November 10th, 2005
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Stories old and new, foreign and domestic
Last Saturday Uezu-san and I got out to the Edo-Tokyo Museum in Ryogoku (which coincidentally is also the sumo-training capital of Japan). I’m a knowledge buff and an efficiency buff, so I spent a considerable amount of time in advance consulting with coworkers and pouring over the websites of just about every museum in the tri-prefecture area. In particular I was hoping to find something with a strong chronological stratification, as the engineer in me always works big to small, divide and conquer, etc. It seems that the Edo-Tokyo museum was the best choice in terms of content, funding, and proximity to where I live (there’s virtually no place in the heart of the city that I can’t reach in half an hour).
I’d read on a message board that to see everything would require two and a half to three hours, so I figured arriving at three would be just about right for closing at five-thirty. Unfortunately we drilled down a little too much, and I think that estimate was a bit too conservative. The upshot is that we got through a good amount of Edo (Tokyo’s former name before the Meiji-era) but not really much of Tokyo at all.
Around five o’clock, the curators started really pushing seeing some sort of animated display in one of the rooms of the “Tokyo Zone”, as it was the last showing of the day. It turned out to be some rudimentary lighting cues on scale model sections of Tokyo, with a voice-over and the corny kind of background noise to simulate the sounds of the bustling city at the time period. If you’ve been to Gettysburg or pretty much any Civil War museum, you may know what I mean. Little wooden characters move in one dimension along a track to bad quality audio. It’s funny how everyone crowded around to see the different dioramas as the story of some famous murder progressed. Maybe they were expecting more, or maybe it was really fascinating to them. I’d guess at the former. Campy yes, but the nostalgia sponged away any cynicism I may have harbored.
So after that we had fifteen minutes until closing, at which point I inadvertently directed us into the “Life in World War II” section of the Tokyo Zone. It was bad enough that I’d thrown us three hundred years into the future from where we were last looking around, but it made things additionally uncomfortable that we got to end the tour (consequently right before dinner) reading about the unrelenting mercy of the firebombing US military, and the ludicrous ignorance of the Japanese government. [Example: the local officials estimated that at most one bomb would fall per ward in a raid, and that the fires could be put out with buckets] Having read several books on the Pacific War, I already knew uncomfortably far more than I cared to about the inhuman suffering of the conflict.
But I hadn’t eaten yet that day so after the museum closed we went to a more or less Japanese cuisine specialty restaurant and had a large assortment of vegetables and soybean dishes. The fact that raw tuna is largely bloodless, at least compared to beef, helped.
At dinner Uezu-san ordered a ryokucha hai (green tea cocktail) for my benefit since I’d never seen one. It’s quite common for restaurants and pubs to serve Chinese oolong tea mixed with Japanese liquor, but I’d never seen it done with green tea before. It was pretty nice actually. I got a glass of awamori, which happens to be one of my favorite Japanese (Okinawan) liquors.
After supper we went to Shinjuku because it was easy for both of us to return home from. I introduced her to Dance Dance Revolution and Taiko no Tatsujin, since she is still new to the wonderful world of video games. We had a nice time and stopped at one of my favorite whiskey pubs, Cho, on the way to bowling. I received further self-indulgent affirmation for how young I looked when the bartender asked if we were college students, though it was probably due to the fact that I was wearing my Waseda University t-shirt. In the end I helped teach a blogging newcomer how to post content on the web. (Are you reading this? Sorry it’s in English! パブちょうさんは読んでますか。英語だから、ごめんね。^^;;)
After two earnest attempts at bowling, it was time to say good-bye as last trains were approaching. My bike was in the Hatusdai underground parking deck, left there from Thursday’s adventures, so I decided to pick up a couple of cans of cheap Asahi in Nishi Shinjuku and walk home along Koshu-kaido so I could go pick it up. Along the way I stopped at a famous adult entertainment store (largely because it had some attractive costumes and wigs in the front window), and was later distracted by an overhanging blue light. The significance of this event is probably lost on all but one very devoted aficionado. Unfortunately this time there were neither bored housewives, a dental office, or garbagemen masquerading as police. It did help correct my posture a little bit though. 
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