Parcly Taxel: Spindle had gone out "hunting" for kombini food while I was asleep so I could have good breakfasts during our stay in Tokyo. Perhaps tired after travelling a lot over the first half of the whole trip, I only woke at 10am on New Year's Eve and left the kirin's apartment at 11am.

Spindle: It could have been even later had I not flash-froze her insides to stun her into wakefulness. Despite being besties with an actual pony I can still work my windigo magic on her, and not just for amusement.

On the metro (which legally consists of two rival systems – the private Tokyo Metro and the public Toei Subway – and does not include things like JR's Yamanote Line) we first rode to Higashi-ginza (東銀座), near which lies the "outer market" of the Tsukuji Fish Market (築地市場) selling typical small-market stuff: food, cutlery, other kitchen instruments, trinkets...

Parcly: But I had not expected a crowd as dense as what I experienced inside Tokyo Station, now funnelled through narrow rows of open-air stalls hosting multilingual signs. All this, when the inner market (where closed-door fish auctions were famously held) moved to another location four years ago? The noises were enough; I'd need to go elsewhere quick.

Spindle: Parcly did buy two packets of diced egg roll to supplement her bread-and-coffee breakfast, this bite-sized treat fluffy enough to have plausibly come from a food pony. While the queue was short here, other stalls made scarcity into a gimmick, one of them having an ordinary rice bowl limited to 20 servings a day.

Princess Celestia: To relax her mind a little Parcly travelled a short distance to the fabled Nihonbashi (日本橋), home of not just the titular ornate bridge where four dragon statues stand watch, but also two long-standing department stores, Mitsukoshi and Takashimaya. (The latter has a branch in Singapore too!)

With many standalone stalls closed for the New Year or closing their queues to new patrons by the time she arrived, Parcly simply bought bento boxes and sashimi from Mitsukoshi for lunch and returned to her apartment to eat.

Parcly: In front of more than a few of the shops/stalls/display cases I saw kadomatsu (門松), a seasonal decoration of three overtly sliced bamboo stems (the name refers to pine, but bamboo is more common now) bundled by straw and placed in pairs to welcome ancestral kami. While it was crowded as ever when I entered Mitsukoshi, the hoof traffic had already started thinning out when I left.

Spindle: There are other traditions peculiar to Japanese New Year, such as making and displaying objects depicting the animal of the Chinese zodiac corresponding to the new year – in this case the rabbit () – and fukubukuro (福袋). These were apparent even inside Tokyo Skytree Town, which we waded into after eating lunch and where we lingered until nightfall.

Parcly: "Is there anything else still open this late into New Year's Eve?" I purred on a bench inside the Skytree Town, still remembering the incident where I was possessed by the Tantabus at the upper decks of what was still the tallest tower in the world. Luna's inspiration then struck me in the head, and I motioned to Spindle to travel to Shinjuku, the other nexus of Tokyo.

Spindle: Shinjuku is the busiest train station in the world, to the point that the connectors between each operators' respective parts constitute a small underground city combined, like how each of Tokyo's 23 special wards call themselves cities.

Tech-oriented department stores have their grounds here, but like much of their surroundings had already closed down when we resurfaced. I observed staff at one such store trying to put up a cardboard torii before the maddening New Year sale, but the top bar hit the shutters and bent.

Gabby: Much of what was left, then, was up there. Cross Shinjuku has a partly curved billboard on top, and for brief intervals shows an anamorphic cat on a ledge, meowing and sliding and doing cat things to amuse the ponies below.

Parcly: You don't say?

Gabby: Well, the first character of torii (鳥居) means bird and Shinjuku has its cat, so... could I, a catbird, go up there?

Parcly: I might need to cast a Posterification Spell for that.

Spindle: A Sukiya was fortunately still open, and we got our takeout dinner beef bowl from there which we (again) ate at the apartment. After relaxing our hooves for a while we went out one more time on rail to Asakusa (浅草) and its great Buddhist temple Sensōji (浅草寺), expecting the least for the New Year...

Parcly: What came out was ABSOLUTE CHAOS as, by my estimate, ten thousand creatures from every corner of the world gathered inside the temple grounds alone at any one time mainly to throw coins into the prayer box. Crowd control police lay all around to direct the packed-like-sardines traffic, some devout worshippers, some just curious like us.

I was expecting 108 bells to be rung just before the exact time of the New Year – these enumerate the temptations that must be overcome to reach Nirvana – but there weren't any such rings here. All I heard instead were the collective cheers across the phalanx of creatures as midnight came and went, a phalanx chopped up by crowd control in batches to enter the main hall, leading to traffic waves.

Spindle: Bells started ringing, and the Skytree lit up, when we neared the phalanx's front, but the former sounded like coming from another temple. After throwing a coin ourselves we followed the younger crowd and bought a packet of takoyaki (fried octopus) to eat in the cold.

Happy New Year!