Last Sunday we went to have a look at the Tokyo Sky Tree (see left), a new building due for completion in Spring 2012 that will have a height of 634m, making it one of the world`s tallest (in fact the tallest "tower" in the world), and the tallest artificial structure in Japan. Its current height is about 450 metres or so and there is a PR office nearby which has a two-weekly collage of photos showing the progress of constrution starting on 14 July 2008.

Interestingly this tower was named by the people of Tokyo. After a month of collecting names from the general public, six names made the final shortlist: Tokyo Edo Tower, Tokyo Sky Tree, Mirai Tree, Yumemi Yagura, Rising East Tower, and Rising Tower. The winner turned out to be Tokyo Sky Tree, as a result of a nationwide vote in which it received 33,000 votes out of the 110,000 cast. The runner up was Tokyo Edo Tower ("edo" being the old name for Tokyo).

As I read on Wikipedia, its primary role will be as a television and radio broadcasting tower as Tokyo's current broadcasting tower, Tokyo Tower, at 333 meters, no longer tall enough to give complete digital terrestrial television broadcasting coverage as it is surrounded by many high-rise buildings. Digital terrestrial broadcasting in Japan is to be replace the current analog broadcasting which will end in July 2011 (and Mariko is not as tall as she looks in the picture on the right!).

Speaking of tall buildings, and being someone who is not keen on heights, I am always in awe of our ability to engineer such things, and have a lot of respect for those people who work on the top of such structures in order to get them finished. For me 634 metres is amazingly tall, but then its still some way short of the tallest building in the world, the 828 m tall Burj Khalifa in Dubai, which opened in January 2010.

We also had a day trip out recently to a place called Sawara in Chiba, about 70 kilometres north east of Tokyo and only 15 km from Narita Airport (if that helps you in any way to place it). Its a really cool place to walk around and it has lots of waterways. The streets are still like they were in the Edo period and you almost feel you are in a time slip.

There a many buildings from the latter half of the Edo Period (period in which Japan was ruled by the Togugawa Shogunate and lasting from 1603 to 1868) to the beginning of the Showa Era (1926). Its really interesting to see buildings as old as 200 years in some cases such as furniture stores and general stores that have been operated as family businesses since those days continue to operate and make money (albeit primarily from tourists).















We also managed to find a very nice and reasonable restaurant for lunch.

As we were leaving, we enquired at the tourist information office about a nearby park and instead of that we were advised to go and have a look at a field of cosmos flowers which was pretty much in the middle of nowhere, which for an entry fee of 100 yen, gave you the right to cut as many cosmos as you liked and take them home with you. You can get the idea from the photos below.

So the weather has finally cooled down a bit here recently but still in the low to mid twenties which is not bad for the second day of October. Went out for a run this morning and then did some grocery shopping at the supermarket about 250 meters from our place. That particular supermarket opened about four months ago and is really ideal for us - reasonable prices and within very easy walking distance. Their point card is pretty good too and like most other supermarkets they give you one point for every 100 yen you spend which you can then use against the cost of future purchases (so effectively like 1% interest), but quite regularly they offer 5 times points days (aka multi-point days) but the catch at this particular supermarket is that you can only get this extra 4 points per 100 yen if you pay in cash. For someone like me who still hasn't learned to carry enough cash in his wallet to cover sudden needs and who isn't so inclined to research in advance when these multi-point days are I sometimes have to forgo such things, however, I am safe in the knowledge that I will be accumulating points on my AMEX card when I use plastic. It sometimes feels like a bit of swings and roundabouts, however in just 4 months we have racked up 1,787 points, effectively 1,787 yen interest on spending of about 90,000 Yen or so, much better than what you get at the banks, and not bad considering you need to eat to live.

Almost every store in Japan offers you point cards - Mariko actually has a separate card case full of them and she is a master at always being able to produce the point card wherever we seem to go, even if we havent been to a particular store for a while - we even saw a TV show recently where certain individuals were explaining how to maximise all the benefits of point cards and other additional benefits. I lost what they were saying after a few minutes but it seemed that there is a science behind it all. In a society where there is so much competition in almost every sector, especially retail, if you dont have point cards then you are not playing the game and you will also lose out on a lot of savings and benefits. We recently "bought" a great set of knives exchanging points accumulated on credit card, and when we bought a digital recorder at Yamada Denki, we got 15% of the cost value as a points gift, meaning we basically got 200 quid or so for free. There are a plethora of methods and special deals out there if you join in the fun of it all. Mariko' challenge is for us to get to 10,000 points on the supermarket card, and then we can shop free for a month (hopefully) however there is the temptation to buy too much or lots of unnecessary things but so far we haven't been stockpiling or gaining weight so we must be doing OK.

Yesterday evening we went to watch Eat, Pray, Love - a movie starring Julia Roberts, at a nearby multiplex cinema. Now that we have a car we can actually explore a bit more, so coming home after work, getting changed and then heading out again made a bit of a change to leaving work, heading out and then coming home. Not a major lifestyle change but the chance to do something a bit different. The film itself was quite enjoyable and the location shooting was really good - New York, Rome, Bali and India - not a bad combination for places to live during ay year. As we were driving there, I thought at one point we were going to run out of petrol as my attention to the navigation system was lacking and we veered off course a bit and then the warning light came on, but luckily we managed to find a petrol station and fill up the tank. We got the car with a full tank of petrol and did 565 km and yesterday we paid 6,750 yen for 50.75 litres of High Octane (Super Unleaded as its called in the UK) fuel (or 133 yen per litre) which comes out to about 1 pound per litre at current exchange rates, so quite a bit cheaper when compared to the UK (about 1.16 pounds). However, when compared to the US, where the price is around 2.75 dollars per gallon, and as 1 US gallon equals 3.785 litres, that means we got 13.41 US gallons so thats an equivalent of 500 yen or 6 dollars per US gallon at current exchange rates - significantly more expensive if I have done my maths correctly and probably partly to do with the strength or the Yen at the moment, which is another story in itself.

Anyway, after that little calculation session, my head seems to be in a spin, so I will write off now and probably go get a much needed haircut. Already 3pm here on Saturday.

Until next time.