Tokyo 2023, Day 2 (TeamLab Planets and Asakusa)
After going to sleep at 9pm last night, we both woke up at 5am this morning and were greeted with the beautiful Tokyo skyline with the rising sun illuminating everything:
The breakfast buffet didn’t start until 7am, so we just stayed in bed until it was time to eat. I forgot to take many photos of the buffet at the Mandarin Oriental, mainly because I was hungry, but it’s an amazing buffet. There’s a large pastry table in the center, a separate congee bar, another bar with enough items to make a full English breakfast, and a small Chinese food section. And on top of that, you can order from a small menu of cooked items. As we were sitting there enjoying our breakfast, we remembered just how much we love our Asian breakfast buffets.
After our delicious breakfast, we headed off early to Toyosu, where we would meet up with the family for our entrance into the interactive art exhibit, TeamLab planets. But since we had an hour until our entrance time, Nick and I decided to walk around the area. A river runs next to Toyosu, so we were able to enjoy the river walk there, but before we did, we appreciated the lovely manicured green spaces around the station:
As we kept walking, we encountered our first cherry blossom!
So exciting and beautiful! We actually planned this trip like 9 months ago, with the hope that we would be here during sakura season, so being able to see some blooming cherry blossom trees is amazing!
We continued walking around and noticed a theater with signage for Final Fantasy X, so we thought it was a live performance of the video game. But as we got closer to the theater, we noticed that it was actually a Kabuki version of Final Fantasy X, and it showed all the actors who would play each part. Unfortunately, we won’t have time to see it while we’re here, but we’re sort of curious to know what this would be like:
Next, we headed off to the Toyosu fish market, which is where the famous Tsukiji fish market moved to recently. When booking our TeamLab Planets tickets, we didn’t realize this move at all, and unfortunately for us, the fish market is generally closed on a Wednesday, which meant that many of the sushi restaurants there were also closed, and thus, we weren’t able to have any amazing sushi there…
Finally it was time for us to enter TeamLab planets, where we excitedly met up with the rest of the family for the first time this trip. As we waited in line, we talked about how their trip had been (they have been here for a week and a half), and we were happy to hear that they’ve been having a wonderful time.
But we had to cut our conversation short as it was time to enter TeamLab Planets, by first removing our shoes and storing them in lockers. So yeah, you walk around the entire place barefoot, and there are a couple of areas with shallow water, so definitely wear pants that you can roll up to your knees. Also, the introductory video mentioned that there are many rooms with mirrored floors, so avoid wearing skirts.
After getting settled with our lockers and storing bags and jackets, we walked to the entrance and were told to go to the water experience first. None of us knew what that would entail, so as we turned the corner, we noticed an inclined walkway with water streaming down it, so up we walked. And at the top, we saw the source of the water, a lovely waterfall:
After drying off our feet, we headed off to the next exhibit: a large, mirrored room with thousands of strands of LED lights hanging from the ceiling. The lights were coordinated with each other to create a stunning, dynamic display of light and color, and being in the center of it was awesome:
We spent quite a bit of time here just staring at the apparent movement of lights and the effects that the grouping of lights had as it spread throughout the room.
Eventually we left the room, only to be greeted by a darkly lit hallway that seemed like something from a horror movie:
The next exhibit was another water one, but this time, the water filled an entire large room. Images of cherry blossoms and koi were projection mapped onto the water, so it felt like we were wading in a beautiful koi pond. Due to the dimly lit nature of the room, taking photos here was a bit of a challenge:
The next room contained many large spheres (similar to yoga balls), in a mirrored room. The interesting thing about this room was that if you hit the balls, you would change the color of the entire room. So of course, everyone in the room is smacking away at the balls and the room suddenly started to feel like a disco floor:
And the final room of the water area was a really awesome dome shaped room with a mirrored floor. Here, you could lay down on the ground and the entire domed ceiling would show various scenes of moving flowers. It was really cool just to be fully immersed in the visuals, but this isn’t the greatest place for people who get motion sick. I don’t have any photos of this place, but even if I did, the photos wouldn’t offer anything near the actual experience of being there.
