After another nice breakfast at the Dormy Inn, I wanted to post some postcards on the way to Morioka station, but the letter slots of the postboxes I found were all blocked off with tape. There was a notice explaining that there would be no collections during the two-day festival because of traffic restrictions.

I took the Shinkansen from Morioka to Tokyo but got off early at Ueno as it was handy for my hotel near Asakusa. After dropping my bag, I headed for Kappabashi Street, which is the place in Tokyo for kitchenware, and I knew some of the readers of this blog would be interested. Some of the busiest shops specialised in large, scary-looking knives.

Tokyo Skytree does not feature in the rankings of the world's tallest buildings because it's not classified as a building (it's an uninhabited communication and observation tower). However, amongst free-standing structures, it comes 3rd in the world (after Burj Khalifa in Dubai and Merdeka 118 in Malaysia) and number one in Japan. Below is a photo of the tower at night taken from my room on the 12th floor of the Asakusa View Hotel. The interactive version, also showing my room, was taken during the day.