another late night bargain grab 225 yen ($2.46) i'm gonna stop pretending like 100 yen equals $1 like everyone else has been for a long time, it simply isn't so anymore and it does make a big difference so im gonna start quoting the real price, yes it will deflate everyones balloon a little bit but the truth will set you freeeeee.
guy playing tunes on a saw in front of one of the museums at ueno koen. maybe it was the modern musuem. it is an eerie sound and just down right weird, but its was some how a beautiful sound though. anyway if dude really wanted to move units or make change he picked a horrible spot, he gets probably about 20 old ladies per hr in this spot on a tuesday afternoon at this obscure museum that no one goes to or wants to pay for. anyway museums suck here because you have to pay like 700 yen or watever the cost is for each section of the museum. so if you want to see the new watever exhibit, 700 yen, want to see the regular premanent collection? 700 more yen. so wack. it was a turn off and made me and my friend Fumiko from my illustration class at FIT go elsewhere, where we ended up paying into the same scheme at the edo tokyo museum further across town. sigghhhhhh.
we had to walk through akihabara to get to the other museum. akihabara is geek anime/electronics/video games/etc... town.
liked the signage
these guys are a dime a dozen in beijing cuz you can actually make just enough to live if you hustle every day. this is the 1st i've seen in tokyo and it was allllll the way on the east side in old town
looks like a bunch of river/canal dinner cruise boats. would be cool to do this. looked like the cheapest was 7300 yen ($80) including a tempura dinner.
we crossed over this bridge, it did not look as cools as this old woodblock print art.
monjayaki place. like okonomiyaki (japanese pancake things with stuff inside) only this is the one you eat with those little spatula spoons. i posted this before in the summer.
semi vertical bike racks
inside the edo toko museum permanant exhibit. worth it. the special exhibit is wat i came for. it featured ukiyo-e woodblock shin hanga prints(new era) from like 1915 to 1945 or further maybe even. anyway two of my fav guys were represented here, kawasi hasui and yoshida hiroshi so it was awesome and we spent like 1.5 hrs looking at it all. i discovered hashiguchi goyo who i also am a fan of now. so anyone who is a art fan check these 3 guys out!
all of japanese old stuff jammed onto one wall thing
awesome samurai armor. check out the parying mantis headpiece! I'm in love with samurai armor now after i had to reasearch them a lot to illustrate them in my Yahoo! japan themed illustration.
awesome weird and inspiring artwork showing the fire dept in old tokyo they would fluff that mop like thing below up in the air and march to the scene of the fire. yes they could be carrying water instead but where would the pomp and grandeur be? at least there weren't rival fire dept crews so everyone would end up fighting over who gets the fire resulting in buildings burning to the ground like in old NYC.
the cool thing about the edo tokyo premanant exhibit is there were a lot of hands on stations, like they had one of these that you could lift, not super heavy but def would suck to carry it for longer than 5 min. they also had a pole with two buckets of fake sh!t that you could try, again would suck after 2-5 min.
tokagawa ieyasu the shogun. he is the one that started the edo era (edo is the old name for tokyo) he is like the big dog of shoguns. i think shogun is even higher than the emperor thus there isn't one now. after him i think a few of his sons kicked arse too so the tokagawas were THE fam. on one hand this guy was an a-hole and murdered and slaughtered tons of people, on the other hand he can be looked at as good cuz he ended the warring states period by uniting japan under one leader instead of all the warlords trying to kill each other all the time. so what side are you on? i dont know
me in a thing that i think the daimyos rode in on various trips carried by guys. daimyos are the regional rulers under the shogun
a chicken on top of a parade float thing. interesting........
a subaru 360 next to Fumiko. the first japanese "light" car watever that means. maybe it means small and a mother lover.
crazy escalator madness
cool shaped coffe shop roof awnings
in the JR ryogoku station. we by chance went down a little side street that is famous cuz a sumo wrestler stable. stable sounds like horses, anyway i dont know if they live there congregate there or train there or all of that but they say you can seen them some times wondering the street and eating tonssss of food. somewhere btwn asakusa bashi and ryogoku station.
looks like erotic novels?
dont know what i ordered but was excited to see i ordered curry udon. awesome
left is plum salt! dont know about the other 2 but an awesome touch. didnt use any though cuz you cant do that to curry.
udon noodles hanging up. everything was set by a timer on the wall so they are just right. those japanese, what a bunch.
