Oh Tokyo!
Braving our first bullet train (shinkansen), we rocketed away from the serenity of our bucolic riverside machiya in northern Kyoto on a 4-day excursion into the heart of urban Tokyo, staying in a small hotel in the Shibuya "neighborhood", with its iconic Shibuya Scramble, purportedly the busiest pedestrian interchange in the world. Tokyo is crazy.
We're exhausted.
Think Times Square, but everywhere..for miles. And yet, so clean, so orderly. Endless shopping in gorgeously designed stores, palpable fashion obsession, fanatic fandom of everything from Disney characters to shoe brands to J-pop bands to Harry Potter. A ceaseless barrage of arcades, claw machines, maid cafes, kawaii mascots, cosplay, packs of tourists zipping through the city on go-carts (Mario Cart excursions), sardined subways and trains, karaoke clubs, so very much food (Editor's note: Bo got his fill of conveyor belt sushi!). It is something to behold, and I'm glad we saw/experienced it...but a few days was about all we could handle.
Some photos and brief captions below of our time in modern Edo:
The kitsch!
Vintage arcades! Above: TAIKO DRUM MASTER!
One of the biggest highlights of the trip was our visit to TeamLabs Planets, a sort of immersive tactile-visual sensory overload experience:
Zadi in the undulating orchid garden
Inside the mesmerizing crystal light room, replete with mirrored walls, floors, and ceiling
(Hi - Erin here. I missed TeamLabs and other Tokyo adventures for a conference on Peace and Sustainability at the United Nations University. So much to talk about given, um, world events! I will spare you photos of all the powerpoints and backs of heads. But I did meet lots of wonderful people including new friends from the Philippines and Indonesia in the pic below.)
Erin played conference hooky one afternoon and joined us for another BIG Tokyo highlight - the Studio Ghibli Museum, which we were so very lucky to get tickets for. Ghibli is the studio of the famed Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki, creator of our family's favorite films like Our Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away, and Princess Mononoke. The museum is a strictly no-photos-allowed kind of place, but we got a few outside:
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(Hi- Erin again - we so wish we could share the wonders within, including an entire room of zootropes based on various Ghibli movies and a reproduction of Miyazaki's studio, jam-packed with inspiration: stacks and stacks of books (everything from The Little Prince and diagrams of 18th century tools and machines to A Guide to Euphorbia), weird mechanical objects, plants, paintings, photographs, sculptures, many jars of colored pencil stubs, and even saucers of cigarette butts and sweets. Not to mention ALL of the SKETCHES. It is the endlessly fascinating maximalist antidote to the Marie-Kondo minimalism we in the West often associate with the Japanese aesthetic. Kind of like Tokyo itself.)
Back in the city, we came across the famous Itoya, a 10-story stationary store:
Inside Itoya, my favorite floor was the "Color" floor...below is just one small wall of it. The place really can't be captured.
At one point, we ventured into the vast Meiji-jingu Shrine complex, built in honor of Emperor Meiji. One the touristic highlights of that complex is a something called Kiyamasa's Well. Described as a continuously gushing clear natural spring, the well attracts a steady stream of visitors due to its being one of Tokyo's rare 'power spots'. We were very excited to see this and stood in line for the chance. What we discovered when we got there was a little different than advertised:
Wow! Talk about sensory overload! I need to learn more about Studio Ghibli and I appreciate the stained glass pics-not something I associate with Japan-we’re all learning!
ReplyDeleteWe were thinking about you as we were appreciating the stained glass at the Ghibli museum, Ellery! Wish you could have been there (and we could have taken more photos!)
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