Last Day In Asakusa

 I started our last full day in Asakusa with another nice run un the river. It was overcast and very comfortable. I'm gonna miss this view every morning

I've been wanting to get back to the Edo Museum for several years. It had been under construction since before COVID and it was opened again. Of course, we didn't realize it had just opened back up a few months ago, and we weren't the only ones who wanted to see it again. So we once again were stuck in a crowd, though this one was far smaller and more under control. It was people going to a museum, after all.

The museum shows the history of Edo (Tokyo) from it's initial founding as the Shogunate capital by the Tokugawas to modern day Tokyo. There's just a lot of really interesting exhibits and information. It's largely in Japanese, but the huge advancements in LLM-based machine translation made scanning and translating a lot of the text fast and easy, so I was able to quickly read the wall of kanji for a lot of the exhibits. Lots of dioramas, documents from the periods. Lots of really cool information about books of the Edo period (a very educated populous, especially for the time). We didn't even get to see it all in the few hours we were there. (Warning, lots of pictures)

After the museum, we stopped in Akihabara for a little bit, then headed back to Asakusa for lunch. While there, we ran into yet another set of street performances, this time really well done. There was a magician (we missed his show, but he drew quite a crowd), a few VERY well done living statues (performers looking like statues). This one woman when she was still looked like a metal statue, and when she moved, it was like a robot moving. Hard to explain, but she was so good, Sumi didn't think she was human at first.

breaking character to talk to a kid for a bit

After lunch we were heading back to Sensouji because we can't leave without one more daifuku from that stand (it really is that good) when we heard drums. We followed the sounds and found ourselves watching a parade that turned into an Awa Odori performance! 

The rest of the evening was spent doing unexciting chores: laundry, packing, cleaning, etc as we prepared to leave tomorrow morning. It's been a really enjoyable trip. The snorkeling and Okinawa, in general was a lot of fun, despite the lack of food. Tokyo is always a good time and this time we saw a lot of new things, some quite unexpected. 

More Pokémon, Nintendo, and Fireworks

 I failed to mention in yesterday's post that this weekend is the Pokémon Go Festival. It's held in different cities around the world on different weekends. For the most part, it is a bunch of special things happening in the game for dedicated players, like special challenges, increased drop rates of certain Pokémon, stuff like that. There was also a promise of an O-Bon dance lead by Pikachu, That almost got us to go, but the steep price tag (¥4000 per person) wasn't really worth it for us. I don't play at all and Sumi's not one of the insane addicts that go to these things

What it DID mean was that the store we went to yesterday was a madhouse. So of course we needed to subject ourselves to it again at one of the other big stores, this time in Shibuya. Now, to set the stage for this, it is the Saturday of the festival that kicked off last night. There are special location challenges around the city, meaning good stuff happens if you catch Pokémon in certain parts of Tokyo throughout the weekend. One of those places was clearly Shibuya. I saw a man with a cooling platter in his hand with four separate devices, all playing Pokémon Go at the same time. For the uninitiated, it's a game where you have the app going and as you walk around, you can find Pokémon, gain items, level up, etc. Most normal people have a phone and they play the game. This dude was frantically playing four games at once with four different accounts while walking the VERY crowded streets of Shibuya on a beautiful Saturday afternoon. There are SO MANY people with their faces buried in their phones wandering out here today.

And it appears most of them also went to the Shibuya store with us. On the way to said store, we found out it was on the 6th floor of an upscale shopping mall, and said floor was filled with video game stores, including the Nintendo Store

This was actually pretty cool. It was a nice, open floor design so we weren't being crushed by hyper children who have had too much sugar, stimulation, and not enough training on how to behave in public like we were in the previous Pokémon store yesterday. There were some neat exhibits and we just missed some special event having to do with Yoshi. They were handing out cardboard Yoshi hats. We did not get one. Salesgirls (they were all female and young) as part of the event were constantly smiling and waving at EVERYONE that walked by. And by constantly, I mean the entire time we were there, this poor girl was smiling and waving non-stop. For a good 30 minutes at my count, Her poor arms. I wonder what she did to deserve this punishment? I told her "ganbatte" as I left and she laughed. She knew it was absurd, too.

Sumi was once again unsuccessful, this time in acquiring a "Marshall" plushie, one of the friends in Animal Crossing. There was one on display, but none for sale, which is pretty cruel if you ask me. We did come home with a Ba-bomb, however.

The Pokémon store...

I don't even know where to start. It was NOT an open floor design. It was smaller than yesterday's store. It had more people in it. The line to the checkout counter was 30 minutes long and wrapped around the entire store, to the point where they had to move the line so people could access the shelves. It was insane. We left quickly.

Back on the first floor of the mall, they had a security robot rolling around, ostensibly watching for shoplifters, I guess? Unless it had a hidden taser somewhere to take down unruly shoppers?

Of course it had to be kind of cute.

There was yet another Sanrio store. So of course we were required to attend.

For dinner today, we picked a sukiyaki place in Asakusa, mostly because the palce we were going to go to, a faux-Italian bar place was full with a private party. And it turned out to be pretty good!

So with full stomachs, we stopped at the Asakusa Don Quixote because we are clearly masochists at this point. 

Think Mos Eisley, but with tourists

Sumi was looking for a blanket, as the fireworks are set off by a river and there's a lot of grass areas along the mile or so of the river where the fireworks are going to be set off. When we arrived, there was a bit of commotion happening outside.

