Stephen: After our time in Osaka came to an end, we had just under a week left in Japan, and were going to spend it back in Tokyo. For this part of the journey, we were staying in an area of the city called Ikebukuro, which is a wee bit north of Shinjuku. We had ‘splashed out’ a bit to get a flat that had both a balcony and a rooftop terrace, which was pretty awesome.

I wasn’t too sure about the area at first, as after wandering around the first night, it seemed like one of the more sketchy places we had been, and there seemed to be lots of the same kind of shops around, rather than anything particularly interesting. After a few days here though, that impression definitely changed, and not just because there was a giant Pokemon centre nearby.

We visited some bizarre indoor anime ‘theme park’…