Tokyo Part 3

So finally I've gotten round to telling you the very last things I wanted to write about Tokyo! 

There won't be so many pictures, because we ended up spending a lot of time over the last 3 days in museums and galleries. I haven't really been going to look at exhibitions in Kyoto, and I realised with this trip that I'd actually really missed it. So one of my resolutions for this next term is to make the most of the fact that Kyoto has a lot of art and craft stuff going on.

That resolution actually includes making sure that I get back to Tokyo to go to the Studio Ghibli museum again. (For those that don't know, Studio Ghibli is an animation studio that makes deep, beautiful films, and is internationally acclaimed).

I could write an essay on how much I loved it, but that would contain spoilers about what it's like in there, and I really recommend going without knowing, because it was fun to properly explore it. I think it was probably designed that way.

In any case, it's in a lovely area, inside the local park. Walking in the sunshine along a tree-lined path, it felt like entering the world of Ghibli before you even make it to the site.

When you get through the gate, there's no doubt that you're in the right place, with this Totoro ticket booth. 

I bought two art books of the museum in the shop, and the first page of one is Miyazaki's mission statement of how he wanted the museum to be. One of his plans was that it would not be a dusty display of past works, but something much more interactive and engaging, and I have to say I think they did it. You don't come away knowing more about the technical details of a particular film you liked, but you do come away with a lasting sense of the world that the people at Ghibli work with, and in. 

I also came away very very happy that I got a picture with a robot from Laputa, because I always loved them.

The next day was full of robots, actually. We went to the artificial island Odaiba, where there's the Museum of Emerging Sciences (the Miraikan). There are super interesting exhibits about a wide range of new technologies in the pipeline, a floor on space exploration, and a chance to see Honda's robot ASIMO live.

 On the way back, we went via the giant Gundam Warrior (the inspiration for Pacific Rim). There's a light display, and the robot moves its head around. Having just seen ASIMO run, dance, and kick a football, it was less impressive than it might have been...

(In fairness it would be terrifying if a statue that big suddenly started dancing)

The next day we headed over to the Museum of Contemporary Photography. The exhibitions were both good, but the best thing I came away with was actually from the shop - they had the book 'Moomin Valley Midwinter' in Japanese. The Moomins are hugely popular in Japan right now, and actually when I travelled by Finnair last month they were selling special Moomin merchandise that you can only buy on the Helsinki/Japan flights. I've always been vaguely terrified of the stories, so not only did I want to see what they were actually about, I thought reading a children's book would be just about right for my level of Japanese (it was!). In the end it was also a very thought-provoking book, like all the best kids' things are. The only problem is that now I really want to buy Moomin products, and in Japan temptation is everywhere...

So that was Tokyo. Stay tuned next time for pictures from the trip I did last week to Okayama and Hiroshima!

Tokyo Part 2 (Nikko)

Hello! It's been a while, I know, I'm sorry! I was about to write about the lovely trip I just took along the coast to Hiroshima, but realised that I never finished writing about my time in Tokyo. So here's the trip to Nikko:

Like I wrote last time, Nikko is the place where the first Tokugawa shogun is buried. To get to it you have to take a long train ride out of the city, and we saw Mt Fuji in the distance! Nikko is right up in the mountains, and although it was a little cold in Tokyo, we still weren't expecting this fountain;

The area is covered with temples and shrines - also hotels, actually, all seemingly closed, because the high season in Nikko is when the autumn leaves are at their best. Felt a little like a ghost town in January though... In any case, the first temple we walked past looked like this:

They'd constructed an entire building around it and drawn the temple on... (You could still go inside and pray and stuff, it just felt a little strange...)

From there we went to the site of the shogun's tomb, which, luckily, wasn't undergoing such big renovations.

The stable of the sacred horse that lives on the site is also noteworthy: it's decorated with the 'See no evil, hear no evil..,' monkeys.

Then we went on a walk around other smaller notable shrines. The mountain seems full of little holy springs and special wishing rocks. We found this stone dating back a couple of hundred years asking pilgrims to kindly refrain from relieving themselves in the holy forest of the mountain.

Also this little guy who someone had left at a shrine:

To end the walk we went down to the gorge, where there are a famous line of Buddhist statues, nicknames the 'bake jizo' (ghost Buddhas) because it is said that if you count them one way, and then count them again, you will end up seeing a different amount...

We didn't try to count them...

I don't know if the legend stems from it, but there were actually more statues until a great flood about 100 years ago, where many were swept away by the river that runs through the gorge. The people who live there did their best to find and return as many of the statues as they could, so along towards the end of the line are a couple of piles of rocks that may or may not have previously been statues.

(They get their own red hats and aprons anyway) 

Having been wandering on the cold all day, it was about time for something warm, so we got a really tasty set dinner with the local speciality yuba (it can be translated as tofu skimmings, but that makes it sound a lot less nice than it is).

The cup was adorable too:

So that was Nikko, I highly recommend it! Also they seem to be trying to attract foreign tourists, because we got about a 1000 yen discount on the return ticket, which helped.

I was going to write about the next couple of days here, but this post is going on a little long! I'll write about the Studio Ghibli museum and seeing the robot Asimo live in a couple of days. And this time I mean a couple of days, not 5 weeks. (Probably).