Wednesday 17th January 2024
teamLab Planets and Skytree today so up and out as early as I could do with the weight of jet lag bearing down on top of me. I was in Shinjuku station at 8:45 and on the JR Yamanote line bound for Tokyo Station (Marunouchi). I arrived at the wonderful red brick station at around 9;30 to see if I could have a look at the Imperial Palace and Gardens before heading to teamLab Planets at midday.
Visiting The Emperor
As I made my way down from the station towards the Imperial Palace down Gyoko Street I saw a.number of police personnel moving people on and there were a few black limousines around so it appeared something might be occurring in the next few days. I watched a few policemen lifting up fences and transporting them to the side of the street as if to open up the pedestrianised area for traffic but there were no cars on there. I did make a video at one point as the police officers picked up the fence from the post holes in the floor and then moved in unison and it looked like their legs were part of a Ministry Of Silly walks gag on Monty Python. I was expecting to hear them shouting to me, to you.
As I got closer to the Imperial Palace there was a big queue of people forming for a guided tour but I walked past this to get to the gates. As I did, another police officer pointed at me and told me that it was closed. Again? This is what happened at the Yoyogi park. He told me it was closed and offered no reason fir it, until after 10 mins of hanging around seeing what I else I could do, he returned and explained in his version of English that the palace was closed for a visit by some ambassadors from another nation and that there would be a horse drawn carriage procession down the pedestrianised street I’d earlier seen being reconfigured.
As I made my way back towards the station to head onwards to the area of teamLab Planets I found that the carriage was being prepared in ceremonial fashion so hung around for a few moments to see the procession begin. There wasn’t a huge audience of people watching, just a few that wanted to cross the area but were being restricted due to the security force.
I Am Donut?
I walked around some of the tall buildings in the area of the station and found the Tokyo International Forum which had some impressive glass and steel structures, as well as a Krispy Kreme coffee and donut shop. My Japanese is non-existent and the young woman serving was having trouble with her English so it’s no surprise there was a couple of confusions. As I’d not had any breakfast, and rarely do actually, I felt like having two donuts so picked out a sprinkled pink and a sprinkled chocolate donut and asked for an Americano coffee too. She got the two donuts I’d asked for onto a plate and then started putting another two on there so I had to explain I only ordered two, she eventually helped me understand that the extra two were free as my order earned two free donuts. I declined them much to her surprise and there were a few confused looks between her and her colleague. I paid for the snackage and went to the end to pick up the tray when ready. When the tray arrived, there were my two donuts and two cups of coffee. I only ordered, and wanted one but I wasn’t about to make life difficult for the staff and me so just took it and sat in the window looking out at the pedestrians wandering past on their way to work. The coffee was not very nice at all so I scoffed the don’ts and had one cup of coffee before tipping the second into the liquid waste part of the recycling section.
Refreshed and energised I entered the station and jumped on a Ginza Line train to Shin-Toyosu station which isn’t far from the art exhibition. It was good to see this part of Tokyo too as it was spread out and you could see across Tokyo Bay, it was impressive in scale.
teamLab Planets
I popped out early at Toyosu station and had a nice walk in the sunshine, it said it was about 13 degrees Celsius so I didn’t have my coat on. I found my way to the large complex that is teamLab Planets and waited until the sign at the front of the queue changed to admit people in the 12:00-12:30 slot. I’d seen a couple of short videos and explanations of this extraordinary place but it was truly breathtaking.
First up, in the queue we were warned that you needed to take your shoes and socks off and roll trousers up to knee height, and that there were mirrored floors within so women wearing skirts could borrow a free pair of shorts to maintain their dignity.
Walking on Water
Shoes off and into a free locker, I also popped my coat, jumper and camera bag into the safe space too so I wasn’t banging into things that might get broken. With the stripdown completed I followed the signs into the first area a blue lit walkway in the dark that led to a white lit uphill climb with water trickling down over your feet. It was weird to see everyone with nothing on their feet and I was waiting for some sort of House Of Horror event that would cause a jump scare. When I got to the top of the ramp I was greeted by the source of the water, a tall waterfall that was flowing in a single column from the roof to the grate at the foot of it, this water then headed off down the ramp. This piece of art was titled Waterfall Of Light Particles at the Top of an Incline. The notes on the plate refer to the light reflecting off only the particles of light leading to an afterimage of light trails.
Spongy Room
After a quick foot drying session with a towel in the drying room we were led into a very dark room with a very spongy floor and walls. This was called Soft Black Hole – Your Body Becomes A Space That Influences Another Body and is to remind us of the soft world all around us that isn’t the hard flat surfaces of buildings and offices, shops and other places. This is to remind you that your body in your space impacts other people as they go through their own space. this is quite interesting as a concept especially as we’ve been talking about Space in the first semester.
