Since being here I’ve planned quite a few outings into Tokyo - the list of things to do and see doesn’t seem to be shrinking. Which is a good thing. One of those has been a trip to Tokyo Bay, and we finally got round to it this week. Good timing too, it was absolutely boiling and a perfect day to go and get some fresh sea air.

Tokyo Bay is pretty massive, and one of its most popular areas has to be Yokohama, which is technically not in Tokyo. In Tokyo itself there is however Odaiba a part of town built on reclaimed land and with a distinctive futuristic feel to it. Hell the main train station is called Tokyo Teleport!

As soon as we arrived, and after having read a bit of the guide on the way there, the first thing that hit me as we walked out into the sunlight is how similar this area is to the Docklands in London. Another reclaimed area, Docklands stands out amongst the sprawling London East End - not least because it is home to Canary Wharf. It stands out mainly because it’s so ‘clean’, nice looking and depending on where you go quite ‘futuristic’ in feel. Lots of big buildings and skyscrapers, lots of glass and reflective material, nice canals, shops and the only part of the London transport system which isn’t actually crap - the DLR, or Docklands Light Railway. An independent network of automated trains which take you all over the area.

Thing is while Docklands is definitely a nice part of town, it also feels quite alien. It just doesn’t feel like London, it’s too clean and nice looking. It’s an area built and designed primarily for businesses, and it feels that way. There isn’t any real human feeling to most of it (apart from a couple of nice spots here and there). And the further along you go into the Docklands, towards the so far less developed and regenerated areas (like Beckton or Woolwich), the more you start to see how all this futuristic niceness is encroaching over living areas, which are for the most part run down and ignored. How long that will last is anyone’s guess. When I first started going to the Beckton area when I was at uni it was a proper hole, nothing to do or see, but as the years have gone by it has started to become more and more developped, though the human feeling that you get in so much of London was still missing last time I was there.

Anyways, Odaiba is definitely not too dissimilar in feeling to Docklands - lots of buildings and skyscrapers, lots of glass, and not a lot of human feeling on first look. It’s also a pretty business area, with a massive convention centre (the Tokyo Big Sight) and the Fuji TV headquarters. Odaiba definitely has a futuristic feel to it, and while there are other parts of town that share this feel, like say Shinjuku, they however have a lot more of the mix of old and new which makes Tokyo so appealing. This mix however is not present in Odaiba. In a whole day there I didn’t see any temples or shrines, any little shops or food stalls. Or anything that I’ve come to take for granted as a definite sign of Tokyo’s unique clash and mix of eras and times. Though there is a big Onsen outdoor park in Odaiba, full of traditional buildings, but again this is done more with the intention of recreating a lost era rather than being an actual place that has stood there for time. And that’s what Odaiba has a lot of - things pretending to be from some other era or somewhere else.

Odaiba does have a lot more than Docklands though - for a start there is a massive beach on the north side of town, which curves around and leads to a really nice park, sitting in the middle of the water. That was our first port of call, and with the blazing sun it was a lovely walk and sight. The air feels a little fresher, and it’s such an odd feeling to be walking along a beach in such a huge megalopolis. The beach is surrounded by flats that reach quite high on one side, and by the more business and shopping end of Odaiba on the other. On one stretch of the beach is also where you’ll find a replica of the Statue of Liberty, :lol: .

That’s another thing Odaiba has (no not the Statue of Liberty) - shopping. It’s not just a business area, but also a huge shopping area. Basically there isn’t much else in Odaiba apart from huge shopping malls, business centres and offices, attractions and some parks. Oh there is a tennis forest and a sports stadium too as well as some museums, but we didn’t get a chance to check those out. For the most part though Odaiba is just one huge shopping and business area - which just adds to this weird feeling as you walk around. As Ella put it, it feels like you’re in America. And it really does.

The malls are truly on some American standard - there are 3 major mall complexes surrounding the Tokyo Teleport station and central area of Odaiba. Next to the beach on the north side is the Decks complex (regrouping 2 shopping malls and an indoor amusement park) and Aqua City. On the southern side is Palette Town and Mega Web. Even the names sound American :lol:.

Not only do these malls offer the kind of overbloated consumerism you’ve come to expect from American style malls, complete with the total lack of a human feel, but they also offer most of the main attractions that are in Odaiba.

We spent part of the day in Decks - mainly because I was interested in checking out some of the attractions the mall had to offer. I’ve never been one for malls, I find them to be way to inhuman and just kinda boring. Sure consuming can be fun, but I’d much rather spend hours trawling from shop to shop in a part of town where things aren’t so faceless and uniformed. It’s all a bit too bland for me.

But I’ve never been in a proper American style mall since I was a kid, and with the fact that these things are the main attraction in Odaiba it would have been stupid to not check them out.

Decks was the most interesting because it offered an indoor amusement park, Joypolis, as well as the world’s only indoor sports entertainment centre, Muscle Park (I mean come on), and two themed floors - one themed after post-war Tokyo and the other after Honk Kong. It sounds odd doesn’t it?

Joypolis turned out to be a bit crap much like the other indoor amusement park we’d checked out in Ikebukuro a few weeks before (I should have known really). Let’s face it, there is only so much amusement you can cram inside a windowless box. And on top of that it’s all in Japanese, which takes away from the err… ‘fun’ if you’re not up to scratch on the language. If you’re a geek it’s cool though I guess. I ain’t enough of an Otaku to find Joypolis cool though.

