In Lights

Day 24 – Sunday, 21 April 2024

Age is just a number, sure. So is the period of time, in hours, it takes me these days to recover from a night clubbing until 4am. That’s quite a big number, that one. I had some serious pillow dribbling to do before anything involving daylight could be attempted. My family, bless them, let it happen. I repaid the favour by showering.

However long it was, I must have got out before lunchtime because we had that meal in Harajuku at a café taking its theme from Charles Schulz’s cartoon of that name. This was, I think, an attempt by Anna to soften the blow felt by Seb (so sharply in Hiroshima) at not being able to get into the Kirby café in the Skytree. As, to the best of my knowledge, Seb won’t have heard of Charlie Brown before that morning, I probably thought this was a terrible idea, doomed to failure. If so, I hope I kept my mouth shut, because Seb was cheerful enough.

Snoop Dogg

With lunchtime behind us and my ability to form new memories slowly returning, we made our way back, yet again, to Shibuya and a chance to do some shopping for clothes and footwear that we don’t need. I bought the clothes, Anna the footwear. Seb went back to the Pokémon Centre and Nintendo shop and bought everything he hadn’t bought on previous visits. Raf, too, loaded up with a few gifts for friends at home who haven’t yet outgrown plush toys.

The evening saw us, for the first time, down in the docklands area in Koto City, south (a little east) of Tokyo centre, to the home of TeamLab Planets. This is a vast warehouse containing a series of thematically linked artworks, or one big artwork, if you prefer, involving a lot of technical wizardry. In one hall, the visitor walks through shin deep water in which electronically generated fish dart about. In another, one is at the centre of a universe of flowers. In a third, real flowers slowly swoop about, making way for visitors as they move about the space. It was enormously fun and we took a lot of pictures, which I will let do the rest of the talking, below.


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