On arriving to Tokyo at 1:30pm the following day, Ryan and I spent some time in the Haneda airport tourism office trying to find out the best way to get to the house we were staying at. Japan offers good travel services to tourists and we were able to get Welcome Suica cards that have allowed us to pay for public transportation without having to purchase tickets for every trip. We took the airport bus to Shinjuku station before taking the Odakyu line to Shimo-Kitazawa, the trendy town we were staying in, full of music venues and thrift shops. We spent this last week staying in Shimo-Kitazawa with our distant relatives. It has easy access to central Tokyo and is a beautiful area by itself so we were very lucky to be able to stay with them.
The 13-hour time difference was pretty jarring on our first full day in Tokyo, but we still enjoyed the day, going to the Mori Art Museum in the afternoon and then the Mitama Matsuri festival in the evening. We didn’t have any specific reason to go to Mori, but their exhibit which organized different modern artworks into school subjects was pretty cool. The museum is on the 35th floor and has a great view of Tokyo, so even if you aren’t interested in modern art it’s still a fun place to go. As for the Mitama Matsuri festival, we had no idea what to expect. The woman at the tourism office gave us a pamphlet with some different festivals and music performances on it, and as the main reason we are in Japan right now is because Ryan is here to study ukiyo-e art and traditional Japanese music, we thought it would be cool to check out the festival that night. The streets leading up to Yasukuni shrine were packed and lined with lanterns. The main attraction that day was the carrying of the mikoshis (small portable shrines). A group wearing traditional Japanese clothes carried the shrine through the crowd, bobbing it up and down and having a good time. It was really cool to see the festival, but by 8:00 my jet lag began to kick in so we headed home. It was a great first day in Tokyo!
 |
| Mitama Matsuri Festival |
Over the next couple days, we visited four more museums, saw three performances, and visited a couple beautiful parks. The three art museums we went to were cool, but I don’t have too many thoughts on the art we saw other than that some of it was really famous and some of it was really old and that’s pretty awesome, but because I am no expert on art, I’ll just show you some of the stuff I saw and you can see if you like it for yourself.
 |
| Eagle from Tokyo National Museum, shown at Chicago World’s Fair in 1893 |
 |
| Under the Wave off Kanagawa from Sumida Hokusai Museum |
 |
Some Art Piece that I Found Interesting but Did Not Write the Name Down from Mori Art Museum
|
The fourth museum we saw was about a different kind of art. It was the Studio Ghibli Museum just outside of Tokyo. Ghibli is the studio that made My Neighbor Totoro, Howl’s Moving Castle, and many other amazing anime movies. The museum had original drawings of Hayao Miyazaki along with a replica of the office he made them in. It also had some really cool exhibits on animation in general. Ghibli is kinda the Pixar of Japan and after learning more about it I really want to see the rest of their movies because that museum was awesome!
 |
| Life-size statue of robot from Ghibli’s Castle in the Sky |
On our way to the museum, we passed through Inokashira park, which has a small zoo in it. Of course we had to go in because the entry fee was less than $5 and we had a couple hours to kill. While I enjoyed seeing the capybara and the Japanese cranes, my favorite part of the zoo was their invasive species section which contained different species that they had removed from the pond in the park to make the ecosystem more balanced. These invasive species included the large-mouth bass, bluegills, and an American snapping turtle. I thought that was kinda funny because these are all native to our lake in the Adirondacks. There was also a mallard and a Canada goose in the exhibit which again is funny to me because I would never consider them to be exotic birds in the slightest.
 |
| Shinto Shrine in Inokashira Park |
As I mentioned, we also went to some performances: a traditional music performance, a kabuki theater show, and a summer festival pop/Latin groove feel performance with a bunch of solo singers. Ryan’s going to be doing some in-depth writing about all of this music, but I’ll give you an overview in case you’re not interested in the ethnomusicology of the Japanese shamisen. So, the traditional music performance was in a beautiful hall in the Tokyo National Theater. It was mostly traditional stringed instruments, but also included some flutes and some singing. People kept getting up and leaving between numbers, so we were not sure how long we were supposed to stay. We ended up leaving after about two hours, after the intermission when the performers turned from seasoned professionals to school kids. Aside from the confusion of when we were supposed to leave, I really enjoyed this perfomance. It is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before, and it was a welcome reprieve from the intense heat that has been hitting Tokyo this past week. The second performance we saw was the kabuki show. The way they’re structured is in three acts that are unrelated to one another but allow you to spend four or five hours at the theater. We were only able to get tickets for the middle act, a historical drama about an incident where a bunch of firefighters and wrestlers got into a fight in 1805. It was very dramatic and I think there were plenty of jokes, but unfortunately I don’t speak any Japanese so I didn’t understand any of it. The stage combat was really the only thing I was able to appreciate, and I personally didn’t find it to be so impressive. It’s very hard to watch a two hour stage play in a language you don’t understand! As to the last performance I mentioned, Ryan and I were walking in Ueno park after going to the Tokyo National Museum and we stumbled across a beautiful pond covered in lotus plants that grew so high you could barely see the water. It was incredible! We heard music coming from a nearby amphitheater and after paying a small fee we got to see a bunch of really talented Japanese singers. It was a lot of fun.
 |
Lotus flower, Ueno Park
|
Aside from going to parks and museums, we have been eating a lot of Japanese food. There’s also a surprisingly high number of French restaurants here, so we’ve had a few crepes and pastries. The food is pretty good here, but unfortunately not great for vegetarians like Ryan, so that’s been a bit of a struggle but we’re making it work.
Another really cool thing in Tokyo is Akihabara. It’s the center of “nerd culture” here and has a bunch of electronics stores, manga stores, and arcades. There’s one store right across from the train station that is an eight-floor department store with every electric thing you can imagine, from phone chargers to electric toothbrushes to electric pianos to toilet seats. Oh yeah, side note: the toilets here are amazing, even public toilets; they’re all really clean and well maintained, many even have bidets. Anyway, Ryan and I spent some time in the arcade playing some music games. They have a big, much higher paced version of the Piano Tiles mobile game. Some of the people there were incredible! The coordination and practice they had must have taken hours and hours to build. Akihabara also has a bunch of “maid cafes” which is supposedly a fun tourist thing to do, but it seemed a bit weird so we didn’t go.
 |
Akihabara, Tokyo
|
Yeah, so that’s a bit of an overview of what I’ve been doing this last week in Tokyo. I’m kinda just writing about whatever I want, so if you want to hear more about any aspect of my trip, reach out and I’d love to talk! Thank you for reading my first blog and hopefully I’ll get another (shorter) one out soon. Next, I’m headed to the mountains of Nagano prefecture. Bye!
- Justin Dunn
