For the shinkansen ride from Kyoto to Tokyo, I asked if we could sit on the left so we could see Mt. Fuji. The ticketing folks were super accommodating. The clouds were not.

After we arrived, we dropped the bags at the hotel, and then booked it to Odaiba. The kids met their second cousins today, and we hung out with my cousin & his awesome family for dinner. We ate some delightful food at a place that had a picture of Keanu Reeves outside. Ei-Nyung encouraged me to sneak the bill, and I managed to get the drop on my cousin, which was a hilarious moment.

Got to see the big Gundam at exactly the right time. Our friend had gone to see it during the day & was like “WTF THIS SUCKS”, but at night, with lights, synced to the scenes in the anime from which the statue was pulled, it was pretty spectacular.

We decided to have a “new Tokyo” day today. Got Ghibli and Teamlab Planets tomorrow, then an “old Tokyo” day before we go. We ended up going to Akihabara, since I have a lot of fond memories of it from my youth, and boy – it is not for me anymore.

Used to be a place where you could get a lot of interesting electronics that were leagues beyond anything you could get in the states. But now that your iPhone does every conceivable thing, that kind of tech isn’t super relevant. So Akihabara is a lot of hobby shops with statues of anime characters, model robots, and … not a ton else?

We ended up going to one of those five-story toy stores, and they had a ton of One Piece statues (though we don’t have any need to have a character statue), and on the upper floor, they had a ton of robots and models – a bunch of stuff I’d never seen before, but was waaaaaaaaay too expensive. Picked up a Skids Transformer, solely because it was the very first Transformer I ever got way back when.

Also went to Super Potato, which is a huge retro game store. But because of the language barrier and various region locking, there’s nothing there that was super appealing, even though it was neat to see. It’s not like I’m gonna go buy a Famicom. There was also some odd livestream of some sort of girl group, and it elicited from what appeared to be a crowd of guys the kind of reaction that a BTS performance would elicit from a bunch of girls. At least, that’s how it seemed.

But yeah – too loud, too crowded, not the kinds of things I’m looking for. I think maybe if I was super deep into cameras or something, there’d be something here that I’d find interesting still, but it isn’t the revelation of my youth. Alas!

Also saw a crazy-ass Warhammer “cafe” – which had a ton of really gorgeously done up terrain for people to actually play on, and a lot of the best-painted armies I’ve ever seen.

the picture of the dude in the sunglasses and the mask is from a Japanese show called Run for the Money, which is on Netflix. It’s awesome. 

We also tried to stop at a “Petit Kirby Cafe”, where they had awesome looking Kirby-themed confections. Alas, without a reservation, they wouldn’t even let you purchase any food. JUST FOR TAKEOUT. It’s crazy. They were processing people SO slowly, I was just baffled. They could easily have done this without reservations & increased their throughput 5-10x.

The stuff looked awesome, but they don’t “release” stuff until after 3 without reservations, and I wasn’t gonna sit around and wait for an hour in the hopes there’d be anything left.

We also ate lunch at the “Ramen Street” in the Tokyo train station. First bowl of ramen on the trip, and it took us almost a week in Japan to get to it. It was interesting to see the variety of ramen that they’d jammed together. The one we chose had a mix of bowls with normal noodles, and some with buckwheat-y noodles. Not soba, but sort of a hybrid soba/ramen noodle. Pretty darned good. Tomorrow after Teamlab, we’re gonna try to hit up the Ramen area of Aqua City, which also sounds like a collection of interesting spots all jammed together into one place.

Dinner at the Ninja restaurant. Cheesy but fun. Kids seemed to enjoy it a lot, and the food was surprisingly high quality given what it could have been.

And if you’re a food dork, note the quote on the wall and it’s author.

That part was very surprising!

The next day was basically “art day”. Ghibli Museum and Teamlab Planets. Ghibli was amazing. Loved it. Watched the Kitten Bus movie. What a neat concept for an animation museum. It’s basically laid out like an artist’s workspace, with lots of work-in-progress and reference material around. For a hand-drawn studio like Ghibli, it was super immersive, and showed off what kind of craft goes into these things.

