Tokyo travelogue: Sunday at the Imperial Palace grounds, Ueno Park and Akihabara

Some of the cherry blossoms are out early | Al Yellon

These are all iconic places in the Japanese capital.

TOKYO — Sunday was another gorgeous day here, with unlimited sunshine and temps in the low 70s. It’s weather I wish I could bring back for Opening Day in Chicago, but… well, you know how that goes.

I have a LOT of photos to share with you today, hope you enjoy all of them.

The first stop was at Budokan. Yes, the arena made famous by Rockford-based Cheap Trick back in the 1980s. This doesn’t look like a conventional music venue and indeed, it’s not — it was originally built for judo competition for the 1964 Olympics. Now, it seats about 14,000 for concerts.

Here are photos of the exterior at Budokan.

Then, it was on to the Imperial Palace gardens. Unfortunately, we were unable to get an Imperial Palace tour booked. So… gotta come back to Japan again for that (and many other things).

The gardens are beautiful, and there are also some fortified walls that date back to the shogun era in Japan (early 17th Century to mid-19th Century). They were restored in the early 2000s.

As noted above, the guardhouses above date to the 17th Century. They have been exceptionally well preserved.

The gardens and area around the Imperial Palace are an oasis of peace in the middle of a bustling city, beautifully landscaped and there were many people just taking walks through the area taking it all in.

Here’s the exit gate… plus an “Imperial Guard”!

The guard was there (and at the other entry gates) to do bag checks. They do take security seriously in Japan and these guards were, as is just about everyone here, polite, friendly and efficient.

The next stop was going to be Ueno Park but before that, walking past a large hotel, I came across a wedding party taking photos outside:

Here’s hoping they had a lovely ceremony.

Ueno Park is one of the busiest in all of Tokyo. And right now, they are having a Sakura festival, basically a spring festival celebrating the season. On this weekend they had many stands set up with various types of food:

I had a skirt steak skewer from the stand shown at the left, it was quite good, and a glass of sake. Cost: About $9. Can’t beat that!

One of the biggest attractions in Ueno Park is cherry blossoms. It’s a bit early for that; they’ll be in full bloom a week or 10 days from now. But a couple of trees in the park were blooming and they attracted large crowds photographing them.

And about the signs… they are everywhere, and people obey every single one of them.

This is for a path that is used to walk through the park:

This sign is placed on the roadway:

“Banquets” … well, that’s not exactly the correct translation. They mean picnics. And there were quite a number of families having picnics:

Including… amazingly enough… a family of Cubs fans. The young boy of this family came up to me when he saw me wearing some Cubs garb:

His mom said he was “shy,” but he didn’t hesitate to say hello to a fellow Cubs fan. Turns out the dad, who as you can see is not Japanese, has parents who live not far from Wrigley Field. They are hoping to come to Chicago to see a game later this summer. And the young boy said he was a big fan of Shōta Imanaga.

You just never know who you’ll run into, more than 6,300 miles from Wrigley Field!

There was also a kids baseball field in the middle of the park:

Mainly, I took this photo to show the guy who was running the food stand what I wanted, but this was a really good soft ice cream cone. Cost: $3.35.

There’s also a temple in the middle of Ueno Park:

At which these young people were performing:

And here is a bit of their performance [VIDEO].

Like I said… there are signs everywhere, and people obey them as a matter of course.

Even with trash:

The last stop of the day was at Akihabara, known as “Electric Town” because of all the stores selling pretty much everything electronic you can imagine, along with other souvenirs.

On Sundays they close the main street for several hours so people can just… walk down the middle.

I hope I’ve given you a bit of the flavor of Tokyo and Japan apart from baseball with these travelogue articles. I’m heading back to Chicago Monday evening (Japan time) and arriving Monday afternoon (Chicago time) so I’m going to wind up having the longest Monday ever. Not sure what I’m going to wind up doing before departing for Haneda Airport, if there’s more touristy stuff I’ll post another travelogue. And I will likely post something later in the week, before the Diamondbacks series starts, summing up the MLB Tokyo Series and what it means for the Cubs and baseball in general.