Tokyo Seven

Our last day in Tokyo began with a trip to the Edo-Tokyo Museum, a museum about the history of Tokyo.   The museum is housed in a huge concrete edifice which somehow reminded me of some of the things French architects do with lots of money and extravagant ideas.

Inside there are all kinds of recreations of Tokyo's past, both in the form of miniature models and full scale reproductions of typical stores, etc.   It made me think of the times in my childhood when we were taken to places like Williamsburg, Virginia to see recreations of American colonial times.  But in this case, the reproductions are quite interesting, especially given that there is so little of the past evident in Tokyo.

A model gate:

A full scale wood shop:

Later that day we went to Yokohama to visit the Yokohama Museum of Art, which had an exhibit loosely based on ideas from Walter Benjamin's essay "The  Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction".   It was a wonderful exhibit, featuring works by Klee, Kandinsky, Schwitters, Rodchenko and many others.   Though I confess I couldn't make much sense of the theme of the show, but I was happy to look at the works.   The museum itself is a beautifully laid out space, with lots of room for the art works, and an air of extreme quiet and concentration.   Amusingly, they don't allow you to use a pen to write things down.   Vera, who loves to jot down notes in museums, was asked not to use her pen.   They gave her a pencil, of course.    And of course, no photos.

After the museum, we went to downtown Yokohama to meet for dinner with our friends Masaru and Chiemi and their impossibly cute three year old son Minato.   It was a true feast; some of us had shabu shabu, and the others had sukiyaki.  We were impeccably served by staff in kimonos, and young Minato charmed everyone.