2002-08-09 - 10:31 a.m.
First of all, everyone please check out this website: www.engrish.com and see what I'm dealing with here!!!
Post-Film Festival, I am doing my best to stay cool and fill my days here in Tokyo. Having opted not to take a post-JET vacation somewhere in Asia (too expensive), I find myself trying not to spend all the money I saved on $5 ice teas. I was quite thorough in doing all the Tokyo-area day trips over the past year, which means that now I have nowhere left to go! Since it's not exactly park-strolling weather here (upper 90s), I've had to be creative about finding air-conditioned places to hang out.
In Japan, as in America, climate controlled public space usually means commercial space. On Tuesday I went to the enormous Sunshine 60 complex in Ikebukuro. I took an elevator (operated by a woman in a pastel plaid dress, pumps, white gloves and straw hat) up to the eleventh floor which houses a planetarium and an aquarium. The voice over narrating the planetarium show referred to the constellations as "kawaii" ("cute") and the kids in the audience applauded the first time the starry sky appeared. The aquarium featured the very scary "Japanese Giant Spider Crab," which will be on my mind when I go to the beach with Rena on Sunday. Imagine your average American crab, blow it up so the diameter from pincher to pincher is four feet, then shrink the body and make the legs really long and skinny. Yikes! I just read in the paper that this aquarium has a special "Night Aquarium" event where at six o'clock they turn out all the lights and kids wander around peering into the tanks with flashlights. I imagine this is very scary for the fish.
After seeing stars and sea creatures, I strolled around the enormous mall for awhile. It almost looked like an American mall except for the things that were distinctly Japanese. Mannequins wearing bikinis stood next to mannequins wearing summer kimonos. There was a whole store devoted to selling "special edition" Hello Kitty goods from around Japan (Hiroshima Hello Kitty whose face is in the middle of a maple leaf; Izu Hello Kitty, holding a piece of wasabi root, etc.). Another store featured some of Japan's more unique and less exportable cartoon characters like Koge Paan, whose head is a burned roll with smoke rising from it, and Tomotoro-chan, a friendly tomato who lives (where else) in a can.
On Wednesday, determined not to shop, I headed to a local public library. It was like Vassar at exam time -- totally packed, with people circling to find seats. There were a lot of twenty-somethings who I would guess were probably "arbeito" "part-time workers" trying to find a cool place to read on a day off; some men in suits -- I wondered if they were the people I'd read about, laid off but secretly going to the library instead of the office rather than telling their wives the truth; and a smattering of homeless men, catching up on sleep while holding a book. Not surprisingly, I was the only foreigner in the whole place. At lunch time I went to a make-your-own bento place and brought my lunch back to the library basement, where I'd seen people eating earlier. Five rows of benches were set up in front of a big screen TV, which was showing "The Karate Kid" subtitled in Japanese. Watching were about a dozen men, who I guessed were either unemployed or retired. With a "what the heck," I took the only free seat right in the middle of them and ate my lunch. Girls in leotards and tutus passed by in droves, making their way to the basement dance studio. As conspicuous as I felt, no one seemed to bat an eyelash at me. The volume on the TV was pretty low, so I don't think anyone could hear Pat Morita's hideously fake Japanese accent.
Yesterday I went to the Tokyo Metropolitan Photography Museum, which is housed in the brand-spankin-new Ebisu Garden Place complex. Connected to Ebisu Station by about a half mile of glass and steel elevated walkway, this complex contains not only the museum but a mall, a hotel, a trillion restaurants, and a "garden-in-the-city," about as natural a garden as any shopping mall's fountain plaza, but without the roof. This place had a very "high class" feel about it. Unlike most shopping complexes it wasn't overrun with teenage girls, but rather with well-heeled young women who looked like they had money to spend. Private security guards were stationed around the perimeter of the "garden," and I got the feeling that a transient looking for a nap there would be quickly ushered out. Though in Japan there are approximately 10 vending machines per capita, mostly selling drinks and cigarettes, at Ebisu Garden Place the only vending machine I saw was dispensing fresh-cut flower bouquets, ranging from $25-$70.
But you want to know something weird? As notorious as Japan is for its strange vending machines (I've seen not only flowers but batteries, coffee in a can, corn soup in a can, hot rice balls, a few years back it was schoolgirls' used panties...) the one kind of vending machine you won't find is one dispensing junk food! I have never seen a vending machine dispensing chips or candy bars. I have no idea why.
