Day 4 Tuesday 2025 05 20 Tokyo National Museum,TeamLabs

Oh my GOD what 
does this all MEAN.

When I say that English translation is sketchy at best, what I really mean is there are too many signs that make me super curious but they are only in Japanese. All the really important signs, tsunami safe areas, transit instructions, prices for mechanical keyboards have English translations. But the frustration of seeing a really seemingly important sign and having to get my phone to help me out just leaves that impression.

I'm basically in a world of unreadable plaques. As I've mentioned my chronic addiction to plaques and reading them, you can imagine the frustration.

We do some laundry in the hotel laundry room. The whole yen conversion thing keeps my eyes from watering and realizing how much we are paying just to make sure we don't offend anyone on the local transit. 

Well, come to think of it, I think my upper limit for that convenience is pretty high. A Canadian not wanting to offend in the very polite Tokyo is like an ouroboros of etiquette from which, say, $20 dollars for a load of laundry would seem a DEAL. 

The laundry has built in soap dispenser. We can't figure out how it works, and to add tot he confusion the translation says we have to add soap? We trust our googling and just let the machine do it's thing. It's one of those odd things that remind you you're in an entirely different country. If the food and city lights and different language and lingering jetlag has somehow not clued you in.

We start the day off right, we are going to get Japanese pancakes. Which are super fluffy and I'm sure fed to one my kids through the Algorithm (yes I warn them about it, no I don't know how effective my warnings are, we are going to get Japanese pancakes, after all). It's the standard wandering around then realizing we are RIGHT there, but.. not right there, oh right it's 4 stories up. But not above a Uniqlo, so you can imagine our confusion.

We get by on the point and saying 'arigato gozaimasu', ALOT. This being western-ish food surrounded by western-ish decor it's not as fraught with awkwardness and the worry of Doing the Wrong Thing. How does someone with this much low-grade background anxiety travel? Er, when his partner insists, clearly.

 

It's a scorcher on the day (like, 24C, but the humidity brings that extra level of discomfort that can only really be found when travelling) we decide to huddle indoors and avoid the heat. I think my wife decides this, knowing my utter unsuitability for the outdoors or really any situation where the ambient climate does not match exactly a Rare Books Library Archive somewhere in Michigan at spring time.

We're around Ueno Station, so there are many many museums. Art Museums, Archaeology Museums, Cultural Museums? But we opt the the National Museum since that sounds, well, more.. more. 

I have a very vague notion of what's going to be there. Samurai things? Tea implements? I tell myself I should do really do deep and impressive research for every country I visit, and I can tell you , the intent is as undimmed as the first time we ever travelled anywhere. Undimmed and unfulfilled, a byline of my autobiography if ever there was one. (hm, maybe also "A little too warm, are you sure it's only Spring", "Dad bod since 13", "A Life History if the Insurance Program From Tron Was a Human Man", "Vaguely unfit for most things", "But I Digress").

In anycase, the Tokyo National Museum.

We first wander into the Asian artifacts, I think;  I'm butchering this. But it's the equivalent of all the UK museum of Anthropology, aka Things We Got From Imperialism and Refuse to Return. Buddha figures from China. Hmmm. No date on when it was acquired but we'll just gloss over it. There is a group of Chinese tourists and they seem pretty chill about the whole thing so maybe it's fine?

Tracing Buddhism, as an initially Indian religion and then as it morphs and changes across Asia is pretty cool. The intermingling of cultures and how countries influence each other over hundreds of years is fascinating. Although we all seem to subscribe to countries as monolithic, sovereign entities that sprouted whole made from the ground, Anthropology has other opinions.

Buddhism, as idea; an idea that propagates and strives to keep itself alive over time and geography (you know, the original definition of the word meme) was initially very strong in Japan. But around 1000 AD some noble got the idea that end days were coming and we better hide away ideas (sutras) in mounds. And I guess the whole 'we are all gonna die' maybe put a damper on Buddhism, and I suppose that's why Shintoism got a stronger hold after that. But then the idea and flavour of Buddhism was, well, confusing. There are gods, some that come from India, some that come from other Japanese traditions. I'm sure I'd have to get at least a continuing education certificate to get the merest inkling of how it all fits together.

The next area was just straight up archaeology, covering all the way from the Paleolithic to the Edo period. As much as I love plaques I could only get through 4 of the 16 sections. 

