(This is a write up of our trip to Japan this summer).
Day 4 (5/28): Senso-Ji Shrine, Teamlab Planets, and Small Worlds
Another morning, another breakfast of onigiri. I woke up at 5 a.m. which gave me plenty of time to get ready for the day. Our first stop in the morning was the Senso-Ji Buddhist temple which is apparently one of the most visited in the world. (Wikipedia says over 30 million people annually.)
Its origins are uncertain, perhaps dating back to the 7th century. It was rebuilt in the 1950s after being firebombed in the war. There is an extensive and bustling market in the approach to the shrine from which we bought a strawberry-custard pastry of some sort.
The Asakusa shrine is right up next to it. In fact, I didn’t realize we’d switched from Buddhist temple to Shinto shrine until after the fact. It honors the men who founded the Senso-Ji.
Following the temple and shrine, we walked to a Kura Sushi. This is a chain with this Tokyo location being its flagship. It was fun. You sit at the table with a tablet and there are two tiers of conveyor belts that run by. The lower just has random stuff on it that you can grab if it strikes your fancy.
The upper one delivers things that you have ordered on your tablet. It has a slot you can put empty plates into and incentives you to grab plates by letting you play a little game for every five. Randomly, it will award you a prize in a plastic ball that drops out. It was pretty affordable: drinks, a pile of sushi, and ice cream for four people for the equivalent of about $50 (about 8,000 yen).
TeamLab Forest
Our afternoon activity was Teamlab Planets. It has three areas: Forest, Water, and Garden. The “forest” is billed as athletic and has various areas with physical challenges (e.g. jump from one block to another; step from one swing to another) that are artistically done. “Water” requires you to take your shoes off and wade through a section.
TeamLab Water
Some of the dry areas have spongy sections that feel interesting on your feet. My favorite was a domed area with nature projections on the ceiling with a fractal quality to them. We laid on the floor and watched them for a while. The “garden” area wasn’t really my thing – orchids being moved up and down that you walked through, trying not to touch them as the orchids to one side or another of you moved up and provided space.
Harper outside of SmallWorlds
We followed up TeamLab Planets with Small World Tokyo, a facility devoted to miniature installations. The highlight was a Neon Genesis Evangelion depiction of Tokyo III and the launch cage for the Evas.
Tokyo III
But there was also a large airport, complete with airplanes that would take off and land along with a number of other smaller works which were very impressive. We had a beer at the café before walking to a Kirin City Plus restaurant. (We hadn’t decided on a beer centered restaurant prior to sitting down at the café!) It was about a 10 minute walk past the Ariake Coliseum.
At the restaurant, we had a variety of pizza, potato salad, French fries, and some other items. It wasn’t exactly “Japanese” food, but it was pleasant and maybe had the fewest westerners of any restaurant we visited during our trip. On the train home, we noticed people were much chattier. I suspected some after-work drinks were at play, but that’s just a guess. The advice we’d received prior to the trip was that Japanese people kept pretty quiet on trains and appreciated the same. This ended up being more true during the day in Tokyo. In the evening and in Osaka or Kyoto, it seemed to be less true.
Our choices were based mostly on can design.
At home, we had some novelty beers we’d picked up the evening before. Mine was good: Free-Style Golden Belgian Ale by YoHo Brewing. It even had a QR code that led you to a little YouTube video that was more entertaining than it had a right to be. Near as I can figure, it is a cartoon about a working stiff who has the beer and finds joy as a luchador DJ.
I was asleep by 10:30 p.m.
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