September 20, 2002
Wes Ehrlichman

September 20th to the 27 shall be known as Gaijin Week 2002. Gaijin means foreigner in Japanese, and this week I hung out with nothing but forigners. I flew to Tokyo on Friday Morning where I met Christina and Quinton, an ALT from Hokkaido, and on Monday Morning I left Tokyo and went to Japanese language camp in the middle of nowhere with ALTs from all over southern Japan.

On September 20th, I went to the Ghibli Museum with Christina and Quinton. It was an excellent time. The Ghibli Museum is a museum that celebrates the animation of Studio Ghibli, the most respected animation studio in Japan. Some of their Movies are Princess Mononoke, My Neighbor Totoro, and the highest grossing film in Japan's History, Spirited Away (which can be seen in some US theatres now).

Every part of the Museum's design is as amazing as a Ghibli film. Quinton read somewhere that the museum was designed so that it would be more fun to be alone in it than with other people. I definatley think they succeeded. When you go in you feel like you're the only person there despite the fact that tickets were sold out. Part of this design though restricts you from taking pictures in the museum, so all of my pictures are taken either in front of it or on the roof. You'll see that when you scroll down though.

My favorite room was one that consisted of several small exhibits explaining the semantics of animation. In the center was an animated 3-D scene. It was animated using several small models that were set up concurrently on a round base that spun around. A strobe light was then shone on the models so that every individual model consisted of a frame of animation. If I'm not explaining this well, just look at the picture below that I got from a magazine.

Yeah, so go to the Ghibli Museum if you ever have the chance.

After leaving the museum we headed to Shibuya and went to a cool arcade. It was fun, but the part we were in seemed to have a porn store on every corner and a lot of bars. They had an arcade though, so we spent the rest of the night in the arcade. When we got home we walked around for about an hour and a half looking for Quinton's hotel. We finally just got a cab and he took us there. Japan's streets are so messed up, and it's a lot worse in Tokyo where there's actually stuff to do. Here are some pictures from the first day.

Christina and me are on the left, and Quinton is on the right.

This is the first thing I saw when I got there.

I hid behind a wall so the guard couldn't see me take this picture.

This big robotic statue is from the Ghibli movie Laputa. It comes out on DVD here for the first time on Oct 4th!

This is an artifact that's hidden down an unmarked path on the roof. We took pictures just to prove that we found it.

From the top of the museum you can see everything.

On the way back from the museum we saw this barber shop with a life size Darth Maul from Star Wars in front of it. It made no sense at all so I took a picture.

In Shibuya station there's a store called ranKing ranQueen. People rate various things all day and whatever the top 5 items are get sold in this store. For example there were five different flavors of Pocky candy and they were placed in the store vertically with the most popular flavor on the top and the least popular on the bottom (In case you're wondering, original Pocky is the most popular, followed by Strawberry, with Men's Pocky in a close third).

More Shibuya.