An Afternoon in Ikebukuro

Prior to visiting Ikebukuro, I had heard that it was a big commercial area with a little bit of everything – shopping, restaurants, entertainment and even sights. It is also home to Tokyo’s Chinatown, but unfortunately, we didn’t get a chance to visit.

Upon stepping out of the train station, it looked similar to many other parts of Tokyo, but appeared a bit less crowded. 

After walking around for a little while, we decided to have a late lunch at Saizeriya, an Italian style, Japanese chain restaurant. 

The food was (expectedly) unmemorable but like all things Japanese, the details that go into perfecting their products is amazing.  Just look at the scoops of ice cream here.  How in the world do they get it that perfectly round?

After lunch, we made our way to Namja Town.  After spending a couple of hours there, I am still a bit confused as to what this place is exactly.  The information online lists it as an “indoor theme park” but I don’t know if I’d use that terminology to describe it, because to me it was more of a cluster of unique museums.  Also, when I hear the words “theme park” I think of very bright, happy, loud places filled with music and crowds of people.  However, Namja Town was dark, quiet, and even a bit eerie.

When we arrived, I was quite surprised to find an almost empty entrance area.  It made us reconsider whether or not we really wanted to visit this place, but we figured since we were already there, we might as well go in to see what it was about. 

We found a map that indicated there was an Ice Cream Museum, a Gyoza (Dumpling) Museum and a Haunted House along with a few other areas that didn’t interest us as much.  We visited the Haunted House first and found it to be more like a museum displaying all sorts of strange, scary things, including rooms that looked like old Japanese houses.  Everything was in Japanese so we didn’t really know what was going on.

After the Haunted House, we made our way to the Ice Cream Museum.  This was definitely one of the more popular places within Namja Town as there were definitely way more people here than at the Haunted House.  The area consisted of some displays of the many different ice cream containers and wrappers, along with a small food court with about 5-6 stalls that sold all sorts of ice creams and other small snacks. 

I liked the concept of having a museum devoted to ice cream, but I wondered how well this concept actually worked.  The ice cream that was sold wasn’t particularly unique, and you’d need to pay the (somewhat) expensive admission fee to enter Namja Town just to enjoy this ice cream.  The ice cream displays were kind of neat, but the collection wasn’t overly large.  And even if they had more displays, how many ice cream wrappers can you see before you lose interest?  Maybe it’s one of those “only in Japan” type of things…

Next was the Gyoza Museum which turned out to be the most happening of all the places within Namja Town.  We saw more people gathered here than anywhere else inside Namja.  After the Ice Cream Museum, we were expecting displays of all sorts of dumplings, but in reality, this was more like a food court where stall after stall sold all sorts of dumplings.
  

We were still too full from lunch to try any of the dumplings, but if I ever went back to Namja Town, this would probably be the most likely place I’d want to visit again. 

All in all, I’m not sure that I would recommend a visit to Namja Town.  Tokyo has so much to offer and Namja Town wasn’t one of my favourite places.  Even if you’re a dumpling or ice cream enthusiast, there are so many other places in Tokyo that would offer the same or better experience.