Tuesday, 16 April 2024
Today our agenda is to visit a few attractions within the city
- Tokyo Mosque & Turkish Cultural Center
- Tokyo National Museum
- Ueno Park
We started the day by going to Tokyo Mosque. Given the distance, we took a taxi from our hotel. The fare was ¥5,600 (RM170).
The Tokyo Mosque is managed by muslims from Türkiye hence the architecture of the building looks Turkish. The center also plays the role of a Turkish cultural centre where it organises events, sells books and halal groceries.
I can see local Japanese attending Turkish language lessons at the Yunus Emre Institute within the cultural center.
We visited the praying area. It reminded me of the mosques that I visited in Türkiye in 2017. I was also intrigued to see the Quran in Turkish script. I guess it would be easier for reverts to read the Quran in the Turkish script as compared to Arabic.
From the mosque, we walked to Yoyogi-Uehara station and had early lunch at Burger King. We took the train to Ueno Station as we wanted to visit the Tokyo National Museum.
Ueno Station was a big place. We walked through the station, and exited into Ueno Park. We had a short walk before arriving at Tokyo National Museum.
The museum was a complex of separate buildings housing different exhibitions. We visited the Honkan (Japanese gallery) and the Toyokan (Asian gallery). These are 2 separate buildings as the place is quite big.
The Honkan features highlights of Japanese art, while the Toyokan mostly Asian artifacts.
After we were done at the museum, we went for teatime at a cafe inside Ueno Park. The cafe had a pleasant view of the park.
After teatime, my parents went back to the hotel to rest. I continued on with the kids. We took the train to Ginza.
We took the kids to Sanrio Nishiginza. It wasn’t very big but it had lots of cool Sanrio merchandise.
We then took a stroll through Ginza, soaking in the evening vibe. I couldn’t resist the tasty Mannekan waffle as we walked to Ginza Six.
At Ginza Six, I went to Tsutaya Bookstore. It was nice to browse through the Japanese language books they have in store. I bought 2 books that I thought could help with my language learning.
Related posts: Tokyo 2024 part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6
Imran Jaafar 