My room knows I'm English. So the wake up call setting on the phone talks to me in Anglo-Saxon. There was a Herald Tribune in a letter rack outside (close). I tried breakfast in the Marmolada which proved to be a buffet for 2700 Yen (expensive). So I aimed to make it an all you can eat buffet and have breakfast as the most expensive meal of the day. People were having serials (sic) in glasses, I was bold and filled up a bowl but then found an absence of spoons! I only realised the card I had been handed to start with was meant to placed in a holder on the table.

Starting hanging around in the hotel lobby for the first tour to begin. I met Burt and Priscilla who were from The States but had also booked with Magical Japan. It was very pleasant that our paths coincided a lot over the next few days! The coach that picked us up did a tour of hotels then went to a rendezvous where we were transferred to another coach for the City tour with friendly guide Yuko. Yuko first took us to the Tokyo Tower, a red version of the Eiffel Tower which acted as a TV transmitter for Tokyo until recently. (The growth of tall skyscrapers has created reception shadows so a new Sky Tower of double the height has recently entered service.). A colleague kindly took me down from the Observation deck to a floor with windows one could look down through the ironwork.

We next visited the Meiji shrine in Tokyo where seemingly Shinto style weddings were being held for the tourists. Ceremonies are performances to some extent but it felt an intrusion. Perhaps as part of the ceremony an o-daiku (giant drum) was struck very loudly. On the way to the shrine passed a vast wall of sake barrels - sake is one of the five purifications in Shinto (the others were water, fire, salt, and passing through a torii gate). Yuko demonstrated the water purifying at a water trough with ladles. She explained (as did later guides) the mix and match approach of Japanese to religion. Buddhism provides funerals as it also provides reincarnation. Shinto monopolises a lot of rituals for the living as you need to get the deities on your side for exams etc. Christianity provides Christmas with its bunting and wrapping paper.

At the Meiji shrine (as at other temples) they sold good luck charms. Quaintly these good luck charms wear out after a year and have to be renewed. Convenient for the shrine. These good luck charms are called "Emma"s. Yuko showed us one her daughter had made - not as effective as the real temple article of course.

The last stop of the morning tour was the Palace gardens. Very pretty with the cherry blossom out. Yuko explained one reason for the masks was an allergy to cedar pollen. I was dropped from the morning tour in Ginza and headed for the basement in the nearby Mitsukoshi store for food. I found food - numerous forms and colours of it in a vast food hall. Most of it I had no idea what it was. But there wasn't any tables to sit at! I picked a rice thingy, successfully mimed for chopsticks, and ate on a chair in a waiting area. Finally time to face the Tokyo transportation system.

With some trepidation I navigated on the Metro system from Ginza to Ichigaya. And totally failed to find the Nihon Kiin. My fault. I needed to do much more research. One challenge is knowing exit gate from the station the Nihon Kiin was two minutes from. That I didn't know. But it was an interesting experience. Helpful video displays inside the carriages in Japanese and English say which the doors will open, and other useful info. Many stations had barriers between the platform and line, the trains stop precisely aligning doors to gates in those barriers. Cleaners were at work helping to keep Japan as clean as it is.

I next got myself to Mitaka, this time using the JR railway as well. This took a long time and I learnt I didn't know how to reckon how long getting from A to B takes when A and B are in Tokyo. I was feeling worn out at this point, and almost gave up on my quest for the Ghibli Museum several times. I wasn't sure I was in the right direction as I walked from Mitaka station. But I persevered and found a wondrous place for children, a treasure house of animation. Much of the museum is for children, in scale if nothing else. But I did learn there. About the technology of art, in the colour swatches and cinema mechanisms and designing. About how like an engineer an artist needs to be skilled in his techniques. About how artists build on other artists, there were illustrations and sources from pulp comics and Arabic legends and Victorian romances and Russian fables.

The evening saw an ill-fated act of independence. I wandered down to Shinagawa and plumped for a pizza place named Vento. The name should have deterred me! There was at least a 30 minute wait to eat inside so I foolishly agreed to eat outside. And got fumigated by those smoking outside. And got toasted by a strange burner which may have been contributing to global warming, or deterring tse-tse flies. For some reason I thought it was clever to order a pizza made with mustard mayonnaise - yeuch. And as for the chocolate orange tea - someone had already had the chocolate orange I think. It was Saturday night so the world was out and about, it had been crowded when I returned on the Yamanote loop line to Shinagawa.