Two blocks farther north of the Wako Building, on Chuo Dori, is the great Itoya stationery store (2-7-10 Ginza). The company was established toward the end of the Meiji Era, in 1904, and now fills all nine floors of a modern building. This store is one of my husband's favorite shops in Tokyo. Even a casual visitor could easily spend a day wandering around the store and still not finish examining every new gadget and writing device.
A WALK WEST
The Ginza is a good place to begin walking around Tokyo. If you wend your way northwest through the Ginza you will come to the Yurakucho area, once the home of three of Japan's major daily newspapers - the Asahi, Mainichi, and Yomiuri. I used to visit friends here, but now all three papers have moved to fancier quarters and the neighborhood seems strange to me. Heading toward the Imperial Palace from Yurakucho brings you to Hibiya, full of theaters, movie houses, restaurants, music and video stores, pizza shops, airline offices, and, facing Hibiya Park, the new Imperial Hotel. The old Imperial Hotel, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and erected in 1922, was demolished in 1967 despite protests from Japanese and international architects; part of it was saved and reassembled in Meijimura, a theme park in the city of Nagoya, 140 miles from Tokyo. The old hotel survived the 1923 earthquake and World War II (it was Douglas MacArthur's first residence in Tokyo), but - and it always strikes me as an extraordinary irony - it did not survive the 1960s.