Japanese Pools

The promise:



The reality:



On the bright side, they make everyone get out of the water for ten minutes every hour, ostensibly to fish out the drowned corpses of crushed children.

Hokkaido More

This is Nonky Land. Nonky Land is like Disney Land, but where the rides get built one per year, but they let people in before anything is finished. It's got a hillside of purple flowers though, I'll give it that. It's hard to drive past.



Some prison we visited. They really tried hard to make it entertaining. There were mock ups with dummies, some were moving. What can I say, it's a prison and designed from the first to be boring and punishing. The only food you could buy for lunch was a prisoner's meal, soup, rice and fish.



This is an artwork and a slide. A brilliant idea, though the slide was really steep and fast. In Sapporo.



Nonky Land again. I kid you not but this was one of only two rides in the 'fun park'. You can see in the background another big draw, a penned in area with some gym balls in it.



This is a perfectly clear shot of Bek and I on a motorboat, skimming across a lake. Why is this photo, taken with one arm on a bumpy boat ride, totally unblurred?

Forgotten Shots

In the Winter the weight of snow on the branches of these trees would break them. So they plant a tall pole and tie the extremity of each branch to the top of it. Everything they do looks pretty.



This is Aussie Hill, where they keep kangaroos in the snow all Winter. It's at a zoo somewhere.

Juxtaposition

Japan is summed up in this picture. It's ancient and modern at the same time. Primitive and efficient. Spiritual and heartless. Beautiful and ugly. Er.. hot and cold.

I like it and it infuriates me.

Obligatory Cherry Blossom Post

We went to Inokashira park to do some cherry blossom viewing. Most of the park is actually taken up by a lake.




As you can see, it's quite crowded, pretty much every area was covered in blue tarp and sat upon.



Kunugi-san found this park for us, it's one of the less popular places, so we thought we'd have less people to contend with.




This bridge seems to be sagging in the middle with all the people on it.



Of course, less popular is a relative term.

Paper

We found this at the Ueno Zoo shop. I can't read it but the pictures make the process quite explicit.

• Elephants eat leaves.
• Elephants sit on enormous toilets and poop.
• Someone unfortunate boils the dung.
• Another unfortunate mixes it in a huge cake mixer.
• All elephants are recycled after providing their offerings.

Arboreal Clothes

It's so cold in Korea in the winter time that they have to insulate some trees to keep them warm, or they will die.

Looks like a neuron.

Bek suggested these resemble coral.



Handle-less mops and brooms.

No Time For Flowers

Decorative cabbages are all the rage in the Winter months.

Kurumi

This is Alice at Ito-san's picnic. She's trying to walk Kurumi, or maybe Kurumi is trying to walk her. It's hard to tell.

Edo-Tokyo Museum

The other weekend we went out with some friends to Ryogoku and the Edo-Tokyo Museum. Edo is the old name for Tokyo. Most of the museum contained huge reconstructions of Edo era buildings and scale models of the town. From the outside the museum looks like it's hollow.

It's a very impressive looking building on large stilts. It's meant to be a reconstruction of a raised warehouse structure.

This looks like a woodworker's shop. The scenes were very interesting although you couldn't go inside them like you could at the Shitamachi museum in Ueno.

Here is one of the very detailed dioramas. It's so detailed that you can't really see anything in it except a bunch of people.

This one is a little less busy.

Old Japanese phone booths were called white boxes. They look very cool, but so do blue, Tardis-like phone booths.

Alice tries the jinriksha. After the museum we went to a small, secluded garden. It was like the ideal version of a Japanese garden.

Ryogoku is the home of many sumo stables, where young sumoka train to one day fight in the many sumo tournaments each year. Sumo is the national sport of Japan, and it's very entertaining to watch even if you don't know what's going on.

Here we all are at the main sumo stadium. We arrived about ten minutes before closing time, just fast enough to take a look at the small sumo museum.

This was the most interesting photo I saw there. A sumoka playing baseball. I'm sure they do other normal things, it's just hard to visualise those things.

We also visited this temple which doesn't look like a temple. They had a pet cemetary on the side and a lot of cats hanging about. Temples often kept cats to keep the mice from nibbling on the scrolls. These days they are probably kept just to amuse the monks.

