Day 17, in which only elementary school children may ride the cat bus

We rose early and took the train west to Mitaka to visit the Ghibli Museum, an institution established by Studio Ghibli's founder and primary animator Hayao Miyazaki. The blurb had a lot to say about Miyazaki's vision of the ideal museum: that it should be unpretentious, should be explicable to even those unfamiliar with the studio's work, that it should both entertain and enlighten, blah, blah and blah. I'm not sure how many of these boxes it ticked, but we certainly approached it on the assumption it would have more to say about good curating than it would about the Studio Ghibli films (of which Paul has seen none).

On the whole, the museum is a bit of a failure and its blurb is significantly overblown. Its primary success is the building itself, which was designed by the Ghibli animators (people who have created some of the best imaginary buildings on film) and which imitated a large Edwardian mansion. The central hall rose up through four stories, overseen by landings, balconies, criss-crossing walkways, half-height doorways and oddly-shaped windows at different levels, with a caged metal staircase rising in one corner and old-fashioned lift in the other, all designed to create the impression that there was an endless maze of passageways and rooms to explore. The attention to detail was also impressive, with stylised scenes from their movies painted on ceilings, and a spectacularly successful series of stained glass windows telling the legend of Totoro as though it were the seven stages of the cross.

Our favourite room was the cinema, where they showed a specially commissioned Ghibli movie (about an elderly Japanese couple who sought refuge from their mundane farming existence by supporting the sumo-wrestling ambitions of the mice which infested their house – a film only viewable at the museum, the blurb boasted, although I found you could also buy the DVD in the gift shop).

Where the museum failed was absolutely everything else: a third of the rooms in the building were given over to toilets (so much so that when Paul and I took up the invitation to explore the museum and make our own story, we slipped through a miniature door in one wall and ten seconds later found ourselves in the ladies' loos – not entirely a wasted voyage, for we learned that Japanese women use urinals), while the exhibition spaces were quite lazily conceived, comprising as they did lots of original art work from the movies surrounded by large amounts of junk (ash trays, model aeroplanes, books about Scotland) which were not related to the films, but were intended to “inspire the imagination”. We were not suitably inspired, and were instead disappointed that the museum had little to say about what inspired Miyazaki or the actual process of animation at the studio.

There were two other things to excite me: on the top floor, in the far south-west corner, was a life-size cat bus to play on (elementary school children only, alas), while in the first room on the ground floor was a 3D zoetrope: a series of spinning models revolving at the same frequency as a flashing strobe light, creating the impression of 3D animation. The cat bus prowled, Totoro jumped up and down with his umbrella, that wee girl did some skipping and a whole host of rabbits gambolled in between the various characters. Given Studio Ghibli's strong reputation for innovation, this was precisely the sort of thing I had expected to fill the museum.

We left and ate a variety of baked goods outside the station, before taking the train to Tokyo Station and embarking on an architectural tour of Ginza. Thus we saw Tokyo Station itself (a great century-old red brick construction, much neglected but now under restoration) and the superb Tokyo Internationl Forum down the road (a huge upturned boat-shaped atrium made from vast quantities of steel and earthquake-resistant glass). We also tried to visit Frank Lloyd Wright's Imperial Hotel – known once upon a time as the 'Jewel of the Orient' – but it seems they tore that down in the 1960s to make way for a large concrete box filled with bad carpeting and seedy looking businessmen. A bit of detective work led us to a surviving pillar in the rear lobby and some carved volcanic rock by the bank of elevators from the original facade, as well as a single photograph of how the old hotel had looked. We had until this point been sad that such a great work had been lost, but seeing this photograph disabused us of any such notion. Wright – readers may recall – is very famous for his series of prairie houses, which are inspired to a great extent by traditional domestic Japanese architecture. So what did Wright use as his inspiration when building the Imperial? Why, the Aztecs of course! It was utterly hideous, and if they hadn't pulled it down in the 1960s I'd have signed a petition today requesting that they do so now.

We went for a quick drink in the hotel's Old Imperial Bar – which was supposedly inspired by the original Wright design – but it was a dark and oppressive 1970s-style room populated largely by Japanese businessmen talking business, ignoring their wives, smoking, and drinking whisky. The bar was ultimately reminiscent of Wright only to the extent that they used his name a lot in the drinks menu, and since it was also £10 a glass of very bad sancerre we soon called it a day.

There has been a lot of talk recently about the launch of Sony's new 3D television, so while in the Ginza area we popped into the Sony showroom to have a quick look. Readers with long memories might recall that I am no great fan of 3D cinema, but it was impressive to see the effect pulled off on a single high definition screen. The movie we watched involved a polar bear's bottom looming into the room, and I can think of no better use for 3D technology.

For dinner, we went to Sometaro in Asakusa, our first traditional Japanese restaurant (where you have to take off your shoes at the door and place them into a traditional Japanese plastic carrier bag, and then sit on a cushion on the floor coz they've made the tables too low) to eat Okonomi-yaki. Okonomi-yaki are persistently described in English as 'Japanese pancakes', but as with the ones you get in London they're pretty much just thick (and slightly doughy) omelets. Unlike the restaurant we've been to in London, here we got to make them ourselves and so while we didn't much enjoy eating them it was super fun greasing up the hotplate, frying up the food and mixing in the various condiments. Fortunately we only ordered two – not three as the guidebook had suggested – as Paul later reported that if he'd had to eat any more he would have vomited onto the hot plate (not, I suppose, that anyone would have been able to tell the difference by looking).

The following morning Paul commented that the Okonomi-yaki weren't so bad. "At least we didn't vomit or have the shits," he mused.


NB: photos now restored to the rest of the blog, thanks to our friends at Photobucket