Taiko Drums and Art

I got up earlier this morning and got out before 6 for running. After a short warmup walk to the Don Quixote

I headed down Nitenmondori towards the temple

and was enough this morning to hear the temple bell ringing signaling the end of prayer as I jogged through the Sensouji grounds on my way to the Sumidagawa path. 

After a few blocks, I hit the river where Sumidagawa Park and the landmark I use to get back are

The path is split into three or four separate paths, depending on the area, for different types of traffic

Lower level for bikes and pedestrians

Upper level for running. Riverwalk path for "strolling", though lots of runners down there, too

There are a number of pedestrian bridges that cross the Sumidagawa to the actual park and shrines on the other side, and you can run for nearly a mile without ever having to cross a street, which is unheard of in Tokyo. After another mile, there is a running/biking path that starts and follows the river for 2300 meters and is on a slightly elevated embankment.

Very pleasant, if somewhat hot and sunny. There are lots of small parks and shrines along the way, and a bunch of cormorants diving and swimming in the river. There is also a large, very nice municipal athletics complex with a running track, tennis, softball and full baseball fields, and an olympic-sized pool!

Butterfly park just off the trail

Too bad I'm not a resident...

Getting back to the temple, the service is over and tourists are just starting to stumble in,

After getting my sweaty butt back to the ryoukan and showering, Sumi and I head out to Ueno station for more Anderson goodness. I make it a point to try something different each morning, so this morning was a different apple pastry and my favorite of theirs, a cheese and pesto bun.

After breakfast, we jumped on the train up to Saitama. Manami and Maika couldn't make the trip this time. They were staying somewhere that would require over 90 minutes one way with a transfer just to get to the station. Half a day on a train to go buy some taiko stuff didn't make sense, so we were on our own! Manami had scheduled a time with Suwakougei for us so they had a driver waiting for us at the station to drive us to the factory. Once there, we picked up our order (new shime drum and stand and tachi-okedo stand) and I tested out some shinobue for Rachel, on of our Hibiki members and through conversation with a Suwa employee learned that there are actually three different types of fue. I knew about the two main types, Uta (mostly standard tuned for ensemble playing) and Hayashi (non-standard tuning with quarter steps for solo festival and Kabuki playing). In recent times, there are also fue designed for standard western tuning. These look like Uta fue, but the holes in the flute are of different sizes, versus uniform holes in Uta fue.

Once we got the order squared away and set up shipping to the airport, we were brought back to the station where we looked for lunch. There was a small shopping mall attached to the station (common for small towns) and in the basement a lot of food, including a Baskin-Robbins?

American ice cream store selling boba

Hidden in the corner of the basement was a small Nepalese restaurant. 

In Japanese, it really is called "Asian Spicy Restaurant Samosa"

They had some great lunch specials, though the names were a bit odd

Why is a two curry and dessert set for ladies? And no baby is going to eat that.

We both opted for the Vegetable Curry set and for less that ¥1000, we had an amazing meal

Fresh vegetables, salad, and naan in a spicy Nepali curry. I was not expecting this in Kounosu (the town where the taiko factory is). We got back on the train and headed back to Tokyo to get ready to go to an art exhibit in the evening. First we stopped at the World Drum Museum above the Matsumoto taiko shop, where you can actually play much of the displays. There is a variety of instruments from around the world, including taiko from various regions. It is small but nice, and being able to hear what all of these different drums sound like is pretty cool.

Sumi didn't really want to see the exhibits. She just wanted to bang on the cool oodaiko 

Now, regarding this art exhibit we went to. There is no way I can describe this exhibit. Even the pictures and video won't really do it justice. It is by a collective called teamLab and they have installations around the world. There are two here in Tokyo, and we went to the original one just outside of Roppongi called Borderless. Before we get to the exhibit itself, let's talk for a moment about the area of Tokyo that this thing is in.

Right next to the imperial palace and by all of the embassies (it's sometimes referred to as Embassy Row) is Azabudai Hills. This is by far the most obnoxiously upscale part of Tokyo I've ever seen. It was beautiful, in an almost dystopian way. The enormous high rise buildings housed offices, shops, restaurants, and apartments for those willing to pay more in a month than some people's annual salaries. The complex cost $5,200,000,000 (that is billion and that is US dollars) to construct, is the tallest building in Tokyo, and has it's own supermarket, multi-lingual daycare and private school, and anything else you can imagine contained inside. There are entire parks, with trees and grass, that are in the complex, above street level. We went to the FamilyMart there to get a drink after passing a cafe that was selling parfaits for ¥4500. That is $40 for a sundae. I saw a family of 4 in there and realized they just dropped $150 on dessert. So we opted for the convenience store. But even that was the bougiest FamilyMart we'd ever been in.

A (sigh) water bar. You can choose your own TYPE of filtered water.

Luckily they did also have some normal fare and we grabbed some drinks and yogurt for before the exhibit. In normal convenience stores, you can eat out in front of the store. That would have gotten us kicked out by plainclothes security watching the plethora of "hidden" security cameras, which were everywhere. So we walked over to one of the parks that had a lot of tables and chairs and relaxed a bit.

This is all part of the building

When it was time for us to go to the exhibit, we walked down to the ground level and got in line. The teamLab installations are interactive and procedurally generated areas with projection, LED lights, mirrors (LOTS of mirrors!) and more. There are a number of rooms that you can discover as you wander through the sensory overload of flowers, waves, parades of frogs and rabbits?, and birds. It is very difficult to express just how cool the whole thing is. You can be in a room for an hour and see completely different things, depending on what is happening in the room and the adjacent rooms. This is because what is being projected constantly changes and morphs based on where people are in the rooms and what they are doing. Below are a few pictures and movies that Sumi took that give an idea of what it's like. I highly recommend going to one of these if you are in a city where there is one.

It was a completely unexpected and very interesting exhibit. I'm very glad we went. After we were done, we headed back to Asakusa for a much more caste-appropriate dessert for us serfs and got some crepes at the Marion Crepes stand by Rox and sat around the fountain to eat them

Exhausted after a very full day, we made the short walk back to the ryoukan and crashed.