After an early morning breakfast at 7 to avoid the rest of the hotel crowds I went for a walk. It was rush hour, plenty of people in suits off to work but most of central Akiba isn’t awake until 11 which meant, no maids around. Pretty good time to take the Osmo Pocket I bought to record my own walking tour video.

The Chinese camera from DJI is about the weight of a 10,000mAh power bank but great quality video with its 1 inch sensor, built-in gimbal and size. The quality of al the walking tour videos I watched convinced me to buy one despite the annoying “activation by app” only. It can use a lot more polishing and without any other competition (action cams like GoPro doesn’t have OIS or as large a sensor), I doubt they’ll be polishing their pocket video cam any time soon.

Also, EU is slowly transitioning to have removable batteries as a requirement for gadgets and the Osmo Pocket doesn’t have one.

By the time I done my walk, stores were beginning to open so I went to grab a SIM card in Yodobashi. My 8 year old phone is quite old with no support for eSIMs but, built-in battery’s still good so sticking with physical SIMs. Ended up picking Nippon SIM which had 3 different bandwidth choices. I wasn’t planning to stream or post photos on the move so the lowest was enough for me. As long as I could use Maps with it that’s good enough. There’s no way to check your usage other than through your own device’s mobile data stats. Never had to check in the past but would have been a useful feature if you could.

No extras like discount coupons (never used them anyway), just a pick for the card tray. After plugging in and entering a few APN settings, working.

Next up was picking up my JR Rail Pass from Ueno.

There’s always the debate whether the national one that covers the whole of Japan is worth it or not. After the prices went up, there’s another reason to not go for one. After doing the sums for my itinerary it was still worth it to me. Especially when I was choosing to go Green (first/business class) again so I could chill and get a seat whenever, even with luggage. Regional passes are cheaper but they don’t offer Green.

I ordered through the official site this time because the agency JTB wasn’t offering it any more in the UK. Perk of this was you could book seats online before collecting your tickets but just like other machines, they can only be used during human staff working hours so if you wanted to book late night say after ticket offices close at 11:30pm, you can’t.

I missed the part where you could just go to a bullet train ticket machine to collect the pass and ended up going to the ticket office by mistake. You actually go to the Travel Centre to collect it which was in the opposite direction (but it looked like they'll be moving again soon). Afterwards, you show them your reservation number and passport to collect. Even if it’s not within its use date yet you can still book ahead.

The pass used to be passport-sized with the smaller ticket laminated ticket on it. Then you had to visit a staffed gate. Now you use it like a regular ticket which is a lot more convenient. At one point I went through the wrong gate and had to explain myself because I couldn’t exit the station afterwards…

I was planning to see all the different station stamps everywhere I went after learning about them. There were a lot of Western fans going about collecting both them and the Detective Conan stamps..

Ueno Station still has those low arches.

Seems like they're trying to encourage pop culture fans to Fukushima, where the nuclear power plant leak occurred, using Final Fantasy.

Well, not part of my trip this time.