Yesterday I wrote that it had rained about 50% of the time. If you add in today and, if my math is right, we’re up to 75%, and it feels like 100%. We haven’t really seen the sun since we landed, although yesterday the clouds thinned enough mid-afternoon to put sunglasses on. Today, it has rained from mid-morning and hasn’t stopped. We just walked four blocks to and from dinner at an Italian restaurant chain here called Saizeriya, and it was really coming down. I swear that it was raining inside my umbrella as we walked back home.
The Japanese seem very prepared for rain. Everyone appears to carry an umbrella. Then, at the front of every restaurant or store or museum, etc., there is a dispenser of long plastic sleeves into which you can put your umbrella. Inside the plastic sleeve, you can safely bring your umbrella inside or even stuff it in a backpack, and it gets nothing else wet. I have never seen these in the US.
We spent most of the day at the International Tokyo Toy Show 2008 at the Tokyo Big Sight convention center. We got there around 9:20am or so, and we thought it was crowded. We were wrong. By the time we left at 12:15pm, you couldn’t move in the main corridors. The show was primarily geared to toys for kids under 10, and, thus, it wasn’t a place for Nintendo or Microsoft to exhibit their video games. If you think stereotypical Japanese toys, you’d be right. Hello Kitty and the Power Rangers (Bandai) were very prominent. There were also a lot of toys that came with their own trading cards and a lot of Lego knock offs, although Lego was there as well. The Godzilla pictured is noted as “not on sale until July.” The best item, based on the time I spent with Joey and my nephew Aki, is a building toy called Wammy. I can’t find an English language site, so I assume it’s not yet in the US.
We spent the rest of the day in the same section of Tokyo, called Odaiba. Odaiba is built on reclaimed land and looks about as futuristic as an area can get. It was finished just in late 1990s, with some of the rail opening just a few years ago. The subway is above ground (a la the Disney World Monorail), and buildings look right out of Logan’s Run.
We ate at a food court in a mall called Aqua City, where I resisted the urge to go to McDonald’s. Joey did not resist and had a massive thing called a Mega Mac that had four hamburger patties instead of two. According to what I read via Google, the sandwich, out since early 2007 in Japan, was such a hit that it quickly became permanent beyond its “available for a limited time” status. We then went next door to Joypolis, an indoor amusement park run by Sega, where we played games for a several hours, just to stay out of the rain.
Tomorrow, my sister is going to take a day off from work and show us some more cultural sights – probably in the rain again.
