Friday, January 5th, 2024

• Hardcore recovery and washing day
• Woke up a little late, got some kombini canned coffee and an onigi for breakfast, then MBW took some plastic wrap (from the giga-Daiso trip yesterday) and mummified our two WK18 chairs to try to ship them back home.
• Walked a couple of streets away to the nearest post office – the people there were very helpful and polite, but were absolutely not interested in shipping a couple of steel chairs across the globe. They suggested we go find a freight-carrying service instead.
• After a round of soul-searching (mostly the question of “What would we even do with two novelty folding chairs in our home?), we decided it was going to be more trouble than it was worth to get home.
• Luckily, the NJPW subreddit came to the rescue:

• With the chairs issue sorted out, we settled in for our first round of clothes washing this trip. Sometimes hotels will have a great setup and it’s painless. Sometimes, like today, the dryer was such a small model, that it took a full 2.5 hours of cycling small loads through before everything was clean and dry enough. Mental note for the next hotel – check out the wash facilities early on and adjust our washing schedule appropriately.
• As a result of losing so much of the day, we decided to ditch our original plans (checking out the collection of suburbs that make up Yanasen (Yanaka, Nezu, and Sendagi) and just stayed local; finding an excellent tensoba (tempura prawns and zaru soba noodles, which are served cold with a hot dipping sauce) for lunch.

• We were also finally about to visit our favourite izakaya Enpachi for dinner, as they’d been closed every day before now.
• Enpachi is a long-time favourite, going right back to the first day of our first-ever trip to Tokyo. They have MBW’s favourite tsukune (chicken meatballs on skewers), consistently perfect beers, and a great cheerful atmosphere.

Visiting Enpachi on our first trip to Japan, May 2010

Visiting Enpachi on our third trip, January 2018

Visiting Enpachi on our current trip, January 2024

• Finally, we ducked back into Yamashiroya to start looking for late Christmas presents for some friends (and their kids); we found some ideas but didn’t want to pull the trigger this early in the trip.

• Finally, early night. As we’d be moving to our second hotel the following morning, we packed everything up, caught up on our journalling (which is largely the basis for the reports you’re reading now), and turned in for the day.