Tokyo Skytree, Sumida Aquarium – Joel’s Journeys & Jaunts

This morning in Tokyo took me to the top, that being the Tokyo Skytree. Back down near the base of the Skytree, I visited Sumida Aquarium in the complex attached to the tower.

Tokyo Skytree

The Tokyo Skytree has two viewing decks. The lower deck has three levels. The upper deck has two. The upper level of the lower deck is 350 metres (1148 feet) up from the ground. The top level of the upper deck is 450 metres (1476 feet) up.

(To be honest, I’m not sure if that’s metres above the ground or above sea level. But Tokyo is a relatively flat seaside city, so the two heights are roughly the same.)

To go to the top deck, you have to buy a combo ticket that includes both decks. That’s what I did.

Going to the top deck of the Tokyo Skytree requires taking one elevator to the lower deck and then another from there to the upper deck.

I don’t know if the first elevator is the fastest in the world, but, if not, it’s probably close. It’s amazing how quiet they can make warp drives these days.

There was a monitor in the elevator cab. On the way up, it displayed the elevator’s speed. It reached a peak speed of 600 metres (1968 feet) per minute. Okay, that’s not quite warp speed, but I’ve been in much, much shorter buildings where the elevators take a lot longer to reach the top.

Wikipedia tells me that the population of Tokyo proper was 14 million as of 2023. And it says that the population of the Greater Tokyo Area was 41 million as of 2024.

On the ground, it certainly seems like a large, frenetic city. But at that level, you only see a tiny fraction of the megalopolis at a time.

You can’t get anywhere close to a full sense of its enormity until you see it from on high. That’s where the Tokyo Skytree comes in.

Looking down on the city from up there, particularly the top level, the city seems to go on and on out to its natural geographical boundaries. Tokyo Bay limits it on one side. Distant mountains arc around the rest of it. They say that on a clear day, you can see all the way to Mount Fuji from the observation deck of the Skytree. Today was a little bit cloudy. And I’m here to tell you it doesn’t require a perfectly clear day. Even with my tired old eyes, I was easily able to make out the distinctive shape of Mount Fuji off in the distance.

From the heights of the Skytree, the city appears to be a few clumps of skyscrapers that punctuate an almost continuous undulating plateau of high-rise and mid-rise buildings, with some rivers running through it. Walking at street-level disabuses one of that notion. There are sections of low-rise buildings, as well as parks, and several shrines and temples. However, the height of the Skytree compresses that view into just the near-continuous heights, except for the rivers.

It’s a breathtaking city. Then again, if you hate big cities, it might be disgust that takes your breath away. But it is, nevertheless, breathtaking.

On the lower level of the lower deck, there are two small glass floors. One has a sign that says you can walk on it and take your own pictures for free. To walk on the other one, you have to let one of the staff take a picture of you. The picture is then available for a fee. I didn’t bother checking the price because, as I tell any fellow traveller who offers to take a picture of me in front of some iconic sight, I have a mirror. I don’t need a picture of me.

But there was that other glass floor to—and I use this word with tongue firmly in cheek—entice me. Regular readers and people who know me in real life (two sets that, currently, almost form a single circle on a Venn diagram) know about my acrophobia.

Standing on a glass floor, even when it’s, say, only centimetres above, for example, some archaeological finds, doesn’t so much entice me as challenge and terrify me. A glass floor that’s the height of the one in the Tokyo Skytree gives me serious heart palpitations.

I was in the Tokyo Skytree when I was in Tokyo about seven years ago. I was determined then to walk on the glass floor. I couldn’t do it. I got close. I spent I don’t remember how long standing beside it, challenging myself to take a step forward. I edged a toe over onto it, but I had a mild panic attack and couldn’t do it. I say “mild” only because I’ve had a serious panic attack described to me, and it wasn’t quite that. But it was enough to debilitate me, and I couldn’t walk out onto the glass floor.

Since then, I’ve conquered my fear of glass floors twice. Once in the Auckland Sky Tower and once in the Melbourne Skydeck. To be honest, I don’t know if “conquered” is the right word. I did it, but I was panicky the whole time. And it took all my powers of concentration not to start screaming.

