Tokyo Diary - Geocaching in Japan

Before We left for Tokyo I had checked Geocaching.com and found there were less than 400 geocaches in the whole country. Rather than trying to decide ahead of time which caches we might be able to hunt, I just loaded all 400 in my GPS before we left home.

We only found 3 caches while in Tokyo. Since we were travelling by bus and train we could not just drive a mile to get to the next cache and usually it was at least 3 miles to the closest cache.

One of the caches we found was At the Feet of Tokyo Tower. This was a regular cache that was in a tupperware type of container and hidden in a tree in a park next to the tower. I signed the log and left a couple of my million-dollar-bill business cards in the container.

Another cache we found was a virtual cache called What Kind of Tree is Grants Pine. A virtual cache is one that does not have a container or a log book to sign. Instead, after finding the cache you e-mail the cache-owner the answer to a question that the owner uses to verify you really visited the cache.

It was amazing to find in Tokyo a tree which was planted by President Grant not too long after the civil war.

The only other cache we did was Godzilla Goes Postal! in downtown Tokyo near the Imperial Palace Grounds. It took us a while to find Godzilla. I was depending on my GPS but the tall buildings that surrounded us made satellite reception so spotty that we were across the narrow side street and down an even narrower alley before I decided to put the GPS in my pocket and use my eyeballs.

I finally spotted the cache and made sure Geoff and I got our photos taken with the monster. This was a multi-cache, which is a cache that has more than one location. For this cache the owner requires you mail him the name carved into the sculpture and then there are directions for finding the cache at a nearby location since there is nowhere to hide the cache on the sculpture. This cache was also a combination virtual/regular cache since you had to respond to the owner and have to sign the log book to get credit.

It would have been fun to find more caches, but we were in Tokyo to see Tokyo, not to hunt tupperware…

Japanese Imperial Palace Grounds <<- Previous || Next ->> The Zojoji Temple in Shiba Park

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