It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas
On the weekend Colin’s friend from work, Shinohara, took us to the Ghibli museum in Tokyo’s Minaka suburb. Ghibli is the studio that produces the breathtaking anime work of Hayao Miyazaki.
The museum was made for children but there were way more adults than kids roaming the corridors and crouching down to pass through the tiny passages, which create the illusion that one of Miyazaki’s fabulous creatures will appear any second. One room exhibits what must be only a small, small sample of Miyazaki’s preliminary sketches. Initial frames of Princess Mononoke, My Neighbour Totoro, and Kiki’s Delivery Service—to name only a few—cover the walls. It was astounding to see how Miyazaki can convey so much energy and expression in a single pencil line. Looking through copies of the movies’ storyboards was truly wonderful. Even those roughest of sketches are commanding.
One of my favourite characters, a robot from Castle in the Sky, fittingly presides over the museum’s only green space – the rooftop garden.
Afterwards we went for supper and tried some delicious new food called oden, which Shinohara says means health food. We had daikon, squid, and fish cake in a clear, salty fish stock. There was bream carpaccio and bream rice. Also squid with wasabi. Delicious!
Also on the weekend, Colin and I went shopping in Harajuku and Shimokitazawa. Lights, wreaths, and poinsettias are transforming the streets. We are very amused at how the Japanese have readily adopted Christmas despite the fact that a fraction of the population is Christian. Shinohara explained that it’s because they love festivals. Expensive ones, apparently. The baby trees in the front row were each selling for about $70 Canadian.
