Shinjuku

Unfortunately spent most of this day on a desperate quest for diapers.
At home, Susana wears cloth. But, when we travel, she wears disposables. I’ve purchased several different brands of Korean diapers before with no problem. But, for some reason, the day before we left, I completely lost my mind and decided to go with a package of a different, much cheaper brand.

When we left Seoul, her diaper bag was still packed with diapers from our last trip. We didn’t try to use the new diapers until we needed to do a change in our hotel room—about 4:30 Wednesday morning.

That’s when I discovered that some brands of diapers are tabless! They have no sticky tapes with which to fasten the diaper on the child. I have no idea who uses these disposables, and if they’ve just trained their kid to balance a certain way to avoid leaks, but this was not going to work for us. We put Suse in the tapeless diaper inserted into one of her ‘less used’ (I know, gross!) diapers that still had sticky tapes on the sides until dawn when I discovered one remaining unused ‘good’ diaper in her diaper bag. Then, after David left for work, I began my Tokyo adventure on a quest for nappies.

Given that I had a healthy almost 10-month-old in her last disposable at 8 a.m. the clock was ticking. I followed the directions from the concierge desk and—with Susi strapped to my chest in her pack carrier and her backpack diaper bag on my back—I climbed aboard the hotel shuttle back to Shinjuku Station.

The area around the train station is full of all kinds of shops and restaurants and the concierge had pointed me toward a “big drugstore” across from the main post office about a block from where the shuttle lets off. I think I found that drugstore (not being able to read Japanese, and not being given any kind of store name, I can’t be sure). But they said they had no diapers.

The pharmacy clerk did point me toward another drugstore that she thought would have them another couple blocks away. I never did find that store. I did find a few other Westerners who said they were familiar with the area and pointed me toward yet another “big drugstore” they were sure had “lots” of baby items. But that place also—if the drugstore I found is the correct one—also had no baby items.

By this time, I was feeling desperate. Susana was asleep in her carrier. It was after 11 a.m. and I was several blocks away from the hotel, with still no idea where to get diapers. I decided to shuttle back to the Hilton and get some tape in the gift shop and just make do. Lo and behold, the Hilton has a pharmacy. With diapers. They are only the Pampers pullup kind, but they work.

Crisis averted. (Narrowly by the looks of the situation when I finally change her.

I am bummed that I spent almost an hour wandering around some amazing shops (a giant electronics store that takes up almost half a block) and have nothing to show for it. If the weather holds, maybe we’ll come back later this week.

After deciding to decompress in the hotel room for a bit (and put Susana in her stroller) we recovered our game plan and headed out to Shinjuku Chuo (Central) Park, about a block away from the hotel. The park is very large and shady, with lots of winding paths and beautiful old-growth trees. It’s home to the Kumano Jinja Shinto shrine (the link is to someone who’s taken much better photos of it) as well as a fair number of homeless people who live in tents covered with bright blue waterproof tarps. When I first saw the clusters of blue hills, I thought that park officials were working on part of the landscape. I soon realized that, no, people are living here. One man was even doing his laundry and hanging it up to dry on the chains lining the paths.

In the few days we’ve been here we have seen more homeless people in Tokyo than I have seen in Seoul. Maybe we just haven’t been to the right places in Seoul. I have seen a few men sleeping in subway stations or underpasses during the winter. walking to dinner last night we saw several men preparing cardboard-box beds in building doorways. Maybe the homeless population is just more visible here.