Skip to main content

Ghibli Ho!

Aaah, Ghibli, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways...
On Wednesday, while my host dad was still in town for New Year's, we made a family excursion of it and all went to the Ghibli Museum in Mitaka. Having been there two years ago when my family went to Japan for YaleGALE over the summer, I was excited to be going back.

So it was early on Wednesday morning when the family (and one of my host sister's friends--Miho--who went with me to Harajuku way back in August) set off to the museum by (of course) train.

That is the Ghibli Museum. Unfortunently, the museum doesn't let you take photos inside of it, so I can't show you its wonders, I can only describe some of them. When you go in (and your ticket is for a specific date and time since a limited amount of people are allowed in the museum each day) you are given a movie ticket for their short-films theater. The movie we got to see was a short animated film about an old couple living on top of a mountain, going through their dull day-to-day routine. One night, the old man spots five mice walking like people and dressed like sumo wrestlers heading off into the woods, so he follows them and watches them get creamed by five much larger white mice. The next day, he and his wife make a bunch of fattening foods and leave them for the six grey mice to eat. Then, they go to the woods again to watch the rematch. The match went down to the wire, with the final spar as the tiebreaker. It was, naturally, an epic battle...which ended in the grey mouse winning. Then the old couple and the grey mice return, laughing hysterically, to their mountain cabin. The end. It was a very cute story, and I'm pleased to say I understood all the Japanese.

The rest of the museum has a bunch of animation displays, as well as sketches from all of their movies, which are just gorgeous. If you haven't seen a Ghibli movie...my god are you missing out!

If you climb to the top of those stairs, you reach the roof, where there is a giant statue of the robotic warrior from one of Ghibli's earlier films, Laputa: The Castle in the Sky. (Not my favorite of all of Hayao Miyazaki's films, at one point I have a vivid memory of my brother and I keeping a tally of how many times the female protagonist screamed in fear...I think we had gotten up in the 50s or 60s...)

There's also a block from the hidden weapons in Laputa that you can sit on and whatnot.

Also, to all my relatives who so generously gave me Christmas spending money, I used it to buy this:
A pair of earrings from the movie Kiki's Delivery Service, which has Jiji, the magical talking cat and Kiki's ribbon. So thank you very much!

To go home we walked to Kitijouji station, through a very beautiful park.


We had a late lunch and then took the train home. I was very, very happy. One of my Japan goals can now be checked off! Yay! Coming up next: hanging out with several sets of friends and Giant Buddhas.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Enoshima: The Heavenly Maiden and the Dragon

This past Monday was a national holiday -- Mountain Day -- so, of course, Troy and I headed to the beach instead. Well, to an island near a beach since (as some of you may know) I'm not exactly the beach-going type. Plus I'd just climbed Mount Fuji, which was more than enough mountain for me. Enoshima is a small island off the coast of Kanagawa Prefecture, fairly near Kamakura. It's connected to the mainland via a bridge, so you can just stroll on over from the train station. The entire island is dedicated to Benzaitan, the goddess of everything that flows -- time, water, speech, music, and knowledge. According to the "Enoshima Engi," (a history of the shrines and temples on Enoshima) there's also a legend associated with the creation of the island involving Benzaitan and a dragon. In brief, the area around Enoshima was once wracked by violent storms and earthquakes. Eventually the tumult ended and a heavenly maiden (Benzaitan) descended from the clouds....
2 comments
Read more

Homecoming

This is it. It's Friday, February 3rd and in less than 24 hours I will leave this house for Tokyo train station, which will take me to the airport, which will take me...home. Most of this week has been taken up with goodbyes: to schoolmates and teachers, and later, close friends. There were tears involved. I think the photos will do it a lot more justice than I could: Kohei, from tennis group. All the tennis people got together for dinner at an okonomiyaki (think cabbage pancake, with yummy stuff like shrimp in it) but first we went to a boardwalk which had nighttime light shows. Top: Anime Club. They threw a small party for me, where we ate lots of food and watched (what else) anime and talked. Bottom: one of my English classes. They asked me to teach them an American game for the last day, so I taught everyone how to play Heads-Up 7-Up. They were pretty good at it. The other exchange student, Nom, and my Japanese teacher. The last view of school: the walk leading u...
13 comments
Read more

Reflections on Typhoon Hagibis

As some of you may have known, this past weekend Typhoon Hagibis blew through Japan, specifically the Kanto region where Tokyo is. It had the grim distinction of being the strongest/most deadly storm to hit the region since Typhoon Ida in 1958. Typhoon classification scales are confusing (and, interestingly, the only difference between a "typhoon" and a "hurricane" is the naming convention of the region in which it occurs ), but at one point Hagibis was classified as a "violent typhoon," the strongest category the Japan Meteorological Agency has, roughly the equivalent of a Category 5 hurricane. Fortunately it didn't make landfall at that strength, downgrading to a Category 3 equivalent storm. Personally, although Typhoon Hagibis (which means, appropriately, "speed" in Tagalog) was not the first typhoon I've (pardon the pun) weathered here in Japan, it was most certainly the most extreme. Most typhoons don't directly hit Kanto, inst...
1 comment
Read more