Our sixth day began with a visit to the Suntory Art Museum, located in a huge high-end shopping mall/office building/ hotel development called Tokyo Midtown. The exhibit was another one of Hiroshige wood block prints, these perhaps even more astonishing than the ones we saw a few days later. The museum itself is sponsored by the Suntory brewing company, and the exhibit was beautifully mounted and displayed. After lunch, our next destination was the nearby National Art Center, a huge exhibition space that opened in 2007. The center has no art of its own, but functions as an exhibition space for many travelling and self mounted shows. In this case, the attraction was a show centered around the Japanese designer Issey Miyake. Not much of interest for me, but the others enjoyed it. The building itself is yet another work of stunning modern architecture in Tokyo.
There is a very fancy cafe on top of this cone:
Wavy lines everywhere:
The exterior:
That evening, Vera and I were sitting in a restaurant having a late dinner when suddenly the whole room began shaking up and down. Alarms went off, lights began flashing, cell phones buzzed and beeped. Yes, it was an earthquake! It lasted about 10 seconds, and then it stopped. The two guys sitting next to us showed us a map on their cellphones that indicated the location, a prefecture near Tokyo, and the strength, 5.6. After that all the people resumed their dinner as if nothing had happened. No big deal.... It was the strongest one I have ever felt, though, and a reminder that Tokyo, like most of Japan, is in an active earthquake zone.
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