Author: Grubb

You’re too old to have fun at the gathering. Joining the group watching the robot statue makes you feel ridiculous. The park you’re walking through is meagre in comparison to the previous parks. The open shipping lane to the ocean seems adventurous. Ella is tired of waiting for you to catch up. You come across…

For our last day in Tokyo we had beautiful weather to go along with the beautiful woodblock prints that are part of the collection at the Sumida Hokusai Museum.  On Friday I talked about the exhibit at the Tokyo National Museum that featured Tsutaya Jūzaburō, master printer of the Edo Era.  The most famous artist that…

A cafe in Kanazawa seemingly designated for Americans.

Throughout our visit to Japan we constantly come across groups of girls or boys dressed in secondary school uniforms.  We never see the high school age kids mix genders as they walk too or from school.  At first I thought, that’s a lot of private schools!  Then I found out that, “While relationships are common in schools worldwide,…

Yesterday, after the sumo slam and water goblins, I dragged Ella to the famous Ginza strip.  The street was closed off to all traffic permitting only pedestrians.  It was like walking down the La Rambla in Barcelona only instead of stalls there were luxury department stores. I had looked up a conveyor belt sushi restaurant that had…

We went to a sumo training stables this morning to watch a dozen wrestlers work out their moves before the big national tournament that begins in a couple of weeks.  It was a two hour drill where black belted trainees faced off before white belted professionals inside a prescribed circle lightly dusted with fine dirt.  When they…

Wet day in Tokyo.  It started to rain about the time we left our hotel and now that we’re back it’s still coming down.  So we went with the big indoor option, the Tokyo National Museum.  The permanent collection had a thousand-year-old Buddhist guardian statues carved out of wood. Then there was Wisdom King Fudo.  The exhibit card read:…

Late Thursday afternoon we took part in a ritual of post-modern madness after surfacing from the Shibuya subway exit.  I felt it was a way of balancing Japanese extremes.  A few days into our trip we hiked to a deserted mountain temple and yesterday, towards the end of our journey, we joined the welter of humanity piling…

Today we tubed all four points of the compass in our Tokyo circuit without missing a beat.  It seemed like every time we figured out which subway line to take to our destination we were barely finished descending the stairs before the train appeared.  In one instance the doors were closed as we approached and the conductor…

Part of the Rippongi Art Triangle, a twelve minute walk from the Mori Art Museum, is The National Art Center in Tokyo. The big exhibit was “Living Modernity” which featured models of houses built by 20th century architects that were the fantasies which, when built, changed the ideal structure of the home environment.  Functional, linear, and…

I don’t know if anyone has had the chance to catch the third episode of the 7th season of Black Mirror (“Hotel Reverie”) where the digital world merges with the real world in a remake of a movie, but that is sort of what the theme was to “Machine Love: Video Game, AI and Contemporary…

The train we got on in Toyama this morning was full by the time we hit Tokyo Station.  And then it emptied.  I expected the worst at the station: a rush of people coming  from every direction aggravated at me for getting in the way.  Instead, although plentiful with people, the exit signs were clear and it didn’t seem…

This morning we took a train from Toyama to Takaoka to see the Takaoka Daibutsu, one of the three largest Buddha statues in Japan.  Ella’s photos give you an idea of his enormity.  Below the Buddha there was a shrine which had a semi-circular hallway behind it with paintings of bliss alternating with paintings of demons reminding…

A short train ride from Kanazawa this morning got us to Toyama where we’ll stay a couple of nights before going to Tokyo.  Toyama which translates as “distant mountains” in Japanese, is a coastal city on the Sea of Japan that starts the Tateyama Karobe Alpine Route leading through the Tateyama mountains to the north. While…

Touring the Meiji era residences its been evident that in the rooms where guests were greeted and tea was served it was a carefully choreographed seated affair.  The hearth (“Ro”) was fitted into the floor; there was an alcove (“Toko-no-ma”) where art was displayed; and there were a set of shelves for preparation (“Mizuya”) where the…