One of the stops on the Tokyo trip was a place called Yokohama. Yokohama is a large area with a lot to do, and we only did a tiny fraction of that. There is a shopping area, but we didn't go to that. There are several museums, a waterfront area, and a plenty of places to walk around. It seemed like there was enough to see and do for an entire day, but we were only there for a half day, so we only saw a fraction of what was there.
Unsubtle reminder that we were there during cherry blossom season. We walked around a park area that was partially built over a parking garage. This made it easy to find the tour bus that we had to return to, but it's also a nice area. Tokyo is very walkable if you are able to go up stairs. I don't have any mobility issues, but from what I've seen and what I've been told, it's not a nice place to be if you are in a wheel chair. Many of the core infrastructure systems like subways and train stations are more friendly to people with limited mobility, but private businesses might have stairs right inside the front door and no other option to get in.
Cherry blossoms are easy to photograph and are an easy crowd pleaser, so I take a lot of those. They don't contribute much to the story, though, so I don't have much to say about them. To quote a particularly sobering time in NPR's history, presented in silence are two more.
Also like NPR's presentation in silence, I'm going to interrupt it with sound. Er, text. I think they do that so people don't turn away from the station, or people who are turning to the station don't think it's dead. There might be some regulation about how much dead air you can have, so people don't buy up radio bandwidth and then just sit on it without using it, thus driving up the cost of other air waves they own. I don't really know.
I think there are different colors of cherry blossom, but I also know that plum blossoms exist, and they are this color, so this might be one of those. I don't think they flower at the same time, but this one might be early, or late.
I didn't want to walk all the way down the otherwise uninhabited area to get a picture over a fence. It was clear they wanted people to come into their museum, but we couldn't to justify the cost/time to look at it. Neither of us are particularly big fans of Gundam or mecha, though I did enjoy Code Geass, and it changed my mind about anime. I'm not sure if this is a museum or just a store. It's possible, and frankly probable, that it's both, which I'm not that interested in.
Instead, we went to the doll museum. There were a number of different exhibits, and we didn't get to see everything before we had to go. There was an exhibit about dolls from around the world. That was interesting because it really demonstrated how art is similar in geographical regions that are close to each other, while also showing the commonalities between all cultures and their dolls. They also show in really stark contrast the ideals of art in different cultures. There were other exhibits that mostly had Japanese dolls, the one in the image was one of the those. They presented dolls from different time periods in Japan, showing their clothing trends and artistic styles.
I tried to find the creepiest doll in the museum, and this poor thing is that. The almost solid black eyes, the high contrast skin color to hair color, the uncanny-valley-like features, the size, it's got everything. The more I look at it, the less creepy it gets, so that's not going to spiral out of control. There were plenty of good runners-up, but of the dolls that we saw, I think this is the winner.
SarisonZero lives and works in Japan. He completed one video after 15 hours of learning to edit and is hoping to bring that number done a bit. Just a bit.