Ghibli Museum

In March, Mondo, Aiko and I went to the Ghibli Museum in Mitaka, a western suburb of Tokyo. Ghibli is a very famous animation studio in Japan that has produced some of Japan's most popular films. I started to become very interested in these films while I was still in the USA, and continue to enjoy them. Animated movies are frequently thought of as something just for children in America (with some exceptions, of course), but that is much less the case in Japan. Even movies that might have children as their primary audience are usually much deeper thematically and artistically than their counterparts in the US. If you haven't seen any of Ghibli Studio's movies before, I highly recommend them (especially Totoro). The museum showcases these movies, and has exhibits that show a short history of animation and the theory behind it through interactive displays. No photography is allowed inside, but I do have some pictures that I took outside the museum. Sorry about the strange shape of the photo of the outside of the museum; I stitched it together from six separate pictures, and the angles ended up a bit strange, but it was the only way I could get the whole building together. The giant robot in the picture with Mondo & Aiko is from a great film called Laputa: Castle in the Sky.

After the museum, another friend, Minoru, joined us. We went to a Mexican restaurant that was having a lunch buffet (hurray! Mexican food!). Later, we looked around the area near Tokyo Dome so I could check out a game store to see if they had any interesting board or card games. They had a reasonably sized assortment, but since many good-quality games currently originate from Germany, and the rules are then translated into Japanese for the market here, there wasn't much that would really be useful for me. (Shortly after that, I found one of my favorite games, "Ticket To Ride", in the local mega-electronics store here in Utsunomiya, but that will be another post . . . )

We took the train to Shinjuku, and we spent much of the evening looking around there. We went to an amazingly large bookstore and walked past Krispy Kreme, which is extremely popular. It's a bit difficult to see in the picture, but the line to get in goes all the way around the front of the restaurant, up the stairs on the side of the building, and over the top of a pedestrian bridge in the background (we did NOT bother to wait for donuts). Our last stop was the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building, one of the tallest buildings in Tokyo ( 48 stories) which has a free observation deck near the top.

Thanks for a very fun day, Mondo, Aiko and Minoru!

(P.S. If you didn't already figure this out, all the links connect to information on Wikipedia in case you want to read any more about some of the things I mentioned.)