I also saw this sign in Ueno Park, with a whole bunch of rules for flower-viewing season, which ended earlier this month in Tokyo.

In particular, I like “Do not use an electric generator and karaoke”. It reminds me of anime scenes that I’ve seen in the past where they have a karaoke machine during blossom viewing. I never really thought about it before.

I passed by a certain temple along the way too which had a peony garden and was also charging people to go in and view them. Unlike Nezu Shrine, this temple had walls around the outside of the garden so people couldn’t see it unless they paid 1,000 yen, and it wasn’t a particularly large garden to boot either (not that I could actually see it). I also went to the main shrine of the temple and they were also charging 500 yen for their goshuin, and it was also not a hand-drawn one, AND it was also not a special one (a special purple-text one which was only available on the 5th, 15th, and 25th of the month whereas today was only the 24th). so not only did I not buy anything from them, but I made sure to not include any photos or mention of them in the blog post either. I think some of these Japanese temples and monks have lost their way a bit over time.

Anyway, one way or another, I got to the Tokyo National Museum after a lot of walking. There were lots of people here, both inside and outside. Admission price was 2,100 yen for a ticket to both the normal and special exhibitions, but they said that the University student entrance fee ws discounted to 1,300 yen instead, and I flashed my student/staff card from the University of Alberta to them and they accepted it! Never mind that I’m not specifically a student this semester. I was within the past 12 months and have not graduated yet, so that should be good enough right?

The museum had interesting umbrella holders:

There were a couple different versions of the umbrella rack, and I liked that they have an entire key and lock system for umbrellas.

The thing about museums and taking pictures of the exhibits is that many people take pictures of stuff in it, as though they were going to go home and then study all the exhibits and their notes afterwards, but no one actually ever goes back and looks at it afterwards themselves, never mind any sort of audience, say perhaps 200-500 years in the future. So instead, I limited myself to one exhibit per gallery that I took a photo of, and then just spent the rest of the time actually absorbing the exhibits (like a vacuum cleaner). Also a good maybe half of the gallery halls, and everything in the special exhibit section, which was about Honen and Pure Land Buddhism (a topic I’ve actually studied a little bit on in my East Asian cultural classes in the past couple years), prohibited photography anyway, which seemed antithetical to the goal of a museum to me as an archivist, but whatever.

Anyway, I then took those pictures and cut them down even further, distilling them to just a handful of photos to present here. For starters, there were a lot of buddha statues and related artifacts in various parts of the two museum buildings, though seeing just a row of Buddha heads by themselves was quite a sight.

There was also a mummy and a human-shaped cartonnage that it was originally encased in:

And a money tree ornament from Ancient China that I liked:

Not every gallery was a showcase of ancient artifacts. One of the exhibits in an interactive area featured a bunch of cushions with what apparently were some sayings from Egypt, Mesopotamia, and China.

I flipped them all to read them. According to them,

• If you dream of a huge cat, you will have a good harvest.
• If you dream of drinking water, you will live a long life.
• If you dream of entering a room in wet clothes, a war will begin.
• If you dream of eating an apple, your wish will come true.
• If you dream of wearing funeral clothes, your property will increase.
• If you dream of eating a pear, you will starve.
• If you dream of flying, you will get back what you lost.
• If you dream of drowning in a river, you will be purified of evil.
• If you dream of catching a bird, your property will be taken away.
• If you dream of mountains and trees, you have a bad liver.

Okay then. Next up, this exhibit of a “human-shaped object” from India (which was in the Southeast Asia section for some reason).

I really liked this basket bowl and would like one, it was probably the item that moved me the most in the entire museum.

I thought this artist was sort of cleverly cheating his way into a big commission, as these were huge panels:

I lined up this sutra case with a five-storey clay pagoda behind and was somewhat amused:

And I found this room dedicated to Prince Takamado’s netsuke collection, which is a collection of sculptural accessories similar to button fasteners.

This was neat because Prince Takamado was the one who sponsored the Japan Centre in the University of Alberta, which arranged my Ritsumeikan study abroad trip last year, and Princess Takamado had apparently been to the University before to give a lecture on those netsuke. I didn’t manage to go to that lecture though, but I do remember reading about it in a newsletter.

The museum also had a gift shop, which was laid out very weirdly, with a ramp (starting on the near right side of the photo) leading up to a second level (far side of photo) and then a steep flight of stairs (far left side) heading back down from that second level back to the main one.

In that gift shop, I found the exact type of CD that I like to look for and purchase, so I bought it with all the ephemeral money that I saved from not entering flower gardens today:

So that was nice. The museum was also pushing this mascot character hard, but the character is so ugly that I didn’t even want a plushie of it:

Though I like the cactuar sort of posture that it is posed in. Cactuar, from the Final Fantasy game series, are actually cute though.

Finally, there was an interactive station where you could use stamps to build an ukiyo-e (woodblock) style picture on a provided sheet of paper — each woodblock contained a section of the overall picture and were used as reusable (and somewhat customizable, by mixing and matching) stamps to create the image on whatever the final medium was meant to be.

I was utterly exhausted after this and the 30 minute warning bell before closing time had long gone off by then, so I made my way home. I stopped at a restaurant called Renge Shokudou Toshu back in the Jujo shopping alley and had another nice teishoku (set meal) for dinner:

It was delivered by a nice robot.

I’ve eaten mostly Korean, Chinese, and Taiwanese food since coming to Japan, oddly enough. I should branch out. Maybe into Indian food!

One of the shops near the shop that I live in is a used CD and DVD store called Dean, and I picked up a couple cheap CDs from there, literally four of them for 506 yen, two that were on my wishlist and two that were just randomly there and looked interesting while being much too cheap.

I also picked up a couple of socks from a 100 yen store, because I didn’t have enough to cover every day of my travel between washes and I was already getting blisters on my feet from all the walking I had done in the first two days of my trip alone. That wasn’t a good sign. I also picked up my first bottle of banana milk, a drink that I’d discovered and craved from previous trips to Japan.

I slept later in the night than last night, but it was still far too early in general, although I had both a video call from Zian as well as a weekly one-on-one meeting with Ronnie that I had to be up for, so I ended up taking a nap, waking up to do those two calls, and then falling asleep again not too long afterwards. Exhaustion, perhaps in combination with jet lag, is still very much a factor for me so far on the trip though. But it’s probably a good thing overall since it means I’m getting a lot out of my time here.

Also, this poster was on the bathroom wall in my lodging:

Why the fish and piano at the end??? (And the cake at the start, I guess)?