And the Melbourne Skydeck was kind of cheating. There, it was in an attraction at the top of the Skydeck Tower called The Edge. With The Edge, once you commit to standing on the glass floor, you can’t back out. You go into a room with opaque glass on the ceiling, floor and three walls. That room is attached to another room with non-glass opaque walls that the operator stays in. They then push the glass room out beyond the edge of the building. The room with the operator stays completely within the building to counterbalance the glass room. Plus, there are cables to prevent both rooms from being dragged over the edge. A thunder sound-effect booms, and the glass on the floor, ceiling and walls turns completely transparent.

The glass floor in the Tokyo Skytree isn’t like that. It’s up to you to put one foot in front of the other and repeat that until you’re on the glass.

Before I could challenge myself to do it, I had to wait for a group of what looked like elementary school children who were already occupying all of the space on the small glass floor. They appeared totally unafraid and completely happy to be there. One of the kids even started jumping on the glass. Fools! Every one of them. Fools! I hope they get some sense when they grow up.

Then the kids left.

I edged up to the glass floor. I put one toe in, I put that one toe out. And I shook all about. I chided myself. I experienced some panic. But then I did it. I stood with both feet fully on the glass floor. Hence, the picture of my shoes with me in them on top of the highly scuffed glass floor.

(There’s a second glass floor below the one you stand on. So I had another chance to survive if the upper glass broke.)

And I lived to tell the story. I hope my heir isn’t too depressed about that.

Sumida Aquarium

As I said above, the Sumida Aquarium is in a complex that is attached to the Tokyo Skydeck.

My walking tour app doesn’t say anything about it at all. And my guidebooks mention it only in passing in association with the Tokyo Skytower. I looked at TripAdvisor. Its reviews about the aquarium were mostly meh.

But I like aquariums, a regular reader is vicariously happy when I visit aquariums, and it was right there. So I bought an admission ticket and went in.

The Sumida Aquarium is not very big. It’s not the smallest aquarium I’ve visited, but it’s also far from the largest. Nevertheless, I rate it much higher than the people who posted reviews on TripAdvisor.

Regular readers are, no doubt, excruciatingly tired of me saying how much I love jellyfish and find them elegant, mesmerizing, and next-to-impossible creatures. I give an aquarium that has a good jellyfish collection bonus points, and serious demerit points if they don’t have any jellyfish.

The Sumida Aquarium has a section with about a dozen jellyfish tanks, each with a different species. Some of those species are much larger than what I’m used to seeing in aquariums. But wait. There’s more. There’s another large tank filled with jellyfish. That large tank has a small glass floor that juts a piece over the tank so you can look down on the jellyfish.

There’s also a hallway with some more jellyfish tanks embedded in the wall. And in an open area in the centre of the Sumida Aquarium, there are a bunch of tanks showing the development of jellyfish. Each tank has jellyfish born on a specific day. A sign beside each tank specifies how many days old the jellyfish in that tank are. Very cool.

The aquarium also has a small colony of penguins. Most of the signs in the Aquarium have both Japanese and English signs. That’s a good thing because I learned that, “The Japanese term for ‘penguin’ is ‘Jincho‘; meaning ‘human-like bird,’ due to its bipedal locomotion. Most penguins mate for life, and raise their young together. The male penguin’s mating dance, the ‘Ecstatic display,’ consists of raising its wings and crying out passionately. A female then decides whether he is worthy of her or not.”

Damn. That’s probably why I’ve had such a desolate love life. My mating dance involves whining and complaining weakly, while shuffling my feet nervously. I guess I should have raised my arms and cried out passionately. But maybe that works only for penguins.

Among the other fish, the aquarium also had a tank of various species of what are labelled as garden eels. They live in sand reefs and look like long worms. Firmly anchor their bottom end in the sand. (I don’t know how deeply because, did I say, they’re buried.) Their long bodies relative to their width stand erect in the water, with only a little wriggling. Very weird, but quite beautiful.

The Sumida Aquarium is not big, but, TripAdvisor and scant mention by the guidebooks notwithstanding, I enjoyed it.