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Day four of four, and our first port of call was the Parasitological Museum in Meguro, a couple of train stops outside the city centre. A quick Google for popular tourist attractions revealed that this small, vaguely obscure hall of learning had become quite a pull for visitors looking to goad their stomachs into wrestling with the $60 sushi they had that morning. I'm generally quite squeamish, but I was curious about this place, partly because Tokyo puts you in a weird mood, partly because I'm an obnoxious leftie at heart and wanted to see if the museum gave any credence to my theory that the only true parasite is man.
The museum was a fifteen-minute walk from the station, down small-town streets that seemed a world away from relatively nearby Shibuya. The building was unassuming and modest, more like a piddling local ward office than the cavern of monsters I was hoping for, and we thoroughly perused everything in the space of about twenty minutes. Nonetheless, a good time was had by all. There were a lot of jars with very small gross things and a few jars with big gross things, as well as some fascinating handwritten notebooks by parasitologists, who appeared to be Japanese but writing in English, I guess so that they could distance themselves from the Cronenberg horror they had to calmly make sketches of every day. There was even a little attempt at interactivity, in the form of a bit of white thread meant to illustrate the length of a tapeworm, which you could mess around with at your leisure:
And I was totally not sick and everything.
Our afternoon was to be spent in Odaiba. Odaiba is an artificial island in Tokyo Bay which was basically built in the 19th century as a site for military sea fortresses, then wallowed in half-existence throughout the late 20th century, whilst civil engineers put together various unfulfilled plans for it and watched billions of yen of investment go down the toilet. Kind of the Millenium Dome of Japan. In the 1990s, the plan was for Odaiba to be a futuristic neighbourhood with the delightful name of Teleport Town, meant to showcase super-modern homes and amenities, but nothing really went as planned. Then the Japanese economic bubble burst, leaving those plans sodden in the shadow of a soapy trickle.
However, the story ends okay. Odaiba has flourished in the last few years with shopping malls, hotels and tourist attractions, though the development is a little uneven, leaving awkward walks through nothingness in between the various new excitements. "And why the fuck not" appears to be the spirit of the place, which features a copy of the Statue of Liberty and a life-size Gundam.
We had to be back in the city centre by the evening, but we wanted to while away an hour or two in the Miraikan - Odaiba's museum of science and technology, which houses the kind of friendly androids and bizarre innovations that one thinks of when imagining stereotypical Japan.
Unfortunately, fate intervened, and we absolutely couldn't spend more than a short space of time in the main exhibits, because as we walked through the lobby we discovered that this temporary special exhibition was on:
Yes, it was entirely about toilets and poo. And interactive, too. Obviously we had to spend 95% of our time at Miraikan examining this particular exhibit.
A picture is worth a thousand words, so:
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| In Japan, everything must have a kawaii mascot. |
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| The Bristol Stool Scale for measuring the water content of faeces, developed at my very own alma mater. *wipes away tear of pride* |
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| I got to wear a poo hat and slide down a toilet. I lost my poo hat halfway down :( |
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| This toilet hates people because they're unappreciative. Well, no more! |
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| Lyrics to the...national....anthem of toilets? |
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| Notes people left on their ideal and least ideal toilets. Wise words here from a fellow countryman. |
You can giggle like schoolchildren all you want, but I really did learn some interesting things about plans for innovative new sewage systems in the developing world, AND I got to make poo out of playdough. By moulding it in my hands, I mean. Not by eating it.
After all that excitement I actually lost my ticket, meaning I had to leave and buy a new one in order to get into the rest of the exhibits. By the time I got in I only had about twenty minutes to enjoy some horrifying androids:
In this exhibit, one person can go into a booth and control the movements of the android (gynoid?) and speak through it with a microphone. The other can have the leg-joltingly awful experience of sitting on a sofa next to the almost-human and having a nice conversation with it. Not only that, but once you've shyly dipped your toes into the shallows of the uncanny valley, you can fully plunge in with this....this:
This is about the size of a baby, but is just a head with a blank torso. Again, one person stays to communicate with the....thing, while another person gets in a booth and controls the....thing, but only with head movements this time. (Of course, everyone who tried it made it stay deathly still for ages and then jerk the face around violently like something out of The Exorcist). We gathered that the designer's idea was to test the boundaries of human-to-human communication - to explore the most basic canvas you could create which was still similar enough to a human being that you could identify with it, which is presumably what they wrote on their research proposal because "shit people up for laughs" doesn't get anyone a grant. Our morals thoroughly offended, we had a quick tour around the rest of the robotics room and then hurried to our train back to Shinjuku for the final stop of our trip.
The Robot Restaurant is one of the most popular tourist attractions in Tokyo. The idea is basically dinner theatre, but instead of watching a regular show you see people dressed as robots and monsters fighting each other on vehicles whilst scantily-clad women cheer them on. It was very, very tacky and everyone loved it. I'm about 80% sure that it's the pet project of some eccentric yakuza or corrupt Russian oil baron, but it really goes full throttle with the tack and that can't help but charm you. After the first few moments of uneasiness, when you step into its neon clutches on one of the Tokyo's sleazier streets, you are escorted to a bar when you can have a drink in the glitziest room you've ever seen whilst people in robot costumes play jazz. And that's even before the show begins. I don't want to spoil it for future customers, but it does involve robot boxing, sharks fighting manga superheroes, interplanetary war and Lady Gaga covers. The lighting wasn't too conducive to good photos, but this should give you a rough idea:
I can't comment on the food because we were advised not to buy it, but the show was definitely something you wouldn't see every day. It made a pretty good final note for our first trip to Tokyo. I feel like we managed to see a lot of the city's more unique sights without exhausting ourselves, though there are still definitely lots of things we could do on future trips and I'd like to go back soon to explore at a more leisurely pace.
I don't have a good end to this. Er, Merry Christmas!
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