The Rolling Stone

You may have noticed that I’m experimenting with different styles and approaches in these blog posts. As I mentioned at the outset I haven’t done this before, so part of the fun of it for me is finding my feet in a new medium. Since I managed to get caught up with my posts (by staying up late, the usual way I get things done on time) I’ve now got an opportunity to try blogging as I go, i.e. writing the post in bits throughout the day rather than all at once afterwards. So I’m writing this first part in the morning. We’ll see how I go with keeping up with the day.

We had a lazy start after yesterday’s activities, with most of us sleeping in until 9am (though I was up early to do some clothes washing in the hotel laundry). This turned out to be a tactical error as it meant a slightly rushed start to get to our booked event.

We took the subway again, but this time we were travelling on the Z (Hanzomon) line. I find the Tokyo subway system very easy to understand with each line having a letter that’s usually the first letter of the name (e.g. the G line is the Ginza line), and each stop has a number. So this morning we were going from Z04 to Z11.

The booked event was a Sumo show (note the pun in the title of this blog 🙂). It was fun and educational, starting with a brief lecture on the history and basics of Sumo wrestling before a couple of retired Sumo wrestlers came out to do demonstrations.

The demonstrations started out serious, but became increasingly comic, especially when they got to the section on demonstrating illegal moves, where it was full-on clowning.

They also gave us a couple of demonstration matches.

At the end they had volunteers from the audience learn some moves and have some mock fights with the professionals. It actually gave a good idea of how skilled and strong they were as they could effortlessly control any amateur. (Xavi did volunteer and they put him in a sumo outfit over his clothes, but then he got shy. He has also refused to give permission for the picture of this to go on this blog, so if you want to see it you’ll have to get me to show you on my phone when I get back.)

It was funny and interesting and we were served an early lunch while we watched, so it was a good start to the day.

There wasn’t much else to see in that area so we headed back to our hotel. We had a quiet afternoon with each of us wandering the nearby streets and relaxing in the hotel room in between wanders. While out and about I snapped some interesting pics.

Later, Hayley and I had a coffee and cake in a very fancy-looking cafe.

In the evening we had another event booked, so at 6:30pm we headed to the subway again, and took the Y (Yurakucho) line. (Sadly we will not get to complete the Tokyo metro alphabet as there are a number of lines that do not run near us, but we have managed to ride the C, G, M, U, Y and Z lines.)

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Okay so my plan to write as I go fell down at the end because we had an amazing, but quite late evening and I was too tired to finish. This means everything above this paragraph was written on the day, but this bit is being written the day after.

The booked evening event was a timed ticket to a place called TeamLab Planets which had the most incredible array of interactive whole room artworks.

Even before we got to the proper artworks, the walls had beautiful light displays, some of which were interactive.

Some of the room were just fun interactive activities (though it was often hard to tell them from the art they were so beautiful).

In one room Xavier coloured in a bird and then it was scanned in and flew around the room. He could even control its flight using an app on my phone. Since he was using my phone I couldn’t get a picture of this, but here is the bird he coloured and a scene on the wall later with other people’s animals.

One of the artworks was a room with walls and floor entirely mirrors with orchids suspended from the ceiling on wires almost to the floor. If you moved close to them the wires would retract upwards so you could walk under them.

Another was a garden of lit up transparent blobs.

There were a set of water-themed artworks that could be reached through a long set of darkened corridors where the floor constantly changed texture and sometimes had running water flowing down it.

The first of these artworks was a room full of long strands of lights hanging ceiling to floor. There were passages through them and it was like a maze through a waterfall diffracting the light.

Next was a room filled knee high with water that had light projections of fish swimming through it. Xavi loved this room, perhaps a little too much.

It had a side room with this display.

Next was the room full of giant soft balls where the lighting gently shifted through the colour spectrum.

Finally there was the room with the mirrored floor where the ceiling displayed computer generated flowers falling through blackness. The image was so overwhelming it was disorienting to walk in the room, all you could do was sit or lie down. I lay there for at least 20 minutes and it never repeated, I could have watched it for hours. The below picture and video don’t really do it justice, but they give an idea.

We spent over two hours in the space and had a wonderful time. A lovely end to the day.