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.

Tokyo Six

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.