We also went to an izakaya, which is like a Japanese pub, the big difference is that they serve a variety of food to snack on as you drink. They have these places in Korea too, it's such a good idea, I wish they had a few in Sydney. It's far less boring to eat and drink, you can drink more, and the food is usually very good yet not everyday fare. I remember eating chicken hearts and lungs on a stick in Korea, here they had tamer options. We ordered a mini pizza, a chees plate, some sultanas, a sausage plate and finally some ice cream for dessert. While there is a lot of food, it's still a pub and drinking is the main idea. We drank beer and I tried some weird Japanese drinks. I can't really remember what they were, strangely enough.

Old Doll Festival

The Ningyo Kuyo, or Old Doll Festival, is held at Kiyomizu Kannondo temple in Ueno park each year. The ningyo used in the festival are old and worn and belong to school children who come to pray for the dolls.

The kids are quite young as you can see. The priests do some chanting for the dolls' spirits, burn incense, march around sombrely and stoke the fire. Did I say stoke the fire? Yah, they stoke the large metal fireplace in preparation.

For what? Ah well, these dolls are used, they are broken, they want relief from the earthly realm of grabbing hands and careless play. They want deliverance into doll nirvana.

So, they shovel the dolls in and the children file past and give a little prayer for their playthings. Hopefully the dolls will be reincarnated as Barbies far away from Japanese infernos.

Namjatown

For my birthday last weekend we decided to try to go out without Alice. We found a babysitter, and she came over a little early to see how Alice would handle her. We've never used a babysitter before apart from our mothers, but Alice didnt' mind at all.

We went to see the Harry Potter movie and afterwards continued on to a Nepalese restaurant that I'd noticed advertised. It was nice to have some alone time as I rarely get away from the baby these days.




The next day we went to Ikebukuro and the Sunshine 60 building. It's one of the tallest buildings in Asia and contains the amazing Namjatown. What's that you ask? Well we barely knew ourselves even after having been there. It could be best described as a food amusement park. It showcases various food stalls along with having pantomime shows and some games of skill. It's divided into various themed 'worlds', and I really wanted to go to the Ikenukuro Gyoza Stadium. Gyoza are Japanese dumplings, and this whole area in the park was based on a stylised Chinese back alley maze of diners. There were a variety of different styles of gyoza on offer but it's so hard to read Japanese characters that I just ended up asking for 'fish' dumplings, or 'vegetable' dumplings. We ate cheese dumplings also, which were a highlight and quite unusual. I tried to use my bad Japanese and asked for some interesting tasting dumplings at one stall, however they just seemed pretty normal when I ate them.





Above you can see one of the characters from Namjatown. The park is actually based on the brand characters from a company whose name escapes me at the moment. Alice seemed quite afraid of this giant cat and not at all happy to be around it. The park had other areas such as a jungle themed area where they had a lot of massage stalls running, with various exotic types of massage on offer like Thai and Hawaiian.

Ice Cream City had an ice cream museum of flavours, and served various styles like rubbery Turkish ice cream and gelato. We ate so much that day. It's really a weird but terrific place.

Happy Birthday

The Sunday before last we went down to Odaiba, on Tokyo Bay, to see the big malls and funfairs. I was trying to show Rebekah some of the commercial side of Tokyo, because we did a lot of temple hopping on our last stay.

The large shopping centres in Roppongi unfortunately seem to be an exclusive enclave of high fashion designer womenswear stores. So, they are extremely boring for me to walk around in, but due to the rain Alice and I still have to run around in them quite often. The street side shops in Tokyo don't have an awning to cover the footpath, so you can't really just wander the streets when it's pouring, or indeed when inordinately sunny. I have a personal theory that this lack of cover is due to earthquake directed building regulations.

In Odaiba there is an amazing place called Venus Fort, and it unashamedly caters only to women. It's built inside a huge featureless concrete box, but when you get inside you discover the faux eighteenth century Italian promenades opening up to a painted-on placid blue sky. The whole interior is a series of these paved streets with two storeys of carved stone facades and softly lit ornate street lamps.

This is a huge fountain in the middle. Unfortunately the pictures don't do the place any justice as it's quite dim inside.

Even the security guards are dressed with Italian police uniforms, complete with berets.