I will say though that walking out of the room while navigating moving images proved to be a bit of a challenge…
After we took a few moments to gather ourselves after the planetarium of flowers, we headed off to the garden area, where we encountered several metallic ovoids resting on moss:
If you lightly pushed one, it would make a sound that would reverberate throughout the entire room.
And finally, the last exhibit is the one that we would see in all of the ads for TeamLab Planets, the room with the hanging garden. They actually limit the number of people here, so we had to wait a few minutes to be let in, but once we did, we got ourselves up close and personal with the hanging flowers:
The plants would move up if someone was underneath it, which meant that there was a lot of movement during this exhibit, which added to the living nature of the entire exhibit.
And with that, we gathered up our stuff and left feeling awe-inspired by the various exhibits that we just experienced. I think the current plan is that this exhibit will run until the end of 2023, so if you’re planning on going to Tokyo this year, I would highly suggest visiting this while it’s still on show.
At this point, we didn’t have any plans, but Nick and I mentioned that even though we’ve been to Tokyo twice before, we’ve never been to the Asakusa area, so off we all went to see Sensoji temple. So we had read that this area gets quite busy, so we expected it to have a lot of people, but even knowing this, we were still shocked at how crowded it was, especially on a Wednesday afternoon. Here’s a photo of Kaminarimon gate:
Yeah, that’s a lot of people, and we were going to go join then, but before that, we needed lunch, so we stopped by a cute little ramen shop for some delicious noodles:
After all that salt from the ramen, it was time to find some sugar, so we waited in line to get some candied strawberries on a stick:
I was scared that I would break a tooth from cracking into the sugar shell, but it isn’t that heavily coated, so it gave a nice little crunch as you bit into it. I also think they might have sweetened the strawberry because it was quite sweet, but that was fine because they still were able to retain the taste of the strawberry, so it wasn’t like we were eating only sugar.
We then headed down the very crowded walkway:
And ended up at Sensoji Temple, the oldest temple in Tokyo. The gates outside were large and colorful, and the Buddhist altar inside was beautifully adorned in gold:
We didn’t stay here very long, primarily due to the large number of people, making it difficult to see much of anything besides the back of their heads. As Jason pointed out many times, it’s a good thing Nick is so tall; it makes it easy to spot him from far away….
As we headed back to the train station, we couldn’t help but get a few more sweets. First, we tried the Asakusa ice cream sandwich, which is really ice cream sandwiched between two extremely thin, wafer like shells. I got the red bean ice cream, while the others tried black sesame and sakura:
I don’t know if this was worth waiting in line for…
We then found a cute little melon pan shop, which was selling matcha soft serve in a melon pan. Nick and I just got a plain melon pan, but the rest of the family split a matcha ice cream sandwich, and they seemed to love it based on how quickly it was devoured.
At this point, we were full of sugar and needed a break, so we rested a bit at our respective hotels before heading out to dinner at a kushiyaki restaurant in Ginza. When we lived in LA, we were a 5 minute walk from this wonderful kushiyaki restaurant, and one of our favorite items on their menu was a tomato-maki, which is essentially cherry tomatoes wrapped with thinly sliced pork, and then grilled over a fire. Despite the danger of consuming flaming hot tomato juice, we loved these so much that we would always order multiple for each of us. Since we’ve moved away, we haven’t been able to find this in Seattle. So when I noticed that Kushiyaki Bistro Fukumimi had tomato maki on their menu, I made a reservation for all of us.
The entrance to this place is a little unassuming, and also not where Google maps thinks it is:
But once inside, we were seated at a floor table with an opening under the table for your legs. The menu was full of skewers, but also other appetizers and dishes, but we primarily ordered skewers. When the food came out, it looked great, and we were ready to eat it all:
The dish with the crackers was actually on the house. I didn’t try it, but I think it was cream cheese with fuji apples, which sounds odd, but apparently tasted really good because people were going back for more. The tomato maki was amazing, and we were able to satisfy what we had been missing for so many years.
Tomorrow, we plan on being in Shibuya seeing a bunch of new things that opened after we last visited in 2019, but right now, the jet lag is hitting me and I’m about to fall asleep, but it’s 10pm, so I think I’m getting better acquainted with the time shift now…