A nice view of the city, for free!

The week before last, I visited the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building in Shinjuku, which has a pair of observing decks on the 45th floor. While these aren't super high, all things considered, they do offer a pretty good view of Tokyo and some surroundings. This is probably because despite being the biggest city in the world (or biggest metropolitan area in the world, depending on your definition of "city"), Tokyo doesn't actually have a lot of really tall skyscrapers.

The observing deck of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building is also totally free to visit. So if you have some time to kill and you're in Shinjuku and like going to the tops of tall buildings, I definitely recommend visiting it.

The Metropolitan Government Building is also pretty easy to find from Shinjuku station. If you can find your way to the area of the station with the taxi and bus stops, there are moving sidewalks from the station which will take you most of the way there underground and signage exists in English as well as Japanese indicating the path there.


I approached the Metropolitan Government Building through an impressive-looking square (which definitely wasn't going to photograph well with my camera) and was able to follow a series of signs directing me to the tower entrance. There were some security officers checking bags in front of the elevator. Then after a short wait and a mildly claustrophobic ride to the top, I was up at the so-called observatory.

Lies.

I arrived a bit before sunset and stayed for a few hours after it started getting dark. This meant that I got to attempt to view Mount Fuji, which a photograph below the window assured me should be possible.

Apparently the day I visited, the weather was not nice enough for that, as you can see from the picture I took which does not feature Mount Fuji. I should probably try coming back some day after the wind has blown all the smog away.

Tokyo tower in the background. The forest
around the Meiji shrine on the right and
another park on the left.

The observatory features a pretty good view of much of Toyko including some well-known landmarks like the Tokyo Tower (shown near the centre of the photo on the right) and the area around the Meiji shrine.

It's also possible to see less well-known landmarks like the new-ish Tokyo Sky Tree (built because the Tokyo Tower was no longer tall enough to provide total coverage for television broadcasting) and some of the interestingly shaped skyscrapers in Shinjuku.

Twilight in Tokyo.

As the sun set, I got to admire the city as the lights started to come on, which is really quite nice. Cities always look nice when the street lights turn on, tracing out the roads. I also noticed that the Tokyo Tower looks especially impressive from the Metropolitan Government Building since it is illuminated pretty thoroughly. The Sky Tree was much less impressive when I was there since it just had a few lights chasing each other.

At some point, I noticed that there was a tennis court on top of a nearby building that's illuminated at night, which was pretty neat.

There are also two souvenir shops at the observatory which feature a variety of fairly interesting things at prices that don't seem too bad (though I'd have to do some price comparisons to say for sure). There's also a fairly overpriced restaurant which claims to have an even better view of the city, but I wasn't going to spend 1000 yen on a salad to find out.

As much as places like this aren't especially tall, I find that I really like visiting them. It's a very different kind of view than the sort one gets from visiting a place like the CN Tower in Toronto. There, you look down on everything and everything on the ground ends up seeming very small. From the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building, you can see far and wide, but you can also see the things on the ground much better. It's definitely a really nice spot to visit.

---

Since I neglected to post a second post last week, I'll aim for three (today, Wednesday, Friday) this week.