One of the things that I find strange about the tours that are available to us is the tradition of going to a shopping center. I would not think that a shopping center would be of interest to a tourist in Japan, not with all of the other things that you could see, but evidently, I would be wrong. It's been explained to me that this is a tradition in Japan, and school trips to historic places will include a trip to the nearby shopping center. I don't know that this is necessarily true, if this is a tradition, or just a way to fill the hours so you don't have to go back to the school, or an observation that has been blown out of proportion, or something else. Even if it is true, why would a Japanese tradition need to be observed by a tour that is catering to an American audience? It's not something that people are going to see, it's not going to be rude to fail to observe it.
There is an entirely different explanation that easily explains why this happens: that the other Amercans that go on these tours enjoy the shopping center stops. I certainly don't understand the appeal. I can see the necessity of having shopping centers, but I wouldn't want to visit them on vacation. I say "wouldn't" because if these were normal shopping centers, I wouldn't want to go, but these shopping centers are temples to consumerism. This both excites and disgusts me, because they are massive, beautiful buildings, decorated and gorgeous, wonderful to look at. They are huge, with stores piled upon each other, with bridges and towers and ramps and walkways. They are beautiful and horrifying in the same way that casinos are beautiful and horrifying: they are massive, gorgeous buildings that have been built by draining the labor out of their victims. They pound the drum of marketing into your ears until you can't think straight, then shove products you don't need into your hands and steal the money out of your pocket. Obviously I'm exaggerating, but that's how I see it. I walk into these like a heretic walking into a church, which I suppose is a literally true description of what is happening. I am a heretic where the church of comsumerism is concerned, and this is their temple. That being said, I'm probably also a heretic where the Shinto faith is concerned (though I don't profess to know much of anything about the Shinto faith, like whether they have heretics or not), and I still enjoy going to their temples.
Here is the statue of their saint, 50 feet tall and gleaming in white. It lights up at night. Inside the shopping center, there is a store where you can buy idols to this saint, complete with the ritualistic labor that you perform to construct your idol before you put it on a shelf in reverence. Translation: This is a Gundam statue. "Gundam" is the general term that refers to a franchise of giant fighting robot media products. The internet says that it started as an anime (Japanese style cartoon), and expanded into a bunch of other media. In the fiction of the franchise, the robots would actually be this size, so this is a "life-size" scale model (life-size in quotes because it's fiction, there is no real life version of it). Inside the shopping center is a store that sells smaller scale models of these fictional robots. You can buy them in one piece, but the tradition is to purchase the assemblable kits, assemble them and then put them on a shelf on display.
I think I buried the lead a bit in this blog, though. One of the stops in the Tokyo trip was a shopping center called Diver City. I don't know why it has that name. It's not even pronounced that way in Japanese, since Japanese doesn't have a "V" sound in either alphabet. The first syllable is "dye" like the coloring process, and then "bah" like the first two letters of the classical composer Bach. City is pretty much the same. There are a bunch of buildings around a park. The park has statues and flowers and all sorts of decorations. This is statue that my notes say is called a flame. I don't see the resemblance, but most abstract art is lost on me.
It's gorgeously decorated, as I've mentioned numerous times. I don't know the psychology of getting people to spend money, but I think making a nice place to stay, a place where people will want to be, helps you sell them things. It probably doesn't hurt. Maybe it's an homage to the Dutch Tulip Mania (look it up). Maybe it's the goal itself: someone wanted to make something beautiful, and they needed money to do it, so they made a shopping center and then used the proceeds to make a park. It's certainly possible to do things in that order. Doesn't seem likely, but it's certainly possible.
I think this was a gift from one city to another. It might have been a traveling thing that stopped here. I should write these blogs closer to when I go on these trips. It can be looked up, if you are interested in knowing more.
This is not the Diver City building, but it's nearby, and I think it's really cool. It's probably a huge waste of space and potential, but I like how it looks regardless. It's a building that is used by a television company to produce television. I'm not sure what they are saying with the building surrounding the globe, but it has a pompousness that I appreciate.
On the back side of the Diver City shopping center is a beach. It has a walking path that leads to the Rainbow Bridge. I have no idea why the Rainbow Bridge is called the Rainbow Bridge. It's grey steel colored. It's arched, but most bridges are arched. To my knowledge, it's not from or to regions that have names related to Rainbows. Japanese culture doesn't have a great celebration of their LGBT community that I have seen, so I don't think it's about that. On that last note, I have not seen any evidence that LGBT people are persecuted here, and there are community spaces that are dedicated to them, but I don't see a bridge dedicated to the celebration of the community. I could be wrong.
I like the idea of stitching together a couple of photos to get a larger, wider angle image of a landscape, but the camera that I'm using is not really going to cooperate with that. It's trying to be helpful, but it doesn't know what I'm trying to do, and gets in the way of that goal. There is probably a way to fix the issues, and I did a little of that to scale the pictures to the same size, but I wasn't going to go through the trouble of color correction. I have a couple more, and this was easy enough that I'll probably make more of them.
SarisonZero lives and works in Japan. He is starting a YouTube project and is very excited for it.