Tokyo- day seven

August 1st was a great day of sightseeing and museum hopping. The day started out at the Edo-Tokyo Museum, which chronicles the history of Tokyo, formerly called Edo. It was a fantastic museum with many wonderful interactive exhibitits, models, and information.




















One of my favorite sections addressed the print culture of Edo, including a life-size model of a print shop, seen below.





















Me with the interactive water carrier, how strong I am....
















Full size model of a kabuki theatre.





















The Meiji area of the museum.




















JASCers at the museum.
















Alissa on the awesome escalator. It was flat in the middle and in a big red tube in the middle of the museum.
















Me and Marie with our best sumo faces.
















Waiting for the train with the Edo-Tokyo Museum behind me.















Crossing the Sumida River.
















We had lunch at the Asahi Beer headquarters.




















After lunch we had a free afternoon for sightseeing. I started at Asakusa Temple.















JASCers at the temple.

































The fountain where you can clense before entering the temple, and the insense, which I was told makes one smarter. I made sure to sniff as much as I could. I also got my fortune, which was good! Horray!




































After the temple we headed to Yasukuni Shrine, which memorializes Japan's war dead. It is controversial with Chinese and Koreans, and because Koizumi, the last prime minister of Japan worshipped there.




































Interesting political material for sale near the shrine.
















The shrine itself.

















While to me the shrine was not offensive, the museum that was located next to it had some pretty nationalist materials inside. I was facinated to see which labels were translated into English, and which were only in Japanese. It was also interesting to see the difference in how the wars of the 19th century were depicted and how WWII was depicted.















After having discussions at the thought-provoking museum, we headed to Akihabara, the electronics area of Tokyo.
















We visited both electronics shops and otaku shops (geek shops) to do some shopping. The following picture is an otaku shop, filled with toys.





















After a very long day, we had a quick dinner before heading home.