Leaping into the Twenty-First Century
with Gusto!

Early on the morning of my last day in Tokyo, I went online using the high speed Internet connection in my hotell room to confirm the departure time for my return flight to the USA, check out various ways to get to Narita airport, and look up the fare and train schedule for my preferred choice. I then took a few moments to read over some suggestions on places to visit recommended by the Tokyo Convention and Visitor Center's Yes! Tokyo web site; included among them was an article from December 2002 describing the recent opening of the first buildings in the new Shiodome complex in Shinbashi.

For several years I had watched this huge complex of skyscrapers being built near the Shiba Park Hotel in which Smithsonian Japan Journey tours usually stayed while in Tokyo. I was intrigued enough by the article and my own curiosity to schedule in a late morning visit before heading off to the airport for my late afternoon departure.

First, however, I wanted to take some photographs of the area around Ikebukuro station to illustrate an observation I had made earlier in my stay -- that the "typical" train station of days gone by seemed to have disappeared entirely from the urban landscape.

I also had one other stop to make -- at RanKing's RanQueen store in Shinjuku, a brand new branch of a set of shops established to feature the "hottest" consumer items available during any particular week, a franchise operation I had first read about in the pages of WIRED magazine a few months earlier.

And so, off we go, on my last day in town, leaping into the twenty-first century with gusto!

Click on any of the pictures below to learn what I experienced in each location ...

	WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO THE RAILROAD STATION? IKEBUKURO
KEEPING UP WITH THE "IN CROWD" SHINJUKU
	SHIODOME MEGAPLEX CITY SHINBASHI