Infinite Crystals
After another corridor walk we entered The Infinite Crystal Universe a room with mirrored walls, floors and ceilings. From the ceiling hung thousands of strings of RGB LEDs, all dancing to the sounds that had also been cleverly designed to fill the area. It was at once, disorientating and confusing with the real possibility that I was going to walk into a wall of mirrors. The LEDs in the strings are all individually addressed and this must have taken an enormous amount of work to set up and programme. It is really impressive, and looking around in all directions gives you views of yourself or other people that seem impossible. I stayed in here a long time and heard the staff telling people off for going into the LED strands, when there is a specific walkway. There was also a control panel in a side room that allowed you to alter the sounds and patterns as well as witness it in front of you.
Milky Fish Water
Exiting the room of infinite lights it was time to walk down a dimly lit red corridor and into the next area. Following the other visitors you could begin to hear some sounds of splashing and I prepared to enter more water by ensuring my trousers were well and truly rolled up. The floor began to drop away on a small ramp and then we were walking through a milky coloured water, not clear like the first water we’d experienced. Rounding the doorway, in knee deep water we came into a large room, covered with mirrors on the walls and ceiling and a series of projections onto the water around our legs. The projections were all sorts of lines and flashes seemingly moving around atop the milky liquid. Then they’d all change to Koi Carp and swim through our legs and around and about the throng of people, changing direction if someone was in their way. I’d read online that if you kicked a fish it turned into a beautiful water lily so I did boot a couple of them and watched them transform. It was a magical experience and the noise from kids yelping and people laughing was also difficult to comprehend. The size of the room seemed exaggerated due to the mirrors stretching out the viewable horizon.
With the other little rooms explored and their not so impressive displays taken in, it was time to leave here and move onto the next artwork. Obviously, people’s legs were soaked and the next room was a black room with benches and a wall of fresh towels to allow guests to dry off before continuing. I particularly liked the wall that had an opening with Used Towel Box written above it, it felt like something that should be in an onsen or another sort of establishment for adult entertainment.
Gentle With The Balls
Down another dimly lit corridor with purple lights at feet level, we ended up at a door int a mirrored room full of large inflatable balls. The first thing I heard here made me laugh out loud, an american steward, with the responsibility of protecting the artworks shouted out “PLEASE BE GENTLE WITH THE BALLS!” He held a completely straight face throughout and I was chuckling to myself every time I heard him repeat these words, how childish. The ball filled room was lit in various colours, seemingly coming from everywhere and nowhere, there was no obvious source of lights, it appeared to be emitted from the centres of the large white balls. There were pulsing cycles of lights going through the rooms as if each of the balls were addressed and their location in the overall melee was known by the computer program driving it all. It was a photogenic room and I stayed in here for a good while trying to find angles with nobody else in. I figured out also that if I photographed the floor of mirrored material it was creating an infinite loop.
Flower Dome
Moving on to the next installation it was into a domed room with a mirrored floor. The patterns and images being projected onto the dome were mirrored in the floor and as such it was very disconcerting. Floating In The Falling Universe of Flowers was one of the times I felt very unstable on my feet, I found that I had to look at the fixed people sitting in the centre of the room or laying on their backs looking up. I wouldn’t have been able to do this as I would have suffered from motion sickness almost straight away. I didn’t stay in this room longer than it took to snap a couple of photographs, before legging it into another dimly lit corridor with red lighting at foot level.
Ovoid At All Costs
After the corridor it was into a signed area where you could where some sliders, provided for you to wander around in the Moss Garden Of Resonating Microcosms looking at the mirrored blobs sat in a mossy covered garden, beneath a slatted roof opened up to the bright blue sky. They reflect light from around the scene and apparently if pushed over these “ovoids” slowly right themselves producing some light and sounds. I didn’t know this until I’d left the building and was going through the photographs. It was a strange place to be sure and I didn’t feel it was as immersive as the previous exhibits. If I’d known about the pushing over of the ovoids maybe it would have given it some more life, but I saw no-one else doing this either so it was a bit of non-event. It did remind me a little of the field of alien eggs in the Alien movie and I was half expecting something to open and eject a face hugger.
