31. Japan Day 3

Team Lab Borderless building

Today we started out at Team Lab Borderless. This is an interactive place with several rooms where they project things on the walls and you can interact with them. For example, when streams of light flow, they will shift around you if stand still, either on the ground or leaning against a wall. Some things don’t react, but I sadly discovered that if I touched the butterflies or some of the leaves they fell and died (I stopped doing that as it felt very wrong). There is the main room (see video below) and then several smaller rooms. My favorite was the one with led lights from floor to ceiling that you had to wind your way through to the main room where half the room was open with mirrors on the floors, walls, and ceiling to reflect the light show. You could also choose which displays were coming.

Team Lab Borderless is actually painted on the walls at angles. the e and o are on two different walls

Julia and I at entrance of Team Borderless

Julia in main room

blackness fades around your body

Gaelle in Main room

my favorite led string light room

my turtle and Poppys jellyfish

My other favorite (which took a long time to find) was the one where you could draw an aquatic animal then they scan it and drop it into the “aquarium” where it animates, swimming around. My turtle left and went to other rooms but when I returned later it was back and I got some pictures with it! Gaelle’s daughter Poppy is a very good artist who drew a beautiful jellyfish. Other cool rooms included one with balls with changing led lights inside that rolled around on tracks. Some rolled by as we were drawing sea animals on the way to “their room” so I knew to ask directions from the workers there. In another room similar balls were suspended from the ceiling. Sometimes rooms were cooler or less cool depending on what was happening at the time. Natalie and Julia were blown away by the lilypad room which I wasn’t impressed with.

sea animals you draw move! Poppys jellyfish changing in about 1 second

me levitating a ball! jk

Hanging balls room

My A turtle swimming with others

room with balls rolling along tracks

Natalie and Yuri at Meguro River Cherry Blossom Promenade

Natalie’s friend Yuri met us afterwards and we went to see more sakuras at the nearby Maguro River. Every year people (mostly Japanese) come here to see the Cherry Blossom trees lining this section of the river. Several traffic police direct traffic outside the train station and keep people moving on the bridge nearby. Here is another impressive example of Japanese efficiency (there is another one later today): Coming out of the station in the middle area, everyone wants to go to the bridge (on the far right side) and it is the opposite coming back (the crosswalk is on the outside and the station is on the inside). Typically Japanese walk on the left side of the road, but here they have traffic police directing people to move to the right so that they cross the street without having to move across the crowd going in the opposite direction! At first I was confused why they were shifting us all, but then it made perfect sense and was so logical!

The best view of Meguro River Cherry blossoms is from the train platform

many knives in kappabashi

From there we split up as Gaelle wanted more time there and the rest of us wanted to go to Kappabashi street to buy knives and kitchenware. We went to Koujin Knife shop where a very nice young man patiently showed us several knives. We learned about the different hardness levels with VG-10 being the “solid quality” level of hardness. Most of these were in the $70-160 range. Their higher level hardness was powdered steel (the top three levels in the picture) and cost $300+ so out of our range. Julia being the decisive one, bought this really nice knife that was slightly harder than VG-10 and left to do more shopping. We went to their sister store which had a different selection. I bought two knives there then Natalie, Yuri, and I returned to the first store to also buy knives identical to Julia’s.

Julia shopping on kappabashi Street

steel hardness levels for knives

preparing to tackle Kappabashi Street

Cute store in Asakusa

We all bid farewell as I wanted to explore the Ghibli store at the Sky Tower, Natalie and Yuri were going to get Natalie’s luggage as she was flying home, and Julia headed back to the hotel. On my way, outside of Asakusa Station was a pedestrian street with tons of shops so of course I stopped there and bought more pokemon, kitkats (they had the elusive gold ones I was looking for and at better prices), and spy family stuff for my friend.

Asakusa pedestrian walkway

delicious pie and not delicious coffee ice cream drink

The McDonald’s here are better. First off, as my cousin Norm tipped me, the apple pies are deep fried as they used to be in the US (and still are at Jollibee, yum!). Of course I had to try one in Asakusa which was delicious, along with some iced coffee with ice cream drink that sounded sweet but wasn’t! Anyways, another way they are better is their garbage: There is a place for paper/compostables and one for plastic cups, but along with that is a sink to dump your drink remains, and I had A LOT of remains from that iced coffee thing. You can’t throw away stuff on the street as there are no garbage cans. Each vendor is “responsible” for what they sell so luckily at skytree I found another McDonalds where I could toss the trash and dump the unwanted coffee drink. They also have little sinks near the pickup area so you can wash your hands before eating, very clean 😊

McDonald's liquid dump

Finally found the Ghibli store!

Ghibli store

At Skytree I had trouble finding the Ghibli store so I first found the Skytree entrance and learned that the lines were not 2 hours long as we had heard previously. In fact, I could get tickets for as soon as 45 minutes. I called Julia and we got tickets for 8:30 which gave her 75 minutes to get there. I took almost all that time to find the store (Google maps is not very helpful when you have several floors) and get my shopping done. When Julia learned that I have NEVER seen a Ghibli movie, she instantly put one on to watch during our last Japan planning session. Clearly I will need to watch several more as they sometimes feature cats and now I’ve also taken a picture of me with a giant Totoro!

Giant Totoro at the Ghibli store

The Japanese once again showed their amazing efficiency at the Skytree. We showed our time ticket to allow us in line for the elevators. Once in line, they sent people in groups of about 25 to one of their 3 elevators when it was close to being ready. They loaded us on the 4th floor but had unloaded passengers on the 5th floor. We disembarked at the 350m floor but to go down, they pick you up 2 floors below. That eliminates any inefficient cross traffic.

view from sky tree

View looking straight down from 350m at Skytree

The view was indeed incredible as we had been told. The lights of the city really can’t be captured well on my phone, but they were so cool! I loved all the nifty bridges they have with different designs and colored lights. They also had a walkway where you could look down to the ground. There were two floors of glass so if for some reason this floor failed you would only fall to the next floor.

the sky tree from the ground

We got home with no incidents. After 2 full days in Japan we were learning more and more about the system.