Wagashi

Wagashi is the Japanese style of cake making. The outside is made of sweet rice gluten and flour and the filling is either red bean or a paste made of pickled cherry blossom. There are a lot of different techniques that can be used to decorate the cakes. Strainers, scissors, saran wrap, and a comb can be used to manipulate the malleable gluten and create a lot of new shapes.

The texture of the cakes is smooth and a little grainy. The taste isn't very sweet, but it's a nice snack with macha, powdered green tea.

I made these! The brown one is shaped like a potato!

Experimental Filmmaker Tomonari Nishikawa

Three Frames Create a Triangle when played at 24 FPS

Constant sideways, diagonal, and upside down images of buildings and windows simulate the feeling of falling. A flash of grass means you've hit the ground. The images of a city flash at you quickly in Apollo, like the confused depictions of life and surroundings before a suicide. It also simulates the hyper speed of driving down a highway and viewing the country side through a rear view mirror.

In Market Street, images of consumption overwhelm the senses, numbing and deranging them. Neon signs during the day time, in black and white, lose their ability to stun, when repeated over and over. Grates and images of textured sidewalks pass by as if you're actually walking along them. A montage of squares and then of circles. How long is Market Street? It feels neverending. A last shot slowly pans across a street and stops, giving us a brief glimpse into the lives of the walkers, then back to the grind of skyscrapers and decorative trees until we descend into black, into night.

Sketch Films (#1,2,3)

An arbitrary headline is given at the beginning of each film (each day). A repetion of just drain covers and man holes could potentially go on for minutes, each different from the last. A documentation of various public works and city structures. The curved necks of streetlights are compared to bent tree branches one frame to the next. A barrage of numbers on the next day. Signs and lines alternate. Pausing at any moment reveals a hidden world that could have been missed in the flurry of images. It reminds one of the sci-fi learning process: a barrage of seemingly meaningless images cut up and juxtaposed and flashed before the eyes as rapidly as possible. Sketch 3 reveals a sideways city of bricks and art deco. Buildings spin as they change positions each frame. All filmed on either 8 or 16 mm in black and white.
Nishikawa is a strong believer in the analog method of cutting and splicing, though he doesn't often edit anything he does. "I will be dead before film is dead".

Protip: try to sync these up to music, they're all silent.
View Market Street through this website:
http://www.tomonarinishikawa.com/film.htm#MS

Fake Food

It costs more than real food

The district of Kappabashi, near Asakusa station, is dedicated to restaurant supplies, specifically fake food. It's very difficult to find a restaurant in the area that sells actual food.

Ghibli Museum

The Studio Ghibli Museum in Mitaka, Tokyo, isn't just a rehashing of classic Miyazaki films. It offers so much more in terms of never before seen in America shorts. There are flip books of all the shorts, and a movie theatre where I saw the sequel to My Neighbor Totoro called Mei and the Kittenbus. The museum is laid out like a house with rooms that are decorated as if illustrators were only recently occupying them. There are original watercolors and preliminary sketches from all of the movies decorating the walls.

Unfortunately, there is no photography allowed inside. It's understandable, but the museum is so popular that it's hard to get in. Instead of getting just a ticket, I had a reservation to go to the museum at a certain time. There are a lot of great exhibits, original watercolors, and stills from the movies. Your ticket can be exchanged for 3 original frames from one of the Ghibli movies. There was a heavy focus on My Neighbor Totoro, more than any of the other movies. I got two movie posters for future Ghibli movies: one is based on the story of Princess Kaguya, and the other is an adaptation of the children's book Anne of Green Gables. Neither are Miyazaki, but instead are being directed by Takahata, who I recently found out was the producer of Little Nemo in Slumberland.

Design Festa

Design Festa is an up and coming gallery in fashionable Harajuku. Just three weeks ago, this gallery hosted one of the largest art shows in Asia. Design Festa usually hosts local Japanese artists, and the whole atmosphere of the gallery is relaxed and comfortable. There is a large outdoor cafe area where you can get a coffee or a White Russian (like I did, haha), and even a covered area where you can eat.

The gallery is a converted house so many people's gallery spaces are actually converted rooms like one woman had displayed her photography in a kitchen, another artist displayed their pieces in a bathroom, etc.

There are permanent installments like paintings on the walls which far from distracting from the current installments, lend to the gallery's feeling of warmth and relaxation. The artists are friendly, and a lot asked me to pose with their work and put it on their websites. Instead of being snobs, they are more focused on creating good pieces and getting their work out to the public.

Ichthomania

You see the Tokyo Tsukiji Fish Market on many travel shows as one of the best tourists destinations in Japan. These are all untrue. While the market might be an interesting place in theory, as a tourist, you're just getting in everyone's way. You can tell that the workers are resentful as they splash buckets of brine on your legs and flick off scales onto your clothes. The market doesn't open to the public until 9:30 am and by that time, they've finished selling off all the giant tuna, the whale meat, and the dolphins, and all the sketchy stuff that could draw negative attention from the tourists. All you see is fish heads and eels, and the smell is overwhelming.

A resentful man with a knife as long as a sword. He cut off the heads of fish very menacingly

The restaurants around the area, though they boast tasty sushi and barbecued eel, are filthy and crowded. There is a smattering of shops selling overpriced tourist wares. Everything's wet, slimy, and smells horrible. I do not recommend you go to the fish market no matter how many cooking shows you watched that made it seem great.

The one good thing about Tsukiji was the cute mini shrine they had outside the market. It had two lion's heads, one black and one gold, that fell off their bodies after a big earthquake. These kitsune spirits were off to the side, and you could sit in front of them and relax as they mesmerized you with cunning eyes.

Rent-a-Neko!

Recently, I visited a Cat Cafe in Odaiba, Tokyo! It was about $7 per half hour with drink included, but there was a great variety of  cats, like Siamese, Munchkins, and Scottish Folds. You weren't allowed to pick up or harass any of the cats, and there was a list of rules to go over before you entered. Basically, as long as you weren't mean to the cats, you could hang out with them, and they would come get up on your lap and let you pet them. Renting a cat is a good way to experience having a pet without the upkeep, or if you live in an apartment that doesn't allow it. It's not like a kennel. You can't adopt one of the cats that you like, and they're all really well taken care of and not just crated all the time. The cafes open at around 7 am and most stay open until about 10 pm.

The place is very clean, and the way it smells, you wouldn't know that twenty cats live here. The cats have a lot of really nice areas to play and be cute in. There are a lot of railings and ledges and other cool things for them to climb on.

Two days ago, I visited another cafe called Prince Cat Cafe in Shimokitazawa which was much smaller, but had higher quality cats. By this I mean, the cats were a lot sweeter and better breeds (long hair Bengals, American curls, more Scottish Folds). Drinks are always included, and they have toys so you can play with the cats. As anyone who knows a crazy cat lady can attest, the smell of twenty cats is horrible, but the cafe had no smell. The floor is clean and there's no cat hair stuck to all the surfaces.

Cat cafes are the coolest when you miss your cats back at home or just aren't allowed to keep any in your apartment. Some people go everyday. It's a good place for a date, or just to hang out with your friends, or with your cat friends, haha!

Visit the website to get a good idea of what kind of cats are offered and what kind of place the cat cafe is.

http://www.cat-prince.com/