Floating Flowers
Returning the sliders to the shelf, they were useless anyway as the didn’t fit my size 12 hairy hobbit feet, it was time to move to the last room of the exhibition. We queued up outside a curtain until the people were finished and had left and then we walked into another mirrored room. We waited up against the wall and another group were sitting in front of us, on the mirrored floor underneath a collection of plants hanging from the ceiling. These plants were alive and growing whilst being cultivated whilst being suspended on strings. There were some wild images here and one of my favourite photos of the whole week shows a young steward monitoring behaviour, but her reflection above and below is reflected ad-infinitum. As my daughter put it when I showed her the photo “it’s a visual migraine but I love it”
With the shouts from the stewards of the Floating Flower Garden shouting that time was up we were then moved into place underneath the plants and then left to get used to the experience. It was a bit odd and not really my thing but it gave me the opportunity to capture a few more images of people in a weird place. The smell was overpowering and pungent from the plants almost as if to prove that they were alive and thriving. “When people continue to look closely at the flowers the flowers begin to look back at the people” it says on a mirrored wall caption but I don’t feel that I had this sort of connection and I felt that this was left til last as it wasn’t as enjoyable as the other exhibits in the building. Many people will disagree with me on this as they might love plants or the experience, but I just didn’t “get” the last two parts of the show.
Recommended?
After this it was time to head back to the changing room to pick up the contents of the locker, or start again from the beginning if you’d wanted to. I chose to move on as I had somewhere else to be in a short while. teamLab have done an amazing job of creating a truly wondrous exhibition of artwork and it is a must see when visiting Tokyo. They have also created teamLab Borderless which is over by Tokyo Tower but this wasn’t open in til February 2024, so I missed it by a couple of weeks. Looking online though, it does look fantastic and ultra immersive.. If I go back to Tokyo anytime soon I’ll be sure to drop in and experience this new attraction.
Tokyo Skytree
It was around 14:00 when I popped out of teamLab Planets and I milled around getting on and off trains to head over to the Oshiage Station near to the Tokyo Skytree, the World’s tallest freestanding broadcasting tower, which boasts an observation deck with 360-degree views of Tokyo Mega City.
I had a wander around Tokyo Skytree Town and all of the shops and restaurants in the area, looked at people on the Skytree ice rink falling and crashing into each other. Despite all of the shops selling all manner of items I saw nothing that I wanted. I was not being cheap on purpose but had hardly spent any money on shopping since getting to Tokyo. My ticket for the Skytree let me get up there at about 5pm and I was soon up on the Tembo Deck at 350 metres watching the sunset over Tokyo with Mount Fuji and Tokyo Tower being visible in the same view. The number of bridges around the city of Tokyo over waterways astounded me, as I hadn’t seen that many rivers. The ticket I had also let me up onto the Tembo Galleria at 450 metres up in the air.
The images from this tower are tricky to make as the windows are quite a distance from the pathway and it’s not easy to support a Canon 5D Mk IV with a 16-35mm lens hanging off the front. There was also a lot of light behind you as you looked outwards, whether it was a cafe, a shop or even a series of posters about other attractions, I felt that they prevented you getting the best possible view and photograph out of the glass, but I shouldn’t moan. It was simply awesome to be so far up in the air in Japan’s tallest structure.
Akiba Amble
At 18:30 I was back at the foot of the tower and after buying a postcard as a souvenir I headed out on the rail network again to see if I could visit Akihabara (Electric Town) in the dark as I thought it might have a different feel about it compared to the first day I was there in the morning. I jumped into Oshiage Station onto an Asakusa Line train to Ningyocho where I then transferred to a Hibiya Line Train to Akihabara getting there at around 8:30pm with a few unplanned diversions and walks around stations. taking photos of empty platforms and stairways.
At one point I found a large illuminated shop window display that was an LED video screen and I found that by adjusting the exposure for the screen it silhouetted the people walking past perfectly leading me to some decent images.
There were also a couple of images that I made of illuminated streets with figures walking in them that I thought would have been a million times better had there been a reflective sheen on the ground from a rainfall. But alas, I had zero rainfall all the time I was in Tokyo and this led to some pretty flat images that I’m working on. I’m going to try and work with different edits to obtain a shot that I’m really happy with, or I’ll just leave it and go back to Tokyo in a rainy season.
Wrapping Up The Day
Got back into the hotel at around 11pm and had a quick snack and drink before watching a bit of BBC News and then taking my film cameras out and about in Shinjuku to see if I could capture a few colour images. At around 2am I started feeling a bit knackered so headed back to the hotel again to catch some well needed sleep before the next days plan was put into effect.
I’d left the agenda/itinerary free for Thursday as I had a few things to do and wanted to work out a way to fit things in together. I had a plan to get to Yoyogi Park and see if I could visit the Shrine, before it closed this time. Then have a look around for the Gymnasium, bit of brutal architecture and then to The Metropolitan Government buildings with my Bronica ETRS late in the evening.
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