The museum was spectacular – it felt like you were in one of their movies. Not necessarily anything specific (though I wouldn’t be expert enough to say for certain), but it just felt like Ghibli through and through.

Teamlab Planets. Amazing. More on this later.

After TeamLab, we went back to Odaiba for ramen. I had a tsukemen, which was good, but maybe a bit too fish-forward in the broth for me. Ei-Nyung had a ramen that was at least as much green onion as it was noodles.

We’d hoped to stop by Joypolis (a huge ass Sega arcade that I thought had closed down ages ago), but unfortunately… they closed at 7, and we got there at 8.

Last full day in Japan, we wanted to go see something more traditional.

This morning, we went to Senso-ji, which was nice – even though it was lightly drizzling, the place was packed. Funny how the little merch shops still sell the same kinds of vacu-formed plastic masks they have for the last 45 years at least.

We also had a very instagrammable ube dessert thing, where they had a thin layer of roasted sweet potato, ice cream, and then they pressed a steamed purple sweet potato through a ricer to make these thin potato noodles that went all over the top. It was really good.

Ei-Nyung went to go visit with a friend, and so the kids & I went to Shibuya to find a melon cream soda float. This was disappointing, even though it looked good. The actual soft serve was really good, but the melon soda was weaksauce.

But yeah – between Senso-ji and Shibuya and three weeks of fairly aggressive walking including nearly a week trying to walk around with a left foot that has been declining from blinding agony to merely painful, I’ll be glad to get home and put my feet up for a bit.

Tonight, we meet up with @hapacheese and our old housemate & mutual friend Brandon (who we last saw in London a few years ago). Tomorrow we pack up and head home. It’ll be a long day of traveling, but it’ll be nice to get home.

I have to say also, of the many awesome things that we’ve seen, TeamLab is definitely going to leave a lasting impression. The exhibits were surprising, full-body kinds of experiences, often strikingly beautiful in ways I haven’t experienced, and it’s something I’d very much like to see more of, which is not something I say about a lot of traditional art. If you’re in Tokyo, you could go.

One thing that I hadn’t expected at ALL even having seen some stuff when figuring out if we should go to it was that you go through the exhibits barefoot, because there are some where you’re walking in water. In one, knee-high. In one, you’re walking up a slope with water rushing down. When you get to the top, there’s an illuminated column of water falling from the ceiling.

In another, the water is opaque, and there are projections on it from abstract lights, to later images of koi.

I don’t remember if there was a third water section, but maybe. There were also numerous exhibits with lots of mirrors that made the spaces seem much larger than they were – in the room with all the LED strands hanging from the ceiling, it was genuinely disorienting, as everything seemed to go on forever in every direction.

One of the reasons I think that this would have been very difficult to do in the US is sad – it’s delicate, and the space requires a certain amount of cooperation to enjoy. You can’t grab the flowers in the garden exhibit – it’s a bunch of hanging orchids. One (foreign) kid was grabbing the ends of the strands, but that was it – everyone else was respectful. There was one kid going places in the LED room he shouldn’t have, but everyone else? Totally respectful. It’s frustrating, because it’s like, “Dammit, this is why we can’t have nice things.” There’s a lot of Japanese culture I dislike – it’s too rigid, too hierarchical – I’d never want to work here, for instance. But there’s also something about being able to hold “society” or “team” in high regard which is in direct opposition to America’s “individual uber alles fuck everyone else” mentality. The kids clean the schools together. People coordinate their movements in rush hour mostly fairly elegantly because they have to – there’s too many people for an individual melee to work.

So Teamlab to me, yeah – we saw it in Tokyo, and I wish I could see something like this closer to home, but I also couldn’t imagine it. The concessions they’d have to make for the exhibits to be durable enough or for them to not be totally dominated by Instagram buffoons who think the space belongs to them would make it worse in every way.

One funny thing in the Teamlab exhibit was that some sort of organization that employs exclusively Indians was apparently having some sort of corporate retreat there. It was just weird seeing a horde of yellow-shirted Indians all moving around in a big group, but they seemed to be having a grand time. 

