Japan Day 5 « CoffeeBear.net

Japan Day 5

Posted by Mark | Filed under Travel

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Today, we had our last class where we could work on our original manga page. Thanks to E & SH allowing me hang out in their room and work on my page; I was able to finish it¹. Unfortunately, I forgot to bring any of my omiyage gifts with me; so I couldn’t give one to Ueda-sensai or the assistants who were in there². The assistants and ???-san³ came with us to the hotel and later to Ghibli museum; so I was able to give them their omiyage then.

Then it was a fiarly long train ride and a hellacious walk in massive humidity and heat to the Ghibli museum. The first part of the museum we saw looked like a ticket booth with Totoro inside and beneath the counter was a porthole with the little ash creatures from Spirited Away. A short walk from that was the entrance where we were informed they do not allow pictures or video to be taken of the interior. *cry, sniffle, sniffle, sad* From the entrance, you could really begin to see that the museum was built to resemble like something out of Nausicca⁴. Then we got inside and WOW! It was too flipping amazing for me to accurately describe it, particularly when trying to do so by typing up a bunch of words about it. For the important people (e.g. those I know in real life), I’ll try to describe it to you when next we meet up. Oh by the way, if you ever get to visit Japan; the Ghibli museum is a MUST-SEE but you’ll need to order your tickets about a month in advance in order to get into it. On a slightly different note, I did feel slightly cheated by the trip to the museum because they were doing a Pixar exhibit and so we didn’t get to see Maya and the Catbus, which is only played at this museum. Plus, the film tickets to see whatever movie they play have an actual piece of film in them from one of the Ghibli movies. Only due to the Pixar exhibit, some tickets had clips from Pixar films in them and I got stuck with a snippet of Finding Nemo, while CH got a piece of Porco Rosso. *sigh* Then it was back out into the heat to walk back to the train station. I was pretty out of it by then because of the wretched heat but I think we did something after Ghibli. I just can’t remember what it was. Ah well,m if the memory comes back to me; I’ll add it as a comment to this entry.

¹ That’s not entirely true; there is quite a bit of work that still could be done to clean it up and make it look nicer but I did as much work on it as I was willing to do and I don’t think it looks too bad.
² Later I gave one of the omiyage to Tanaka-san to give to Ueda-sensai for me. Of course, I also gave Tanaka-san a couple of omiyage as well.
³ I forgot her name but she’s been doing some of the translating for us and I think she was introduced as the head of TCA’s manga instruction program.
⁴ Or Valley of the Wind to you uneducated America louts.