Aqua City and Decks are the other two malls we looked around. Decks has an intriguing place called Muscle Park on the top floor, a kind of amusement park which tests physical skills. There are tandem elements where partners must help each other win, or cooperate somehow. There are commando courses which require extreme body strength to traverse as well as some coordination games with targets and things. The problem with telling you about all this is that we couldn't really participate in any of these pursuits as Alice was with us, so we'll have to go again another day to try them out.

We settled for the baby section of the park, which Alice and I had visited before.

Waiting in line is not as tough on Alice if there are other kids in the line too. Here we see her giving Bek's wallet to random children. The first time I'd taken her to this area the attendant asked me how old she was.

"Fourteen months," I said.

"Oh I'm sorry, she can only use this small, boring, empty part of the massive play area but she can fully view the three year old children having ten times the fun in the other parts," said the attendant in Japanese (maybe).

I tried to make my case, she can walk, I'll watch her, she is quite tall for her age, etc.

Sorry, small, boring section, don't move.

Well, this time we were prepared to get her into the 'dangerous' area. The one containing the ball pit. We decided to use our gaijin powers to intimidate the attendants and let her in. However, this time noone asked the age of any child and kids who could not even walk were allowed into all areas. I have no idea why, maybe lots of people complained, or maybe it was just so much more crowded and with a longer line.

Here's Alice falling in the two-ball-deep ball pit. It was her first time in one, I think. Be careful!

This past Saturday we tried to go swimming with Alice. We knew that lots of pools don't allow any kids to swim in them so we were recommended the Minato city recreation centre. We packed our bag, took the subway and rocked up to the centre's front desk.

"Sorry, the swimming pool is closed, noone can swim"

When will it open again, why is it closed, can Alice swim here?

"How old is she? I'm sorry, only three year olds can swim here."

But, but .... we rang ahead, a Japanese person inquired for us, we were told a sixteen month old could swim here. We bought a baby swim cap.

"Sorry, only three year olds may swim."

At the park, on the slides there is a notice, English and Japanese, only three year olds and above.

It seems three years old is when Japanese babies are allowed to do things, and before then they should just hang around their apartments and poo and cry and whatever else under three year olds do, we don't care, just keep them away from us, noooooooooo.

So, Happy 3rd Birthday Alice.

They grow up so fast, don't they?

Omote Sando

On Saturday we went to Yoyogi park again to see some freaks. Of course the place we were looking for, we couldn't find. There was a section of park where everyone hangs out which we'd been to before, but we got side tracked into going to Meiji Jingu shrine again along a long dark tree lined tunnel. Yoyogi is quite a big park. Well at least Bek got to go there and we saw a wedding also.




Alice befriended a bunch of women who promptly gave her their mobile phone to play with. She didn't want to give it back and they didn't want to take it back, so I stepped up into my natural role as the bad guy and took it. Of course she started crying very loudly in the middle of the large echoing courtyard where the wedding party was marching.

We hustled her away into the dark surrounding forest.

When we emerged on the other side of Yoyogi we did at least find a smattering of freaks. There were a group of four people standing about with 'free hugs' signs.

While a noble sentiment, I couldn't help but wonder why they didn't just pair up and hug each other. Leave the civilians out of it.

We avoided them and made our way down to Omote Sando road, which is kind of the fashion and shopping mecca for young people. Bek forced me into Snoopy town and we bought a bento box for Alice, an empty reusable one to pack her lunch in. She ran around in the press of people, and even assisted us with a few choices.

I bought a nice shirt with a carp on it. No, really. Then we pretty much just wandered around the backstreets browsing the little boutiques until Alice fell asleep and we went home.

Barely

I can barely see where the construction work is being done.

Failure

We went looking for a large baby store called the Akachan Honpo on Sunday and we just could not find it. We asked lots of people pushing babies in strollers, we walked around for ages and eventually we just gave up. The problem was that we didn't have a map, only an address, a mortal error when looking for anything in Tokyo.

We saved the day by sitting in a park near the Imperial Residence and letting Alice annoy all the smooching couples. Actually the women never looked annoyed, just the men. They probably didn't want to spring for a love hotel to get some peace and quiet.

Alice. Lowering the Japanese birth rate since June 2007.