One of the great things about living in Tokyo is that you never know what you might find when you wander around the different districts of the city. Something that I’ve always enjoyed doing on days when the weather is nice and I don’t have any plans is donning my jodhpurs and pith helmet and setting out with my trusty elephant gun at the ready to valiantly explore new neighborhoods. A cracking good time, I tell you.

One particularly fun place to visit for an hour or two is Kappabashi Dogu-gai, located in between Ueno and Asakusa, where one can find block after block of restaurant supply stores selling everything from kitchenware to neon signs to plastic food display models. There you can wander in and out of shops overflowing with anything a person would ever need to open up a restaurant (well, aside from actual food, that is), as well as seek out the many depictions of kappa (a kind of folkloric water creature) scattered throughout the area.

Judy and I made a visit to Kappabashi relatively recently (I gave my stalwart mahout the day off), and here a few photos from that afternoon:

Amazingly, although I was extremely tempted, I did manage to make it out of Kappabashi without having purchased any of the plastic food models. They’re actually quite pricey, and frankly, there’s not much one can do with an incredibly realistic replica of a piece of tempura shrimp other than try to trick people into eating it, which would probably get old rather quickly (I have a hard enough time making friends as is, on account of my ungodly body odor and chronic incontinence).