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<\/a>\nI also caught the very end of some sort of procession featuring senior citizens with flowers on their heads.<\/p>\n
My route continued through a graveyard, where I was able to (though a fence) photograph the grave of the last shogun, Tokugawa Yoshinobu.<\/p>\n Once I entered the grounds, I spent all of my time in the “Japanese Gallery” of the museum. Visiting all of the buildings would take at LEAST two days to give the entire museum its due.\u00a0 Surprisingly, almost everything in the museum can be photographed.\u00a0 Here’s some samples.<\/p>\n The Imperial Palanquin<\/p><\/div>\n This frog has seen things…<\/p><\/div>\n This crabs on this bowl are all one piece with the bowl itself.<\/p>\n And as an interactive exhibit on the way out, visitors could make their own Ukiyo-e wood block prints.\u00a0 Ukiyo-e is a distinctive Japanese style of color woodblock printing, where each color is applied to a carved block which is then applied to the final image one at a time.\u00a0 When you think about Japanese visual art, you are very likely thinking of this style of printing.<\/p>\n Here’s a stunning one from the museum.<\/p>\n At this point, it was lunch time, so I wandered out of the museum and toward the shouting and music I heard from further into the park.<\/p>\n When later describing to Leigh what happened next, I opened with “The nice Australian man said the blue beer was delicious, but I shouldn’t have listened to him.”<\/p>\n There was a beer festival going on, familiar in a lot of ways from any similar festival in North America.\u00a0 Tourists who could show their passport got in free. Dozens of tents selling beer and food on sticks.<\/p>\n The entertainment was wannabe idol groups, mostly set on proving unambiguously that they did not have the aid of Autotune.<\/p>\n And there was blue beer.\u00a0 It was not good, no matter what the nice Australian man said. I honestly don’t know what I was expecting.<\/p>\n The park contains lots of other stuff, like a memorial to that time Ulysses S. Grant planted a tree.<\/p>\n There’s also a shrine dedicated to the FIRST Tokugawa shogun, coming full circle from the gravesite earlier.<\/p>\n Before we get to that, a quick note on Takadanobaba.\u00a0 Every train station in Tokyo plays a little jingle to announce the train doors are closing.\u00a0 At the subway stops, the jingles are all unique, but that’s not necessarily the case for the above-ground rail lines.<\/p>\n However, it’s DEFINITELY the case for the Takadanobaba stop on the Yamanote line, which plays the theme to “Astro Boy.”\u00a0 Apparently Astro Boy was actually based in the neighborhood.\u00a0 There’s a big mural under the train tracks that I didn’t photograph because there were a bunch of protesters in front of it.\u00a0 What were they protesting?\u00a0 No idea, my rudimentary Japanese only sufficed to determine that they were not professing a desire to be taken to the train station.\u00a0 That would have been silly anyway, considering they were directly under it.<\/p>\n But not taking pictures of murals is NOT the stressful thing I had in mind.\u00a0 Rather, as someone with a whopping year and a half of jazz piano lessons under my belt, I somehow thought it would be a good idea to go to a jam session.\u00a0 In Tokyo.<\/p>\n Not to bury the lead, the experience WAS pretty cool.\u00a0 The place was tiny, and the owner bounced back and forth between playing saxophone with the house band and tending bar.\u00a0 If you wanted to play, you put your name down on a list, and after the house band’s set, they started calling people up to play.<\/p>\n I was paired with a local on drums, and three other Americans, two of whom were friends and colleagues of Leigh’s that she had brought with her from the conference.<\/p>\n So… yeah.\u00a0 That happened.\u00a0 We played Corcovado. Leigh’s friends were amazing, and I am informed that I did not humiliate myself TOO badly.\u00a0 And the bass player rapped “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air” instead of taking a solo.\u00a0 That happened too.<\/p>\n The second time I got called up didn’t go as well, but the fact that I was even able to force myself to give it a go at all is something I’m proud of.<\/p>\n Afterwards, the three of us and Leigh went and got ramen.<\/p>\n On Sunday, Leigh had another full day of conference stuff to attend to, so I was once again left to my own devices.\u00a0 I planned to spend some more time in Ueno Park, particularly at the Tokyo National Museum, but … Continue reading <\/a>
\nFrom there, I started making my way towards Ueno.\u00a0 I passed this, and was absolutely baffled.<\/p>\n<\/a>
\nWhy is there a stone sculpture of what appears to be a cartoon character in front of what appears to be a Buddhist temple?\u00a0 After-the-fact research seems to indicate that that is “Baikinman<\/a>“, the villain from the “Germ Planet” and leader of the Viruses. And the Buddhist temple may also be a kindergarten?\u00a0 I’m really not any less confused.<\/p>\n<\/a>
\nMoving on, I had timed my trip to arrive at the Tokyo National Museum just about as it was opening.\u00a0 The museum grounds are enormous, and consist of quite a few buildings.\u00a0 This “black gate” is one of two remaining Edo period gates in Tokyo.<\/p>\n<\/a>
\nPlus, “The Black Gate” sounds metal as hell.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/a><\/p>\n<\/a>
\nThe way the interactive one works is that you are given a blank piece of paper and there’s a series of stations with frames to hold the paper in place and a large rubber stamp.\u00a0 You stamp each color onto the paper, and voil\u00e0!<\/p>\n<\/a>
\nRemember, this page was BLANK when I started.\u00a0 Pretty nifty souvenir.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a>
\nAt this point, I was ready for a break (the heat had NOT magically abated, and I’d been doing a lot of walking), so I headed back to Ikebukuro to relax in the hotel for a bit before heading down to Takadanobaba to do probably the LEAST relaxing thing I had planned for the whole trip.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"