Scaredy Cat Travels

Harajuku and Disney – or Otters and Hedgehogs and Chincillas, Oh My!

After a less than stellar start (lest you have already forgotten us almost losing Rowan immediately on the subway), our train hopping skills had greatly improved. At this point, we’d managed to get on the correct train and get to the right place on the first try every time. We would only lose our way once at street level.

Better yet, the kids often took the lead which meant I had less to stress about. I think Rowan was spurred into action after nearly being stuck in Hamamatsucho Station forever.

Knowing we had limited time to accomplish our last Tokyo wishes before we transferred to Disney in the afternoon and, effectively out of the city for good, we had to prioritize. Like any other sane person, the thing at the very top of our must do list was a creature café, more specifically an otter café. To clear up potential confusion, you do not eat otters at an otter café. You don’t eat at all, in fact. You get a free drink but it’s very much an after-thought, like a “get one free drink from a vending machine as you leave” after-thought. It makes me wonder if there is some weird law or ordinance they’re skirting by calling themselves a “café” when they aren’t. But maybe I’ve just been on my town’s development board for too long.

You know how you think you know your family? And you try to plan a day around what they want? And then find out you have no idea…

In addition to the otter café, I thought there were two other wishes – Rowan wanted to visit the Kirby Café and Gift Shop (Kirby is a video game character for those of you over 30, and you do eat at this café) and all of us wanted to have sushi at one of the conveyor belt restaurants like we tried to do the night before.

So after a long day of touring Tokyo on Sunday, I spent an hour in the hotel that night trying to time out a way to accomplish all three things on the list – which was difficult considering the Otters and the Kirbys were on opposite sides of town. Then I discovered that the Tokyo Kirby Café requires a reservation, and reservations book up over a month in advance. Since it was one of the only things Rowan was really interested in doing, I was willing to try to get in anyway. But then I happily found that there is one other Kirby Café location, and it’s in Fukuoka. We happened to have zero plans for our one night in Fukuoka, so I snagged a reservation there instead.

Snagged is not the best description. That reservation took me 30+ minutes because, as many things do in Japan, it required a Japanese cell number to finalize. I do not have one of those. However, I do have a willingness to lie. I tried entering the hotel’s phone number first. When that didn’t work I Googled what a Japanese cell number looks like. It turns out they have specific area codes for those. So I changed the hotel’s area code to a cell area code and voila! I would also like to apologize to whoever actually owns that number. It was a necessary evil.

With Kirby sorted, I planned to extend our late check-out until 3 pm – just one hour shy of the American Express Platinum benefit of 4 pm. We could leave the hotel around 10:30 am to get to Kura Sushi at opening then hop a block over to the Otter Café when it opened at 1 pm.

Except when you tell the front desk while checking in that you think you might check out at 1 pm (I only offered this guess because they asked – in fact, several Japanese hotels asked), there’s no changing that. I was still adjusting to the Japanese version of customer service so this surprised me. And delayed us getting out of the hotel since the original plan did not include packing and putting luggage with the bell desk before leaving. The dominos falling then meant we didn’t make it to Kura until 11:30 am and, by the time we checked into their little machine, the return time for our table was 2 pm.

As we were leaving the restaurant, which I had hobbled almost a mile to in the rain on my stumps masquerading as feet, the kids announced, “We didn’t really want to do that anyway. There’s one in Dallas.” In fact, Jackson has been to the one in Dallas twice. Somehow neither of them mentioned this the night before while we were trying to get into the Shibuya location or all morning while we talked about our plans for the day. Seriously.

Admitting defeat, we went to the first restaurant we saw – a really cute café but another meal of burgers and fries. It just seemed a waste. I didn’t come to Japan to eat fish and chips. Once we’d eaten more American and British food, it was time to try for the otters. After our successive defeats, I wasn’t hopeful. But luck was finally on our side.

Spoiler alert: It wouldn’t last.

Jackson loved the Garlic Butter Burger.

Rowan, however, was not so sure about it.

A lovely picture of our food at the cafe I don’t remember the name of and can’t for the life of me find on Google Maps. Someday I will be better travel blogger. I only sort of recommend the place anyway so I guess it doesn’t really matter. The food was decent but, for the love of all that is holy, eat somewhere else! You’re in Tokyo, dammit.

There are many animal cafes in Tokyo but we chose to visit “Harry”, a small chain of mostly hedgehog cafes, in the Harajuku Terrace location. There are other Harajuku locations including one on Takeshita Street but not all of them have otters.

Apparently everything good in Japan is on the second floor up a sketchy set of stairs and Harry is no different. Because we arrived right at opening, there were only a couple of other families in the “cafe”. It does not seem like you can make reservations so it’s first-come first-served. Getting there early is highly advisable. Harry didn’t open until 1 pm the day we went but opens earlier on other days.

