Yesterday, after a very pleasant monorail trip across Tokyo Bay to the reclaimed island of Odaiba, I went on my lonesome up to the Tokyo National Museum in Ueno, which was really interesting. Loads of good exhibits, from 6th-century Buddhist statues to traditional Japanese art to samurai swords. Maybe it was more interesting than it sounds. Some of it was quite odd actually; one building was dedicated to the whole of Asia, not just Japan, with Korean pottery, Russian cooking utensils and Egyptian mummies all rubbing shoulders together.
I entered the first display room just in time to see an American man have a quite spectacular fall. As he was running down the stairs he tripped on the last step, staggered across the room for two or three seconds as he tried to stay on his feet, spraying his belongings over a wide radius as he did so, and then finally hit the ground and barrel rolled several times. Incredibly, I seemed to be the only one who noticed this tremendous commotion; I retrieved his jeans from a statue of the Buddha (he was carrying a spare pair, the fall wasn't quite that spectacular) and made sure he hadn't broken any bones (if he had, of course, I would have merely gone to find somebody vastly more qualified), and he pretty much thought I was a saint. Such was the nature of the museum that we kept bumping into each other on the way round after that. I think he had elected not to divulge his embarrassing episode to his wife, because when she was looking his face never betrayed any sign of recognition, but the moment her back was turned he would throw me a weak but whole-hearted smile and a thumbs-up.
After the museum, I went to a shrine in Ueno Park that I found profoundly moving. In the aftermath of the atomic blast in Hiroshima, a man from Tokyo went to the city to search for his relatives; at his father's house, he found only flaming wreckage. He lit a candle on the fire, and decided to keep it burning as a permanent reminder of what had happened. The flame eventually found its way to Ueno, where it quietly continues to burn today. Looking upon it was really rather sobering. I have my own views on nuclear weapons, and why they are, perversely, an important instrument of world peace, but there's a big difference between understanding something intellectually and understanding something emotionally, and it's very important to keep the awful realities of these contraptions in mind when discussing them. You can't fail to do that when looking at this light that never goes out. Beside it there were some inscriptions written by survivors of the attack,
one of which I found particularly emotive: 'I felt a vibration, I looked up, and I saw the sky explode over the city of Hiroshima'.
On an altogether lighter note, we went that evening for drinks at the Park Hyatt hotel, which is, as well you know, where they filmed Lost in Translation. As well as being brilliant because you can go 'look! that's where he sits
when he has breakfast!' and so on, the views from the 52nd-floor bar are pretty sensational. So that was a great evening.
Well, I guess, goodbye, and enjoy my jacket which you stole...from me.
- Adam
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