I genuinely love Kabukicho, from the brightly-decorated entrances to the less brightly-decorated hosts themselves. One might think that the area devoted to love hotels and host clubs in a city the size of Tokyo might be sleazy, but it really isn’t.
Spam From Japan
Live from Tokyo
On Christmas Day, having seen the Broadway musical Avenue Q at Tokyo International Forum, my partner and I walked to Asakusa to kill time before our turkey dinner reservation. Turkey is near-impossible to find in Japan, even at Christmas, so we were content with a 9:00pm seating. For a great post on Christmas in Japan and why KFC is so important, check out This Japanese Life.
Otherwise, enjoy the photos.
Photographs from the streets of Tokyo and Asakusa after the jump!
Click for a higher quality version
My trip to Tokyo Midtown was so successful I decided to visit another Christmas illumination, at Roppongi Hills. Like Midtown, you can walk from Shinjuku (about an hour) or from Roppongi Station (about five minutes). Roppongi Hills is a step away from a futuristic arcology and combines offices, apartments and empty spaces, not to mention an art gallery, observation deck and cinema. Oh, and shops.
One of the first sights was of an open space lit up with rows of white plastic lilies. Carefully-managed waterfalls surrounded the area and the ground was planks of wood with a lot of give to them. Nice, but not much compared to Midtown’s field of shooting stars.
A little further on, I saw a group of people all taking pictures in the same direction. As I got closer and saw the angle, I realised was it was. Tokyo Tower, perfectly framed in Christmas lights. That wasn’t the only spot for the most cliché photograph of a Japanese Christmas, there was another further ahead too.
Inside a building, a small Christmas market had been set up, decorated with Santa and snowmen. They even had a stylised manger set up, which made me happy. Sometimes I feel disconnected from the corporate version of Christmas presented in Japan through Disney-tinted glasses, but this was an echo of a family tradition from my home country. Anyway, five hundred yen got me a paper cup of hot apple wine. There were also German sausages and beer for sale here, plus Christmas decorations.
I never used to think much of Christmas light displays. When I looked up festivals on sites like Rurubu, the illuminations were always clogging up the listings and crowding out the ‘real’ events. The other day, however, I decided to see the illuminations at Tokyo Midtown shopping centre, titled “Midtown Christmas 2010 ~ Dareka ga Dareka no Santa Claus.”
That it had an actual title should have been a clue.
The first thing you see is a garden full of trees lit up in Christmas lights, a mixture of yellow, blue and purple. With the Tokyo skyline as the backdrop, I was pleasantly surprised by how futuristic it seemed. If you ever hear me saying something like ‘wow, this could be straight out of a novel about a dystopian future!’ then it’s a compliment.
What I didn’t realise, was that I hadn’t even got to the main event.
In front of a structure vaguely reminiscent of the alien mothership from Alien (once you see it you can’t unsee it), was a sea of blue lights. Classical music played in the background, but it was mostly drowned out by people yelling how pretty it was. The floor lights changed into spirals and even appeared to rise up as steam poured out of the centre. Ahead of us, the trees lit up and stars seemed to shoot past them.
I continued onwards and up onto a bridge that led into the shopping centre. It was crowded with people watching the display from above, who hadn’t seemed to notice they had a perfect view of Tokyo Tower behind them.
Inside Tokyo Midtown were more illuminations. There was a mirrored box which turned the coloured lights inside it into an infinite matrix. And neon tubes which were just the right distance apart that when they lit up in the right way, they suggested Christmas landscapes and messages.
If, like me, you don’t go to Roppongi much and don’t know where Midtown is, it’s just in front of Roppongi Station on the Oedo Line. However, I found it not too difficult to walk from Shinjuku Station, using a good map on my phone. The illuminations are, of course, free to see and will continue until December 26th.
Rumour has it that Space Battleship Yamato star, Kimura Takuya offered to reduce his own salary so more could be spent on the film itself and better position it as a rival to the likes of Avatar. True or not, the movie cost around two billion yen to make – a huge amount in Japan, even though it doesn’t come close to the most expensive Hollywood films. Was it worth it?
I didn’t know much about Space Battleship Yamato going into the movie, except it was based on an anime series by Leiji Matsumoto. If pressed, I would have said it was about a battleship named Yamato in space. While the ending may be as familiar to Japanese audiences as the connection between Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker is to me, I wasn’t aware of it. It was a shock.
The opening was stunning. For most of the action of the first half, they seem to have eschewed the standard CGI in favour of model shots with enhanced backgrounds featuring the kind of star formations you can find on NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day. At least, I believe these to be model shots, despite the advertised “80% CGI” claim. If it’s really CGI, it’s brilliant.
There is also one incredible shot of the underground city where Kodai lives. It appears on screen for maybe ten seconds, but the detail is all there.
The basic plot is simple, but the specifics are tough to follow, possibly because the Japanese is a level above what is normally required. There’s a mixture of nautical and sci-fi terms which are fairly challenging and you just know that they would consist of a string of ten kanji if written down. I had the same problem with Ghost in the Shell: Innocence.
The earth has been scorched beyond repair by aliens, and humanity only has about a year before the radiation reaches their underground city. However, despite the destruction of all greenery, there are still cats. One day, a capsule said to be from a planet called Iscandar is dropped on Earth and is found to contain a message which states there is a way to reduce the radiation levels. The same message instructs humanity on how to equip Yamato with a hadou engine which allows them to warp through space from Earth to Iscandar.
Kodai is a former pilot and the younger brother of a space captain who was killed in combat. He re-enlists and bravely notes the ship doctor has a cat. Once aboard, Captain Okita eventually recognises Kodai’s earnestness and sense of duty and hands the ship over to him on his deathbed. Kodai faces difficult decisions as captain, but the final one is the most difficult of all and the film stays with him throughout his decision-making process.
As for the final scene… I didn’t know it and I’ll assume you don’t want to know it either. All I will say is that we’re in flu season in Japan and there was coughing throughout the film until that final moment. The music dropped away and so did the sounds of the audience members. Complete silence throughout the theatre.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen this combination before in a live action movie — a hard sci-fi aesthetic, space opera action and the morality of a Japanese war film. The mix is unique and visually amazing, with a real ‘lived-in’ feel to the technology.
The cat survives, by the way.
Official Space Battleship Yamato website (Japanese)
“Star Blazers” Anime Site with Movie Updates (English)
Or, if you want to see more movie reviews by me, check out Ghibli’s Karigurashi no Arrietty, Kamui Gaiden or the entire ‘movies’ tag.