Adventures in Japan

Is It Day 20 Yet? It Should Be: Tokyo

Yup. We're in the biggest city this small island nation has to offer. Tokyo.

And to start the Tokyo leg of our journey with a bang, we started off our first full day in town with a tour to the Ghibli Museum. Studio Ghibli is a world famous animation studio. It has won an Academy Award or two. What I like about Ghibli films, other than the fact that they are gorgeous, is that they don't focus on childish humour, they focus on a childish sense of wonder.


The museum has a somewhat similar approach. No rides, no people in costumes, just the magic of animation. Just exploration of a very interesting building and its surrounding grounds. And a crapload of kids. Seriously. So many kids.

It was a bit of effort getting to the museum. It was a bit of effort getting the tickets in the first place. You see Theo, you have to buy your tickets in advance. From a convenience store. In crazy moon language. No worries though, Carla had printed off step by step instructions on how to buy the tickets. Conveniently, some extra, stupid steps had been added to the ticket buying process sometime after Carla printed off our instructions. We muddled through somehow, and bought our tickets.

That was a few weeks ago, the buying of the tickets.

When you buy the tickets, you also book your time. We had to show up at the museum at 10 in the morning, because that is when our tickets were for. We were there, at the entrance to the park at ten with no problems. And no tickets. We had forgotten them back in our room. The park attendant told us we could get in later in the day if we went and got our tickets. So we did. That was a lot of wasted time on trains.

If I were to be mean, I would say that the whole thing was a waste of time. But it wasn't. But I was tempted to say it. We thought that since we had to specify what time we wanted to visit the park, that there would be a limit to how many people were in the park at once. That there would be some semblance of order. Nope. No order. Just kids.


Which is to be expected, and we did expect kids. We just didn't expect so many. It made it hard to stand and appreciate the art, everyone else was just trying to shuffle their kids through, keep 'em movin, keep 'em happy.

And there was a lot to stand and appreciate. Rooms of sketches, storyboards, background paintings, albums of reference photos. A billion and one different colours of paint. Just wish we could have soaked instead of skimmed.

Here's how busy it was: the line up to get into the cafe had a line. Yeah. We didn't spend as much time in there as we had expected to. But we didn't leave cranky because one of the last things we did before we left the museum was watch one of their short films. Adorable.