Apparently Oiran Night Rock is something that happens on weekend evenings on Broadway in Asakusa. What it is supposed to be is at night (around 9) they start a traditional looking parade with drums and stuff, lead people to the stage, and then start playing modern tunes on traditional instruments. That's what the web page says, and maybe if we stayed until 9, we could see that. This was two young women dressed in traditional-looking getups playing older western pop songs and yelling at the crowd. They weren't singing, but they were certainly working hard. We Will Rock You was bad enough, but that segued into It's My Life by Bon Jovi and then (sigh) the grand finale, YMCA. People were having fun, so I'm glad but it was genuinely awful. How we've managed to stay in Asakusa for over a decade and never see this I don't know,. I guess we're already in bed by the time it starts?

Anyway, the fireworks. They estimated some 700,000 people will turn up for the show. That's not as many as the 1.3 million that were at the Asakusa Fireworks show a few years ago, but it's a lot. So I figured they would have some plan to deal with that many people invading the town, right? Right?

To make a long, frustrating story short, they utterly failed in so many ways. You hear stories about how useless Japanese police are. Yes. Yes they are. They were good at telling us not to walk down streets and herding us down the same path. The problem with that was a) there wasn't enough room for the hundreds of thousands of people to fit on said path, b) this path was next to 20 foot tall cement walls that blocked the view of the fireworks, c) there wasn't actually a place for people to go. They just kept yelling at us to "keep moving" but there were so many people, we physically could not move, and even if we could, there was nowhere to go. 

I was getting angrier and angrier as the farce continued. I actually had little trouble seeing the fireworks, for the most part, once we shoved our way close enough. I'm tall. But there were literally hundreds of thousands of people that showed up and couldn't see anything. There were so many tiny (and I mean tiny) east asian women in the crowd that had no prayer of seeing anything but a large concrete wall and a wall of humanity so they couldn't move. There was a lot of pushing happening, which was partially understandable, except we weren't moving because there was nowhere to go. It was mildly amusing that I was being pushed by 90 pound girls and once I put my foot down (literally) they would run into me and just stop. 

The silver lining was that Sumi managed to find a curb to stand on and we found a spot far enough away from the wall that we could see most of the show. But I really hope people get fired over this. It was a disaster waiting to happen and an utter failure of crowd management. Fortunately no one fell or got trampled. I have a feeling the police would have just told them to "keep moving". But man, Japanese fireworks shows are fantastic. 

Of course, with that many people, it was a bit of an adventure to get home. We didn't even bother with the nearby train station. We walked about a mile or so and found a smaller station to get us back to the apartment.

Yokai, Sanrio, and Pokémon

Today there are a few exhibits that are in Tokyo for a limited time that we are looking forward to seeing, with varying degrees of "looking forward to". The first is the Yokai Museum, a travelling multimedia art exhibit of Yokai (Japanese folklore supernatural beings) in Shinagawa. Shinagawa is an upscale Tokyo area, very recently constructed on a man-made island in the bay. Think very trendy with lots of art galleries and gated communities. We took the train down and after a bit of wandering found the converted warehouse that housed the exhibit. It had been traveling the country for a few years and Tokyo was I believe it's last stop.

It was similar in feel to the TeamLab installation we visited last year, but not as elaborate and more educational. Really interesting overall, and we're glad we got a chance to see it before it went away. I'll add a few of the many pictures we took.

We discovered just the other day, actually, that Sanrio was celebrating it's 60th anniversary with a big old exhibit in Roppongi Hills, the obnoxiously upscale part of Tokyo. Well, we can't miss that, can we?

Mori Art Museum, 52nd floor.

The elevator was VERY fast, with our ears popping several times on the way up to the 52nd floor. The exhibit itself was far more interesting than I initialy thought it would be. Other than all th expected plushies and characters and cuteness and all that, it was a really interesting look at the history of the company. I found out they used to publish sci-fi novels in the 70's and 80's. Like real novels from real authors, all as part of their commitment to "fantasy" which sci-fi was an extension of, to them. Also, while many of the characters were intentionally designed, some were kind of "happy accidents" as Bob Ross would say. One of my favorites was Tuxedo Sam (a penguin who has 365 bow ties). Sam was initially not going to be a character. He was made specifically because they were making a lot of household appliances (humidifiers, toasters, etc) and his shape was perfect for many of them, so he was initially just that. But people started asking about him and now he's one of the gang. He's also one of the earlier characters (1979).

See what I mean? These are coolers and tea kettles

There was also a movement in the 80's for non-characters: things that weren't like cats or even Chinese half-fish men (yes that's one of the more popular ones). Enter Fresh Punch:

It's...well...it's a glass of punch...

Anyway, it really was fun to see all the older stuff from the 60's and 70's and how it all changed over time. I also learned that Sanrio has published the Ichigo Shinbun (Strawberry Newspaper) continuously since 1975, allowing you to keep up with all the goings-on of the world on Sanrio, gossip, scandals, new characters, you name it. There were walls of the covers.

After all that, we decided in our infinite wisdom, to check out the largest Pokémon store in Tokyo, the Pokémon Center Tokyo DX. Because we somehow hadn't gotten enough of crowds and children. It's quite a store, with a wide variety of Pokémon merchandise. Sumi was unsuccessful in trying to find a Farfetch'd plushie, but did find various other trinkets to her liking. 

After a lot of walking around and dealing with crowds, we were pretty much done. After a nice dinner at CoCo Curry (SUMI'S request, I will have you know!) and some amazing daifuku at the same stand in Asakusa, we collapsed back at the apartment. Tomorrow will be another walking around day in Tokyo. We have a few more places we wanted to visit AND there's the first fireworks festival of the year just north of the city proper in Adachi.

"The Anonymous Man" - found outside the art installation warehouse

Of all things to import from the US...

There's a lot to unpack in this PSA. It is an ass, with a carrot in it's mouth, getting it's head stuck in the train doors. And rather than anyone being concerned about the poor creature, someone is holding up a "Do Not Run" card in it's face. And his carrot broke.