What struck me is how Japan, as a country was influenced by China, having envoys and religious ideas pass back and forth.

I'm sure there are very good museum curatory
reasons to not have the super cool handle on the
blade, but it just looks odd.

We made it to what I think all dad's look for, the Samurai room. They had really ancient blades on display, as well as a blade made by the first master swordsmith who figured out that wavey kinda pattern on the edge of the blade technique (this is actually from super high heat tempering). What was interesting is that up close, it's far more uneven and looks like, well, flames were put the blade, which makes sense. But all those movies and cartoons make that wavey edge look too uniform and pretty. What else could movies possibly be lying to me about.

This was a display of ceramics. Specifically ceramics that came about because China due to some military pressures, moved all their pottery and ceramics from the ports, so it was much more difficult to get them. So Japanese pottery kind of took over. That's some super cool interconnectedness of history for ya. Alot of the ceramics at this time period were in the style of Chinese pottery, but had subtle Japanese touches. No, don't ask me what those are, I'm only here for the plaques.

This Buddhist deity is featured quite a bit. I don't retain any cool Plaque Facts! about him, except in every depictions I've seen of him, he has like a 26 pack. Abs on top of abs on top of abs plus a menacing expression are the keys to nirvana, apparently.

Ok, my only artsy fartsy photo, I promise. Looking up
from one of the atriums.

Right after, my daughter insisted we try takoyaki, which I think is basically, balls of squid with sauce? It was amongst an array of things we had tried at different times due to her urging. The day was hot, and sticky and in no way resembling a well air-conditioned second hand book store int he fall, we were tired, but yeah, hot balls of fried seafood!? Let's go for it. 

Luckily outside the museum was the cutest food truck in existence. 

We tried some, I enjoyed them. But maybe they were too cephalopody and soft for my kid's taste. But I grew up eating dim sum. Unnameable balls of umami are what I'm all about. Overall consensus from the family was "That was interesting". Eating by Instagram is a strategy fraught with peril.

In EXISTENCE.

After that we are off to eat at one of those ramen places where you have a tiny cubicle and never have to interact with anyone. An introverts dream. This is apparently the dream of many other lunch goers as there is a long, snaking line, in the somewhat intolerable heat. Enough to get this nerd into the familiar muck sweat.

Much sweat, the slowest of lines, legs sore from the walking the museum, this really does call for some hot, rich broth and noodles. We apparently do not take the weather into account for our eating habits.

Ichiran, is the place, and I use Google translate to read their little spiel they have in every cubicle. They are very secretive, this is the best broth ever, and no one person knows how it all fits together. As a wall of text to hype you about the food, this was pretty good. And the food was good too, I'm not an expert in food.. things. But yeah, great ramen, minimal interaction.

The funny thing was there was a light board that indicated what seats were available and which were occupied. Further decreasing the need for any human contact at all. But it was clearly on the fritz, and maybe had been for years/decades. 

The Japanese need to have eating arrangements while avoiding any unnecessary human contact predates touchscreens, apparently. This looks like it was made around the time people thought disco was a pretty good idea.

But in what I can only assume is a manifestation of a mini-cargo cult, the server would constantly check it to tell them, uh, I guess that it was still broken? Lights flashed off and on and there was no pattern. Folks at seats had blinking green lights, lights, no lights, red lights. But the server would always check the board ("nope, day 89519 and still broken"), then check the seats, THEN sit people down. It was baffling but maybe it was just part of the workflow. Time honoured work flow. From the time of stagflation, the OPEC oil crisis, and a group hallucination in which everyone thought John Travolta pointing at the sky while his hips went in another direction was dancing.

It makes me wonder if there was a senior worker there who insists that everyone check that chaotic board of non-information before seating anyone. And during training days, he'd catch them and ream them out when they only checked the seats, and not the Flickering Lights 5000. Then he'd comb back his sideburns, fix his butterfly collar, and call it quits for the night to go to a nightclub called Disco ForEVER whose patrons had dwindled over the years to the  owner, a flea bitten stray cat, and 82 year old twin sisters who always confused the dance hall for a flower shop that had closed down 30 years ago.

After that we headed back to the hotel to chill out, have some screen time, and prepare for TeamLabs Planet.

