Ueno Early Stroll

At 2:30 AM, I found myself wide awake..

We decided to explore the Ueno area first thing —
wandered north to Ueno, where the streets, still snoozing, felt like a private playground. Most shops don’t open until 10 AM, so the only sounds were my footsteps and the occasional crow, probably judging my life choices.

Ueno Park was calm and mysterious in the early morning haze, and that’s when I met the tree—a pine with a perfectly circular branch known as the “Moon Pine.” It’s like nature decided to get artsy. This whimsical wonder, near the Kiyomizu Kannon-dō Temple, was so famous that Hiroshige featured it in an ukiyo-e print back in 1856. The original tree got KO’d by a typhoon during the Meiji era, but they brought it back in 2012 with some serious landscaping magic.

As the sun climbed higher and shutters rolled up, I wandered into Ameya-Yokocho, or “Ameyoko,” a street that really knows how to hustle. Once a black market hotspot for American military surplus after World War II, it’s now a sensory overload of everything you didn’t know you needed.

The name “Ameyoko” has a double meaning: it could be from “Ameya” (candy store) because the area was once packed with sweet shops when sugar was scarce, or from “America” because, well, it was loaded with U.S. goods back in the day. Now, it’s a wild bazaar with over 400 shops hawking fresh seafood (yes, giant crab legs on ice!), white strawberries (fancy and mysterious), Nike sneakers, secondhand Hermès bags, and pretty much anything else you can imagine. It’s chaotic, loud, and completely fabulous.Leer más