Tokyo Sunday, 2008

November 30, 2008 - Sunday - Tokyo

Today is the only day I'll be in Tokyo when the museums are open, so I began with a walk through Ueno Park to arrive at the Tokyo National Museum as it opened.

Leaves are still on the trees here. I think the many of the maples have shed but the ginkos are just yellowing and falling now and the oaks are still up there. Lots of bird noise – I think they are ravens, not crows; but there is no way to be sure. I did go to the natural historical museum later, to learn a bit about the birds and the bees here, but 99% of the signs were in Japanese and for me unreadable.

The day was mild and sunny – about 60 degrees. There are several things about Tokyo that remind me of London – Dec climate is one. The closeness of the buildings is another. Small interior spaces and odd arrangements of wiring and plumbing. My bathroom in the hotel is quite an adventure. You step up into it. The hot and cold water at the sink have both an odd super long spout over the basin and an additional value to redirect the water from the sink to the hand-held shower in the small deep tub. You have to sit or squat to shower. I think this is the Japanese way, but all these cute little oddball fitting strike me as very English. Then there is the electric teapot in the room and at a shrine near a lagoon in the park I caught the smell of characoal/coal – another London trigger for me.

Anyway the museum was not too big and I could take photos. Below are a display of robes from the Edo period.




A lot of the exhibits in the museums were of illustrated scrolls and other simple literary art. Below is a book of poems from the 1300’s. I thought the use of sprinkled gold surprising for the time.







The museum garden was open – this is apparently a rare event. There are a number of traditional Japanese tea houses and the like with people dressed up in period dress.







Lunch was a curry wheat noddle dish with a few bits of tofu and chicken with a cup of coffee in a fairly fancy place. ($15.00) One of the oddities of entering a restaurant here is the entire staff yells our a greeting to you as you do. Then there are the things you are given to eat with. Obviously I am familiar with the chop sticks and the porcelain soup spoon – although today’s noodles were particularly slippery and reluctant to lift. I had been growing almost proud of my chopstick technique. That ended at lunch. I was given an additional empty bowl today whose use I no idea about. Near the end I guessed it was a holder for my Japanese spoon and I used it for that.

I am also received a little cloth shrink wrapped in plastic – the package measures about 1 inch by 3. Could this be in place of hot towels – so far I have just ignored it.

After lunch I went to the nearby Natural History museum which was filled with kids and parents on a Sunday so it was quite a scene. The signage was all in Japanese but I could make out the generic climate regions, admire the sea and plant life and understand most of the exhibits on volcanoes and earthquakes. Camelias and forsythia are native to the area. The picture below is of a collection of camellia blossoms – to show their genetic variations, I think. Anyway it looked good.



By the time I left the second museum the park was full of people streaming to the zoo and just walking around. There was a big crowd around a Japanese guy with hair died a kind of copper color wailing away on the bagpipes.

The final stop today was at Akiba – the electronic market area – supposedly an inspiration for those first scenes in BladeRunner. I priced a lens I was interested in – but after doing a quick internet price check found NYC is cheaper! Outside the electronics/photo megastore a crowd had gathered around a squeaky girl band singing on a stage. There were anime and manga places mixed in among the electronics and video-game places. All the people handing out fliers seemed to be 12 year old girls in boots and short skirts. Pretty weird.

Sayanora !