In addition to otters, you could choose to visit with and feed hedgehogs and chinchillas. Of course, we chose all three. Our package, which included 30 minutes with the animals and three sets of feed – one mini cup of food per species for each family member – was about $50 USD. We were told that we would only be allowed five minutes with the otters but that didn’t end up being the case. I imagine it is monitored more closely when they are busy.

We started with the hedgehogs. I held one while Jackson fed it mealworms. Rowan, at this point, was wary so he only took pictures. While the hedgehogs were very cute, we were so excited about the otters that when we saw no one was currently feeding them, we dumped our hedgehog immediately. Ultimately, I think we spent about four minutes with the hedgehog.

He really deserved more time.

Fun Fact: It’s “wary”, not “weary”. Please watch Bull Durham if you doubt me. If Ryan and I had ever divorced, it would have been over this irreconcilable difference – for me, because he could not stop saying it wrong and for him, because I could not stop correcting him.

I cannot emphasize enough how cute, and a little terrifying, the otters were. There were a couple in an acrylic enclosure with little holes the otter would stick its paw through to take food from you. Otter paws feel oddly amazing by the way. They are very soft – sort of like the antlers of the pushy deer in Nara – but that’s another post.

Feed me or I will bite your face off.

Next to the feeding enclosure was a larger one with three otters “on break”. It was entertaining to watch them play with each other and a burlap sack. Really, a burlap sack. While we were watching, an employee fed those otters fish. He got in the enclosure with them and you could see bits of their individual personalities. One in particular was a little ornery, pushing for more food and nipping at the others.

I will call them Banks, Henry and James.

Next was the chinchilla, it was cute and so soft but not as fun as the hedgehogs or otters. There was also a random giant bunny in a Toy Story t-shirt roaming freely. The kids pet and fed him as well, but I am still recovering from the bunny that stowed away and wreaked havoc in my garage earlier this year, so I steered clear.

Run away!

Fun Fact: The animal cafes started with cats but have expanded to dogs, owls, mini pigs, goats, raccoons and even capybara.

Fun Fact: Jackson once shared with their entire grade in elementary school that their mother weighed the same as a capybara. I wasn’t happy about this but life was preparing me for Jackson, as part of their Mother’s Day “About My Mom” tribute, announcing to their entire grade the following year that I had been divorced before marrying their father .

Pro Tip: Do not tell your children anything.

By the this time, the cafe was busy and the waiting area outside was packed. Just as we were leaving, the otter keeper took the three “on break” out, holding them and putting them on his shoulders to let people pet them. Of course we turned around and headed back in. The ornery otter stayed true to form nipping at several people but the others were surprisingly docile.

I will bite your face off next.

In the waiting area were more enclosures with even more otters so we were able to use up our remaining feed on the way out. We also grabbed our drinks from the vending machine – Rowan got a strawberry latte, Jackson got a hot lemon drink, spilled it and burned themselves, so I didn’t get anything in the chaos. Rowan really liked the latte. Jackson was too upset to offer an opinion on the lemon drink.

While we loved Harry, we were also happy to have found what felt like the real Harajuku, a narrow backstreet lined with quirky cafes and alternative shops. I didn’t know until we got back to the US, and I was looking up info for this blog that we had wandered onto Cat Street, another well-known street in Harajuku, loved for its eccentric, understated vibe. I wished we had found it on Saturday. It would have been a nice foil for Takeshita Street.

Cat Street

Fun Fact: There are no cats on Cat Street despite the name. There are several theories about where the moniker originated ranging from it being the street that helped launch a well-known Japanese rockabilly group called the Black Cats (apparently Japanese rockabilly is a thing) to the street being as “narrow as a cat’s forehead” or simply that there were once a lot of stray cats in the area. The origin of the name may never be truly known, but it is known that a river flows under the street. The Shibuya River was covered by Cat Street in the 1960s in preparation for the Olympics.

Across from the otter cafe was a small sticker shop called B-Side Label. It may seem like an odd thing to have a shop dedicated to, but I’m a child of the 80s when sticker collecting was an art. I still remember the high of scoring a trade for a rare scratch and sniff or a new googly-eye sticker for my Trapper Keeper.

B-Side’s stickers are designed by a team of local artists showcasing their individual styles with the goal of “brightening your day”. If you like stickers and Japanese pop art, you can shop online here. They also sell a limited selection of t-shirts, cell phone cases and charms.

We spent about 30 minutes wandering the narrow aisles before the crowds caught up to us here too. In the end, we all bought stickers – a mix of Pokemon, Japanese art and anime characters. We each checked out separately, paying with our SUICA cards. The employees asked where we were from and seemed genuinely excited, giving us each a bonus Japan sticker.

Part of our B-Side haul

Wishing we had more time and that it wasn’t raining so hard, we headed back to the hotel to grab our bags and make the transfer to Disney.

Our plan for the evening was to purchase “After 5 PM” tickets to DisneySea, have dinner in the park and see the evening show, leaving the following day free to focus on the attractions (and more food!).

I was particularly nervous about navigating four different trains between The Conrad and the Sheraton Grande Tokyo Bay with all of our bags but it went very smoothly.

