Shinjuku Station platform

One day an e-mail arrived from our travel agency. I don’t know how it got past my spam filters, but I’m glad it did; they were advertising unprecedentedly low fares for Golden Week. That’s the first week of May, when lots of people don’t have work or school, and they leave the major cities to visit their rural origins or relax elsewhere. We hadn’t been planning on meeting up in Japan at all, but a US$350 round-trip deal, during a week that Roko would only be working two days, was difficult to refuse. So, I took off to see Japan for the first time in two years, and Miss Hiroko for the first time in three months. On my first full day there, Monday, she did go to work, so I spent the day wandering on my own. Shinjuku, my old home station and favorite town, was my first stop.