Watching suburban life from a KFC

I have this week off so I'll be doing some exploring around the city. Today I ventured out to the southern suburbs in search of one of the two or three Ikea stores in the region. Land prices in central Tokyo are just too expensive for the land-hogging Ikea stores. I took the Hibiya line to Naka-Meguro and then the train to Den-en-chofu, a wealthy suburb that was redone in British suburb style in the 1990s. Many of Japan's movie stars and rich live here. If I saw any in the train station I didn't know it.

At Den-en-chofu Ikea provides a free 20-minute shuttle bus to their Kohoku store. I missed one shuttle because my train line branched into two and I was on the wrong one. By the time I backtracked I had missed the shuttle and so waited an hour in an almost empty KFC overlooking the train station. There was a light rain and I was in a cozy second-floor window where I could watch people coming and going from the train station. This is the only station I've seen that was small enough for family members to drive to the station door and pick up their family members as they de-trained. This didn't seem like the jam-packed Tokyo I was used to. By train, this comfort was only 10-minutes from the edge of "downtown" Tokyo.

The Ikea was just like the one in Shanghai except it wasn't as crowded. The prices were about the same as in Shanghai. Most of the Swedish-designed furniture was made-in-China. I bought a lamp and headed back home in the rain.