It’s a very rainy day in Tokyo today. Nevertheless, I ventured out of the sharehouse firstly for content purposes and secondly because it now happens to be less than a month until my 23rd birthday. [Hint to anyone who wants to post me a card/present/dairy milk: postage takes about three weeks so the sooner the better please!]

I thought I would peruse some department stores in Shibuya, Tokyo’s shopping and entertainment hub, for some birthday inspiration. Unfortunately I forgot my umbrella so I did get rather drenched on this particular spree but I took a nice picture of Shibuya in the rain, which made it worth it in the end.

Shibuya is well-known for its department stores, and Japanese department stores are well-known for being incredible. Consequently, this is where I began my day-out. It’s also where I ended my day-out and everything in between as there are many department stores in Shibuya and you can kill a few hours in each one.

My department store crawl involved five of the big ones today: Shibuya Hikarie, Shibuya 109, Don Quijote, Loft and BINGO Shibuya MODI. The best one was absolutely Loft. It is described as a homeware department store so I hadn’t actually intended on going to it but I happened to be walking past as the drizzle turned into torrential rain so I ran for shelter inside. I can’t remember the exact floor plan but you walk in on stationery. You can spend almost an hour looking at the pens, pencils and stickers of ramen and sumo wrestlers really. As you go up each floor, it turns into gifts, then homeware, then more gifts I think.

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Shibuya Hikarie has a lot of nice clothes and accessories plus a great view from the eleventh floor. Shibuya 109 is supposedly the home to Tokyo’s youth fashion scene and Don Quijote is a discount goods store, where you can buy pretty much anything. I never venture further than the snacks floor in Don Quijote as this is where the huge variety of Kit Kat flavours are located. Today I tried about the apple flavour, which was interesting to say the least. I also popped into the Lindt store round the corner and bought a single matcha-flavoured Lindor for one hundred yen.

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BINGO Shibuya MODI was the last store on my list so I was feeling a bit worn out by the time I made it there. This one has a huge floor dedicated to vintage clothes, then the floor up is dedicated to more upmarket clothes. The next three floors are all book/magazine/DVD related where I splurged on a Japanese magazine. I can’t actually read it but from what I can gather it looks at different Japanese people’s lives during lockdown. Each person is pictured at home with some of their favourite items. Here’s how the other half live, if anyone’s interested!

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Shopping in Tokyo is fun but it’s also exhausting. I saw a million things I wanted but I also wasn’t really compelled to buy anything. Probably not a bad thing seeing as consumerism is killing the planet. Anyway, thanks for reading!