We headed back to Tokyo for three days to meet up with Caroline and Clark, as they are joining us for the rest of our time in Japan. We were excited to have a little bit more time in Tokyo as the city had impressed us when we first arrived. Despite being the biggest city in the world and being home to 40 million people, it moves incredibly efficiently. The city is very clean, people are polite and helpful. There is so much to see and experience. On our first day back in Tokyo Sophie and I took a jewellery class where we searched cultured oysters to find a pearl. Surprisingly we were the only people taking the class, we were spoilt by the attention of the three Japanese people who were running the class and owners of the business. They were incredibly kind and friendly despite our limited ability to interact with our language barrier. The class was clearly designed to sell the jewellery that you then mount the pearl on, luckily the jewellery was reasonably priced, and we were both thrilled with our finished product. Aiden and Alastair braved the streets of Akhibara a gaming, technology and arcade district. We had planned to visit this area with Clark again, so this was more of a recon mission to see what Aiden would like to do during his visit with Clark.
The following day with the Cardwell was jam packed. We began with visiting teams Team labs Borderless Art Gallery. This is an immersive integrative art gallery where the artwork has no borders. Mirrors, passageways, projected images and amazing technology allow you to be completely immersed in a digital world. We were all in awe as we spent about 2 1/2 hours exploring the gallery at our own pace (while ensuring that we generally stuck together as it was huge with many different rooms and passageways and tons of people).
We had an incredible Japanese lunch where we sampled many different dishes before heading to see the Imperial Palace of Tokyo. This Palace can only be seen from outside unless you pre-book a tour during the limited opening times we unfortunately had not done. We explored the area around the palace, including the garden, seeing some of the government buildings and high-end shopping streets.
We then visited Haruka a district favoured by young people and known for people dressing up in costumes, favourite anime characters, or high fashion. It is also a place where you can find many of the Japanese trends that Tokyo’s teenagers are enjoying. Sophie was motivated to visit a pet Café and was thrilled to find one featuring hedgehogs. The kids wanted to try the many of the local treats on display everywhere. Having to make a choice the boys finally settled on a huge rainbow candy floss. Not something we would usually allow, but exceptions were made. Caroline was keen to try Purikura, special photo booths, where your image is altered to produce bigger eyes, higher cheekbones, and makeup. In the connected booth you can edit your pictures adapting the backgrounds, makeup, and accessories them, producing photo stickers. This was much more time-consuming than we expected as we waited for teenage girls to work on editing their prints without realizing that we did not need to wait for their booth and ours was hidden behind their booth. This activity clearly consumes a lot of Japanese teenage girl’s time. It provided great people watching as we got to see the enthusiastic young women with their friends, enjoying this cultural phenomenon. The next day visiting a seven-story arcade with Clark and Aiden helped us understand where the counterpart teenage boys and young men are hanging out.
Alastair and I enjoyed our visit to the museum honouring one of the most famous Japanese artist, Houkasi, the Sumedia Houkasi house. He was a master printmaker born in 1760, during the Edo period. He lived until 89 and during his lifetime produced an immense amount of artwork, he published a huge number of books using visual images to describe many different skills; cooking, dancing, sword fighting, sumo…He was an active art teacher and is often considered the first Manga artist. It was interesting to learn about his lifelong life and reflect about the amazing influence he has had on the art world, both inside and outside of Japan, he was big influence to the famous impressionist artist and brought Asian artwork to the rest of the world, considered one of the most recognizable Asian artists.