The train took us through more open parts of Tokyo and we saw all manner of extremely cyberpunk buildings. Now I realize saying that is backwards, since cyberpunk and that entire genre got it's aesthetic clues from Japan, and not the other way around, but you get what I'm saying.

This was one of the coolest train rides for us Japan, since it showed us all the really wide open parts of Tokyo, with all it's baffling and rad looking buildings

Maximum Cyberpunk (I think it's a convention
centre)

Definitely not a place where they train cybernetically enhanced vultures to 
harvest the ND 327450 matrix core from fallen Mecha Hunter V2 off of
Orions belt.

Team labs is an experiential art museum with lots of cool interactive large art installations. It was cool, but also, a Gram Trap? Is that a thing. It totally was that. It had the indefinable sturdiness of an experience that was engineered to usher in thousands and thousands of people through it every day. That quality you feel when going to a really well run theme park comes to mind. 

This looks super cool in
a photo, most boring IRL.

Me reading the Oh God This Makes Me Feel Dumb
Artist statement. In so many languages, but no code.

The artists statements were long and mostly inscrutable but did have fun things to say. Again, not an artist, or a critic. I think real art snobs would likely hold their noses up at it. But it was fun for me and my family. I'm not sure if it lead to any deep feelings or thoughts. Except for a lot of installations mentioned they used software to say, emulate the movement of koi that would do some collision detection with visitors in the water and all I could think was "show us the source code, cowards". 

It seemed to be a bit of a tourist attraction/trap, as that was the highest concentration of tourists we had ever seen in one place. Maybe all the locals have already tried it, or gotten wise, or would rather avoid any enclosed space looking at bright lights being surrounded by tourists. That seems a reasonable take. 

After a few hours, we are done done done.

We are all wrapped up, absolutely tired out, but we gotta eat. Our daughter is tasked with finding some place to eat. All me and my wife can think is, 'no more ramen'. She finds us some place with bar food and various fried things.

Wee wander through, now that I'm looking at the pictures again, REALLY crowded streets near Ueno. Restaurants on top of restaurants inside bars on top of wagyu eateries besides grocery stores. At some point while visiting this seems pretty normal.

Thing is, we haven't eaten at alot of restaurants, it's always a bit daunting. Tokyo being so vast, there isn't many places where there are only tourists, so restaurants are not specifically geared towards tourists waltzing in and mangling their language or pointing menus like cave people. But that's what you have to do, point and hope the staff are patient with you. Which has always been the case. But what between my anxiety about offending and my general Canadian-ness plus with a healthy layer of nerd, well, it's, how do you say, character building.

However, the place we find is in an area with tons and tons of little eateries and restaurants and dive bars. And the one we picked in particular, is more a dive bar vibe. No English anywhere. It has that grimed in lived in look of a spot that's the favourite of locals, probably the kind of place that has a smoking and non smoking section but the non-smoking section is more of a suggestion than anything. 

We drift to loitering stop outside. We are daunted.  I'm thinking "uh oh, another day eating egg sandwiches and onigiri from the local corner store". My daughter got us there, but then urges me forward, this is my thing, apparently. It helps that I always just surge forward like this is the most natural thing in the world. Fake it until you make it indeed. Or fake it until you are full of karaage, is my take.

Well, courage is a thing I'm trying to cultivate. Which I figure only happens when I'm scared/awkward/uncertain. Which well, yeah, I was all three at least. I just square the shoulders and walk in.

This is a burger. Technically correct.

The server at the front looks only mildly surprised at our appearance, clear tourists. And then he, I kid you not, asks us smoking or non-smoking. Actually, he kind of makes a sketchy motion towards his face like he's taking a puff then nods yes or no. 

Perfunctory lobby at the front that has 3 tables it is, then. 

KARAAGE. Yes, 
I do feel this needs to
be yelled like I am charging
into battle.

Luckily, this restaurant seems to suffer from the same aversion to any human contact that the ramen place does, and he motions toward a QR code. No need to bumble through the 10 or so words I kind of know in Japanese, then. 

The place turns out to be super friendly and the food is great. Bar food, little fried croquettes, karaage, the kids order burgers because of course they do. But this is just a hamburger patty on a hot plate, but they seem happy. The other food was suitably delicious and bar foody.

 It was a great end to the day, which left us notably undimmed and fulfilled.