Tokyo, day 3

The morning

Today, I have a plan: I actually booked one thing in Tokyo, and that is teamLabs Planets, where I have a ticket to enter at 1PM. So I decide to spend the morning in the same neighbourhood, and after buying some onigiri from 7-Eleven for breakfast (my go-to choices are tuna mayo and pickled plum), I decide to head to small worlds.

The way there isn't the most straight forward, but it's not too bad either: take a metro, change to another metro, then take a different line that is kind of a scenic monorail. I had some trouble yesterday, but surely this time it will be fine.

Of course, it wasn't fine: each entrance has a single machine accepting Visa cards, and the one I went to is in maintenance... I have to get out, find a different entrance, and by the time I do that of course the maintenance is done on the first one.

And this is just the first problem: when I get to the second metro, I have to exit and enter from a different entrance, and this time my card straight up doesn't work. I had to call for assistance (and wait for them to arrive), just for him to explain that the metros don't actually have Visa card readers, only their local ones, and that I have to buy a ticket. Apparently, the Visa readers are only implemented for trains. Huh? The first metro was from the same company, so how did I get in that time?

Since the metro rides took me forever, I don't think I have time to visit small worlds and have lunch before going to TeamLabs Planets, so I decide to change my plans, and start with a walk around the Toyosu shores, followed by lunch at the Toyosu market.

The Toyosu market is where fish auctions are done every morning, so the fish sold there is guaranteed to be fresh. I go to a sushi place, and order sashimi, with their umeshu and extra sea urchin sashimi. The sashimi bowl was good, I think the sea urchin extra was overpriced (if I had seen the price, I would have probably gone for a single sea urchin sushi instead).

I then go visit the fish auction house, but it is obviously too late: the auctions happen in the morning. They are actually just done cleaning up for the day, so now the site is just an empty warehouse.

teamLab Planets

teamLab Planets is "a museum where you walk through water", according to their website. Essentially, it is a series of rooms with interactive art, decomposed into 3 sections: water, forest and garden.

In the water section, we are asked to remove our shoes and continue bare footed, because we will have to go through... you guessed it, water.

The first portion makes us go up a slope with water flowing on our feet, on top of which there is an illuminated waterfall. After that, we can dry our feet in a room dedicated for it with lots of towels, and texts explaining the art, reminding us that it is Intentional Art, and not just for fun. Something about the waterfall actually being a beam of light, because the only light source is reflected from the droplets, so we don't actually see water but just light...

The next room has a mushy, uneven ground, and is supposed to represent gravity, because when someone walks close to you you'll feel their weight through the mushy ground. I was basically alone in that room though, so that didn't work very well...

After that was a dark corridor with different textures on the ground. This one was actually pretty cool, we could only feel it like that because we were asked to take our shoes off, and we usually feel textures with our hands, not our feet, so I found it well thought.

The next room was beautiful: a lot of LED strips, in a room with mirrors on all walls, the floor and the ceiling. It looked pretty chaotic when walking through it, but when sitting in a specific corner, we could see shapes and animations, brought by pointillisme, that were decided by people using the app from teamLabs.

After another corrider with textured ground, there was the fish pond: cloudy water at knee level, with projections of koi fish, that tries to avoid the people in the room. When you hit a fish, it explodes into an ink splash that then blooms into flowers. This is all brought by real-time computer graphics, like many other art expositions there, which makes it a very interactive experience. I spent way too long just running after fishes and seeing how they would react, it was very fun. Apparently, the flowers that fish burst into depend on the season, which is a nice touch.

Then there was a room with big balls, that are supposed to emit a specific color and sound. The color changes for all balls in the room though, and the sound doesn't exactly come from the ball itself but it's more of a diffuse sound around the room, which made it kinda meh. I think it would have been a lot more fun with sound coming from the ball itself, and a delay for the color spread based on where the balls are in the room.

Finally, the water section ended with a big room with projections of flowers, kind of like a planetarium but instead of showing star related animations it was just flowers blooming and going all across the room. Similarly to the fish pond, the flowers were seasonal.

The forest section started with a room with moss and some shiny blobs. Even after reading the explanation, I didn't understand what that was about...

