Everyone should visit the Ghibli Museum!

This morning, we set out for the Musee D’Arte Ghibli, or the Ghibli Museum, located near the Mitaka subway station (get there from the Chuo Rapid or Sobu Local JR trains). The museum features the works of Studio Ghibli & its creative director Hayao Miyazaki. He wrote & created classic Japanese anime movies such as My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away, & Princess Mononoke. The museum is an amazing building accessible only by public bus. It houses original sketches & teaches the visitors the process of making animated movies. The architecture of the building itself encourages visitors to wander & get lost, & there are many small doorways & staircases for children. We are fascinated by Miyazaki’s imaginative works. Robby leaves the museum wanting to watch all his movies, & I leave thinking about sketching & painting. We are both inspired in some way.

We check out Harajuku on a Sunday evening. Boutiques on Taskeshita Dori, where all the young people shop, are closing by 7pm, so the place looks people dead. Most people walk in one direction - toward the subway station. We see small booths in alleyways that sell the heavy rock genre - Slipknot t-shirts, silver chains attached to unwieldy wallets, & pins with punk-inspired themes. One store sells hip-hip-themed attire, & the three shelves facing the doorway are full of the classic NY baseball cap in at least 15 colors. We see a handful of girls who look like life-sized dolls, straight out of Alice in Wonderland: blonde curly wigs, short pink dress with white apron, pink parasol, white tights, & enormous platform shoes.

Groups or pairs always match in style. Even their make-up is similar. Couples match too - same hairstyle, same type of dress, similar shoes. A boyish-looking woman in sagging pants would never be seen with a girly woman in spiked heels & a short skirt. Only heeled women hang out with heeled women. Women must call each other up & choreograph their attire for the evening:

“I’m going to Takeshita in my ‘60s Indian hippie dress.”
“Which one?”
“The blue one with the red pattern.”
“Okay, then I’ll wear my pink Indian hippie dress.”

In their attempt to look different, they all end up looking the same! Robby thinks that these extreme styles of dress have to do with a claim to individual identity. Everyone wants to cling to a specific identity, so that they feel set apart from others, especially in such a homogenous society as Japan, where (don’t hurt me or Robby) less racial diversity means that people all look similar. I am not sure I agree with him. There are many homogenous countries where people don’t take it to the extreme as the Japanese do, but Japanese do have the money to spend on appearances, unlike many other people around the world.

Since Harajuku is closing, we go to Shibuya, which ends up looking a bit crowded, but also semi-empty compared to Saturday night. We explore the Sega arcade store, which contains mostly gambling games, like the machine into which you feed coins in order for one level of coins to topple another level of coins (I don’t know what this is called). There are a ton of these games. Then after a burger or two at Mosburger (mmmm!), we go to Taito Games, another multi-story arcade. Lots of gambling games, some Streetfighter type games. One large game consists of a large screen that shows horse races & 20+ reclining chairs attached to personal screens. Players sit comfortably in these plush seats, while they bet on horses that compete in fictional races. There is also a room full of electronic mahjong machines.

These arcades are incredibly noisy, especially when people play Pachinko, the slots game that involves lots of little metal balls rolling around in the machine. Lots of people smoke while they sit for hours with buckets of coins punching buttons. Robby notices that none of these games involve social activity. For example, at all the Streetfighter games, each player plays the machine instead of each other. So playing is a very isolated & private experience.

Enough of Shibuya’s excitement. We need sleep!