Packed up and about to head out. Got two hours between when we check out & the train to Narita, so we’ll poke around the Tokyo station area for a bit. Shinkansen to Narita, then to San Jose airport via ZipAir, then a friend picks us up for the drive home. Will amount to a very long day with one minor point of stress which is “checking in to ZipAir”.

Looking forward to being home, but not homesick. Amazing to me that we managed a three week trip with a lot of moving around without anyone losing their minds. 😀 Portends well for the future!

Last minute swing by the Kirby Cafe Petit, and I was able to ask her nicely enough in Japanese that she let us buy stuff without a reservation.

Bah. Flew out of Tokyo at 4pm. Didn’t sleep more than 15 min. Got in at 10am. Was groggy all day. Made it to bedtime, at which my body decided it was time to wake up. Thanks, body.

Man. I know I’ve said much of this before, but this was a hell of a trip. Before we left, we were trying to think about what “success” looked like. Was there something we wanted to get out of the trip that we’d be disappointed if we didn’t do it? There were some small things we weren’t able to do – for me, a lot of that revolved around my foot injury and not being able to see some more traditional “old Japan” stuff. I definitely want, while the kids are still young, for them to walk in a Japanese castle interior that looks like a Japanese castle interior. I have absolutely no idea why that means something to me, except that it felt like such a transportative moment when I was a kid that I feel like it’s important to me that they have that experience.

But otherwise? We had such a great experience. I feel like we got to “see Korea” and “see Japan” both as they are today, and dive into their history and culture in a way that will illuminate the kids’ life forever. We got over the uncertainty and stress of traveling to both of these countries – both heightened by each of our history and expectations. I was terrified of meeting up with family and just sitting there in silence with the language barrier. Technology made that easier. But if that technology wasn’t there at all, it’d still have been worth it. I’ll have to track down my two female cousins who I spent time with when I was young – it’ll be a bit harder, since my mom doesn’t talk to their dad basically at all any more, but I can probably figure it out.

We ate a ton of food. So much good food. We had a lot of country-specific food in the place you’re supposed to have it. The kids will have a weird love of convenience stores and vending machines that unfortunately does not carry over at all to convenience stores or vending machines in the US.

Next time, I want to go a bit more out in the sticks. If there’s a reasonable way to stay in more countryside locations in both countries, that’ll be great. Every urban location will be right on top of a train station, though, because the difference between 5 min. to a train and 15 min. is eternity.

My favorite moments:

• The mango I ate in Jeju. Holy fucking shit. Life changed in a mouthful. I’ve never had anything that good. I think that’s correct. Despite all the fancy-schmany restaurants we’ve been to, I think one bite of mango blew it all away. Wild.
• How absurdly uncomfortable the Hanok in Seoul was. I mean, I hated it in the moment but it’s SO … memorable? Why would anyone do that to themselves?
• TeamLab Planets – I desperately wish I’d a.) have brought a better camera, and b.) know how to use a better camera, because there were things in there that the photos we have just don’t do justice, and I don’t know how to have taken a picture that’d have captured it.
• Omi, my cousin’s young son, would grab Jin’s face. Jin would make an expression and a groan, and Omi would cackle and double over the way that really young kids do. Nayu, his daughter, grabbed Kuno’s hand while walking and wouldn’t let go. Kuno was visibly uncomfortable, but Nayu was beaming in a way that… I dunno. She was just so happy. Kuno’s never had the older brother experience, so maybe he got a moment of it then.
• Sitting in Cafe Onion in Seoul at 7 in the morning, totally wrecked from travel, and eating a bunch of delicious pastries and wondering how we were going to make it ‘til 3pm. For some reason, the small bits of suffering during the trip seem to have stuck in my mind and ended up as positives. 😀
• Just seeing all the people we know. Friends we haven’t seen in years, if not decades. Family I haven’t seen in 20+ years.
• Seeing the kids get through it all together. I’m not trying to brag here or anything – but they made it through a 3 week trip in six places and had no problems at all. A moment of grumpiness here and there, but practically speaking, flawless victory. It makes it so much less stressful to plan for another trip like this.
• Every goddamn time the kids were surprised or delighted by something. I feel like that’s the purpose of my life at this point in some weird way, and it was great.

Picked up a Gundam at the airport on the way out. This was super fun to build.