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.

Tokyo Five

On Sunday we started our day with a visit to the teenage shopping street Takeshita Dori in the Harajuku neighborhood.   This area is Tokyo at its tackiest, and something of a tourist attraction.    While some members of our party investigated socks, I was busy with my camera.

Crepes of many kinds!

Lolita floor or Gothic and Punk floor?

So some people actually wear these kind of boots:

As an antidote, we next went to visit the Ota Memorial Museum of Art, which had an amazing exhibit of wood block prints by Hiroshige.   Most of us are familiar with some of the classic images of the prints, like these:

But this exhibit featured some of the very first printings of the images; what was startling was the absolute vividness of the colors, which made the compositions really come alive.  No photographs were allowed, and, in any case, they could not reproduce the effect of seeing the originals.   It was an eye-opening exhibit.

Then we walked along Omotesando, a very high end shopping street, famous for its flashy modern buildings like that by Herzog and de Meuron for Prada.    I don't know if anyone really buys much in these stores; I was entertained by the sight of t-shirt and shorts clad tourists entering the building and being greeted by the so elegantly clad store personnel.

Sunday shoppers, out in force, entering a funhouse mirrored shopping mall:

The Prada building:

Reflections of an adjacent building in the Prada windows:

Then it was a retreat from commerce again, this time to the Nezu Museum, a small and very elegantly designed museum of Japanese art.   There were some amazing screen paintings and ancient bronzes and pottery.   No photos allowed.
The museum also has a spectacular garden.  It's a beautiful oasis in the middle of Tokyo.

The iris season was just about over:

There was a small bamboo grove:

We had our delicious green tea at a counter in a very stylish tea room overlooking the garden.

Continuing our pattern of alternating retail sights with art museums, we decided to finish the day with a visit to Shibuya, the true mecca of young people's shopping, and home of the famous crosswalk where all traffic stops and thousands of people cross the large intersection, going in every direction.  It's an unforgettable spectacle.

Advertising and neon signs are everywhere:

And more strange architectural manifestations:

Omelettes, anyone?

I don't know what this is about:

Tokyo Four

We had noticed that there was an art fair in Tokyo in the International Forum, and we all wanted to go see it.  The idea is very similar to other international art fairs like the Armory Show in NewYork; a large number of galleries have small exhibits featuring their artists.   What was immediately noticeable was the absence of the smell on money floating in the air that you sense in New York.  No important looking people on cell phones; but mostly people coming to look at the art.   And most of the art being things that New York critics might sneer at.   We all found things we liked; the stuff that intrigued me the most were those works that invoked various traditional Japanese art techniques, and made something new out of them.   After our trip the day before, I was amused to see this piece created out of scrap wood:

We walked around the Tokyo forum a bit afterwards, because it is such an amazing building.  The roof was having some kind of problems, with a protective sheet covering it.

After a very tasty lunch at a tempura restaurant in yet another high end shopping mall, we went for a walk in the area surrounding the Imperial Palace.

View of the Tokyo Station (modeled on the Amsterdam train station) from inside a French restaurant in the shopping mall.

The area around the Imperial Palace is wide open and beautifully planted.   You can't actually see the Palace itself, but the fortification walls and moats are quite impressive.

There was also this architectural oddity from the 1960's, a music hall built to honor the Empress.

After that, we went back to the Shinjuku area to visit one of our favorite Tokyo stores, Tokyu Hands, which is sort of a combination hardware store, craft store, stationery store, and whatever else you might think of.   It features every possible permutation of whatever you might need or might never have thought of in a typical display of Japanese inventiveness and thoroughness.

The Shinjuku area also has numerous skyscrapers of all kinds.

Then it was back to Nakano for dinner.   I mentioned earlier that Nakano has many restaurants.  We ate there almost every night, and the meals were always very good, and very reasonable in cost.   It was sometimes an adventure, especially if we were in a restaurant where virtually no English was spoken, and the only food descriptions we had were in pictures.   Sometimes you were never quite sure what you were going to get.  But it was always good, and the quality of the fish was extraordinary.

It was a pleasure to walk around at night, with narrow pedestrian streets and lively crowds.

 Whenever you look up, you see the ubiquitous electric wires which are found in every small Tokyo neighborhood; nothing is buried here.

Restaurants and bars:

This is one of the restaurants we ate in.

 We didn't go in here:

Other enterprises:

The local pachinko parlor:

The ubiquitous you-know-who:

Places like Nakano are part of what makes Tokyo special.  It's like a little village in the middle of the huge metropolis, five minutes train ride away from  Shinjuku Station, the busiest train station in the world.