The rest of the forest section was set in dark rooms with fluorescent projections on the walls. A lot of them were interactive: in one room, you could draw things that little gnomes would jump on, or move cubes that sprouted mushrooms and ladders for the gnomes.

In another section, they had a city landscape, and you could draw a plane, or a whale, or a bird, scan it, and pilot it through that city using their app.

They also had a bunch of obstacle courses, some were interactive, others less so.

The last part of the forest section was a large forest, with animals. You could catch them through their app, by pointing your camera at an animal, or release them somewhere else, and the more animals you caught the more details you had about the ones you caught.

The garden section was the most boring one. It is a large room with plenty of orchids, set on a mechanism that goes up when people walk nearby, allowing paths to form based on where people go. The orchids were nice, but the system was sooo slow, in order to go forward a few meters you basically had to wait minutes for the orchids to go up. That made it especially annoying when I was at the end of the room and wanted to go back...

Overall, teamLab Planets was pretty fun, I enjoyed how interactive it was and thought that some of the expositions were very creative.

small worlds

small worlds is the largest miniatures museum in Asia, with around 7,000 m² of exhibitions.

The tour of the museum starts in the space center area, that contains small replicas of well known spaceships as well as imaginary ones, including a space station on the moon and some anime inspired ships.

The miniatures are placed on tables that have buttons on the side, allowing visitors to trigger animations. Some of them are very simple, just turning on an LED and rotating a piece, while others are a lot more advanced, including a spaceship liftoff, with sound and smoke!

Next is the global village area, containing multiple fantasy inspired cities, also interactive. The level of details is impressive, it's not just the outer layers but things inside the buildings as well that are modeled.

Next is the creators gallery, containing smaller sets that are for sale. Even though they are smaller, some of them must have taken weeks, if not months, to complete.

Next is the Kansai International Airport area, that includes planes lifting off and landing. It is also a rest area, with a lounge using the same sofas as the actual Kansai International Airport (those are not miniature, so we can actually use them).

A big part of the museum is dedicated to Evangelion, the anime. I've never watched it, so I didn't find that part very interesting, but I am sure that a fan would love to be able to see Tokyo-III open up and the mecha suits get ready for use from the hangar.

They also have a section where you can have a 3D print of yourself, and turn yourself into a miniature figurine. For a chonky fee, you can even be added to your favourite scene for a while! The shipping fee to Denmark was too high, and I didn't want to translate all their terms and conditions to see if they are respectfully using the scan only to create the figuring, so I didn't do it.

Finally, we can go through their studio, seeing them work on new pieces, and they also organize workshops so people can create miniatures too. I spent too long admiring everything else, so they were already done with their day.

There is another floor with a cafe, that has a few more miniatures, but nothing very interesting compared to the main scenes.

They had some very cool things in the shop, including some miniature puzzles made of wood, that didn't take a lot of space, so I considered buying one, but in the end decided against it because I'm not sure it would have survived the rest of my journey...

Dinner

For dinner, I decided to have tempura.

I found a restaurant that looked really good on Google Maps, unfortunately it was a bit too good: they were fully booked for the day, and of course I did not have a reservation.

Instead, I went to another small tempura restaurant, not too far from the first one. I was alone, so the chef and the waitress had all their attention on me.

I ordered a tempura set and umeshu. The plum wine arrived first, served in a delicate glass with decorations, along with a gelee with fish skin in it (I think), and a sort of paste of crab and spinach, or some other leafy green. The umeshu was really good, the small appetizers with it didn't look the most appetizing but they complemented it will.

After I finished my glass, the chef started frying, serving the dishes one at a time: shrimp legs, squid, aspargus, crab, mushroom, onion and eggplant, usually coming in pair, with soy sauce with horseradish on one side and rock salt on the other side. The chef told me that horseradish was supposed to be mixed with the soy sauce, but the rock salt should be kept separate. Because it was served one at a time and they were focused on me, I did not take any picture of that part...

Finally, the main part came, with shrimps fried all together then dipped in sauce, on top of rice, with miso soup on the side.

During the meal, the waitress also offered me some hojicha tea, and the dinner was closed with a vanilla ice cream as well. I don't think those were part of the menu, but they didn't charge me for them.

I then headed back to the hotel, full and satisfied.