for forever, something that is best appreciated from a high vantage point. Miles and I did it twice – once for free on top of the Tokyo Government Metropolitan Building in Shinjuku, and once on the top deck of the Tokyo Tower in Minato ward. Regarding the former, the views were not bad and the observation deck is quite spacious so we didn’t feel like we were fighting through a crowd to look out the windows. There was also a piano that was free to play, and there were some seriously impressive performances that afternoon, with some of the amateur pianists drawing bigger crowds than the views outside.

Tokyo Tower was not really a part of our original agenda, but Miles saw it on a screen behind the check-in desk at our hotel and said he wanted to go see it, so we did. I even paid for top deck access, which comes with a strange Harry Potter-like sequence involving a hidden library and talking portraits. The views were great, though, and the late afternoon lighting bathing the city below was near perfection. Miles enjoyed the bird’s eye view somewhat, but I suspect he found the actual tower itself more interesting than what he could see from the top of it.

The city

A good chunk of our days in Tokyo were spent walking through metro stations, busy streets, and quiet neighbourhoods, and those in-between times had their own little joys. I would tell Miles which exit we were looking for after exiting the train car and he would eagerly look for the right signage. We’d walk by an elevated train track and Miles would drag us to a stop to watch a few trains zip across to other parts of the city. He was constantly asking questions about where we were, what building that was, what that sign or storefront said, etc. On the smaller streets without sidewalks he’d remind me to be careful and to walk closer to him away from the middle of the road. Little things like that stick in my memory as much as the museums, the towers, the temples, and the food.

Farewell

Our days together in Tokyo flew by, and before we know it it was time to pack up our things and hop on the train back to the airport, and back to Hong Kong. Miles had handled this trip like a champ, patiently waiting as I tried to figure out how to get from one end of the city to the other, walking thousands and thousands of steps without a hint of a complaint, gamely trying whatever food I put in front of him, and expressing his own curiosity and wonder at the new worlds unfolding around his young self. I couldn’t have asked for a better travel companion.

This just about covers everything we did on on our boys trip, except for one little excursion to the wilder places north of Tokyo on our second day in Japan, where autumn had already started to turn the leaves into rich ambers and golds, and ancient temples and tombs rested in the shadows of even older forest canopies.