In hindsight, this was fate setting me up for the next few days.

The view from the Tokyo Disney Monorail.

Riding high off our successful subway/train transfers, we checked into the Sheraton and immediately asked about securing tickets to the park for the evening. I had booked tickets for the following full days through Klook. Not because I really wanted to but, because the Tokyo Disney website is notoriously iffy about accepting US credit cards. After attempting to buy tickets with every card I own (and that’s a lot), I gave up and bought them through Klook. But the After 5 PM ticket was not offered.

Disney no longer sells tickets at the gates so my only other option was to purchase those through the Sheraton directly. All of the official Disney partner hotels can sell tickets to the parks. Each one has its own way they handle it and some of them are convoluted. Be sure to read carefully about your hotel in advance if you plan on purchasing through them.

One of the things I love about Disney in the US is the customer service. When you’re traveling with little kids (or even big ones!), it is comforting to know that the staff at the parks and hotels will do whatever they can (within reason) to fix any problems, meet any requests. The customer is truly always right.

So I was blindsided again when I asked the front desk clerk about the tickets and she replied plainly “we don’t sell that ticket here”. I waited a moment thinking she would offer some additional information or advice but she just stared at me so I asked what I should do if Klook didn’t sell them and the Sheraton didn’t sell them. She said I should buy them on the Disney website. Now I am reasonably certain she knew that I couldn’t do that with a US credit card and that’s why I was asking in the first place. When I mentioned it, she simply stared again in response and suddenly my name was Karen.

If you’ve ever trained a dog, you know that certain breeds have more of a “desire to please” than others making them more likely to follow commands. Ryan and I often joked that Rowan was born without a desire to please. This girl seemed to be lacking that chip as well.

It might be easy to blame it on the Sheraton and their long history (at least with me) of being problematic. But, in my experience, Sheraton employees are friendly and smile at you while they unintentionally ruin your life.

I think it was more of a combo of her personality or lack thereof and the Japanese version of hospitality. I know Japanese hospitality is legendary but, in my limited experience, that only extends to helping within the rules. Once you need something that requires thinking outside the box, you’re out of luck.

Before you start hating me, I know Japan is different. It’s their right to be different. It’s wonderful that they’re different. Different is part of the reason I wanted to go in the first place. I also understand that it’s up to me to adjust to their different, not the other way around. But when you’re tired and hungry, your feet really, really, really, really hurt and you desperately want to go to DisneySea right this minute, sometimes different is exhausting.

I’ll admit I was annoyed with the employee in the moment, she just didn’t have much personality or enthusiasm which I found irritating. But over the long term, my problem is with the company. I cannot understand why Tokyo Disney can’t, correction, won’t fix the flaw in their website and accept US credit cards.

Spoiler alert: Other things in the app and the park worked just fine with an American cell and credit card so it is clearly a choice and one that makes life difficult for a growing portion of their visitors.

Feeling defeated once again and wondering what to do with the rest of the day, we headed to our room.

In planning an itinerary, the flow of the trip is important. It’s good to schedule slower days in between busy ones. It’s also good to maximize your budget by combining nicer hotels with budget accommodations. However, it is not advisable to go from a suite at The Conrad straight to a four-twin bed basic room at a Sheraton. We knew it would be a shock to the system, but we were still underprepared.

I had hoped to get bumped up to a slightly better room because of my Platinum status. But I’m not sure if I did or not. I was pretty certain I had booked an ocean view. We could technically see the ocean from one side of our room but it mostly overlooked a construction staging area. You could see the parks from the room and fireworks at night, so there is a chance that this was technically an upgrade.

Upgraded?

The room itself was basic. Four twin beds stuffed into a small room with a desk and a mini fridge. No real decor or theme either unless 1960s hospital is a theme. But it was clean and the beds were comfortable. At Disney, that’s often all you need.

I felt a “lived in” photo of the room would be the most helpful when considering the Sheraton four-twin room for your own trip.

As for alternate plans for the evening, our only real option, without taking a bunch of trains back into Tokyo, was to tour Ikspiari, Tokyo Disney’s version of Downtown Disney or Disney Springs. But it was raining, Ikspiari didn’t get great reviews and my feet were still problematic.

Ikspiari

We ended up resting in the hotel room aka another three hour nap then waking up hungry but the hotel restaurants were already closed.

Instead we visited a couple of the convenience stores located in the Sheraton and made a meal of random snacks.

Scaredy Cat Rating: One paw for a healthy respect for an otter’s willingness to bite your face off; multiple subway transfers with luggage and my inner Karen.

The $$$: No $8 Coke Zero today. The café for lunch was around $30. The Otter Cafe was around $50 USD. Stickers at B-Side were $2-3 each. Because of the Disney snafu and our laziness, we spent less than $30 on our snack dinner and saved $100 on park tickets.

Pro Tip: If you sleep through a vacation, you can really make your budget go further.