Daiba-Itchome Shotengai was however well worth the effort. This is definitely a most intriguing attraction - basically it’s a recreation of 1960s Tokyo, over an entire floor of the mall. As you step off the escalator you find yourself led into small windy streets full of shops and attractions from the era. While there are a majority of products, toys, food and memorabilia from the 60s, there are also quite a few shop selling modern things - a bit of a weird one. However the decor and feel of the whole place are unmistakable and quite well done to be honest. Kind of like a cheap recreation city you might see in some areas of Europe. But this one is in a building, fully air conditioned and quite surreal.

Alongside the shops are scores of 1960s entertainment and food - sweets, drinks, but also boxes holding original toys and entertainment from the post-war era (such as early Mecha designs and toys). There is also a fairly big arcade area full of machines and games from back in the days.

It’s definitely a quircky attraction - it works well, there is plenty to make you go ‘whoa’ especially as it’s done with such detail and attention. There is a still a feel of tackyness to it, but that’s easily ignored once you just take it for what it is - a harmless bit of fun and ‘remember when things were different?’. We had a blast in the arcades, winning piles of crap sweets and plastic toys. However the rest of the ‘attractions’ in the shopping mall definitely weren’t all that.

Muscle Park proved to be pretty boring, even if the concept is definitely ‘nexxt level’. Another indoor style amusement park based around sports - you go in, buy tickets at a machine and partake in various sports like activities to test skills etc… all in brightly coloured and shiny areas full of staff with microphones enticing you in or commenting on the current person’s skill or lack thereof. After 5 minutes you’re left feeling like this is really just a cheap way of entertaining - and it’s got a huge burger stand in the middle of it, selling burgers modelled on the park’s mascot… :???:

Cheap, much like the other recreated area of the mall - this time supposed to be a little ‘Honk Kong’ but failing quite miserably. It’s just two floors full of Chinese restaurants (the food’s pretty decent) and shops, and complete with quite tacky recreations of Chinese streets, signs and even recordings of people in the street. I’ll stick to checking out Chinatown in Yokohama I think.

The other main shopping mall in Odaiba is Palette Town. It stands across the centre of Odaiba, on the south side overlooking massive docks and the rest of the bay - however you can’t quite see the sea, which is a shame. You reach it by crossing the central promenade area.

One thing that’s quite striking about Odaiba, is how many green spaces there are. The beach extends to Daiba park on one side, and on the other side continues to curve onto Shiokaze park, and throughout is lined with little grassy, shaded areas, trees of all sorts and even in some parts palm trees. In the middle of Odaiba stands a central promenade and park, elongated across most of Odaiba and combining concrete, walking areas with fields and grass, full of flowers and trees. On the other side of Odaiba, where the convention centre and sports centres are located, is the tennis forest.

All this only adds to the odd feeling Odaiba gives out - it all feels man made and somehow intentional but in a city like Tokyo which suffers from a severe lack of major green areas, it gives a sense of open and nature which is in total contrast to the futuristic feel of the architecture and consumerist overload of the shopping malls. Add to that the fact that one of Tokyo’s main airports is nearby (I forget which one), with planes constantly flying quite closely above you, and you’ve got a totally surreal experience. Sitting in a field, surrounded by poppies and flowers, with huge shopping malls on one side, convention centres on the other and planes flying above…

As for Palette Town it’s also quite an experience, for two reasons. Firstly it’s home to the world’s biggest car showroom, Toyota City Showcase. That showroom is spread over 3 floors, and includes a two lap track on which you can test drive the latest models as well as a long, twisting track which spreads over (and through) the entirety of Palette Town and on which you can test the new prototype self-driving electric cars. As you walk around Palette town you’ll see little cars driving around, adding to the sense of surreal. The Toyota City Showcase also includes a building where you can check out lots of the latest technological developments, not only for cars but also for everyday living - there was some cool stuff in there, including all sorts of weird chairs as well as instruments and kitchen ustensils which take a different approach to things we take for granted in everyday life.

In that part of Palette town is also where you find Mega Web, another amusement park of sorts, this time outdoors and with the main point of interest being a giant Ferris wheel, one of the world’s biggest, which has a pretty attractive light show built on it for nightime displays. The fact that the Ferris wheel is literally on top of the shopping mall and showroom, as well as a big rock venue they’ve managed to fit under it, only continues to add to that feeling of oddity.

On the other side of Palette town is a mall called Venus Fort - tailored exclusively to women. Step in, and you find yourself in a giant indoor mall designed after a traditional Italian town centre, or at least what the Japanese think a traditional Italian town centre would look like. Lots of fake looking stone work, embelishments and to top it off a fake sky which follows actual daylight. A man’s worst nightmare? Perhaps, as you’ll get dragged along from shop to shop no doubt. They’ve also managed to fit in a giant fountain in there, again taken on a classic Italian design, as well as a casino area and restaurants. Step out and you find yourself with a Ferris wheel above, and the docks on the side.

By this point the surreal factor had reach well over 100% - yet there was still one more thing. As we walked into Palette town we noticed what looked like a giant exhibition space, inside an area made out of cargo holds. As we walked out, we checked it out and it turned out to be an exhibition entitled Ashes and Snow by Gregory Colbert. Not only did it look interesting for its content, a blend of photography and film looking at the relationship between man and nature, it’s held in The Nomadic Museum - a travelling museum, composed of cargo holds and constructed at each location in which the exhibition is held, for the duration of it and then brought down and moved. We didn’t get a chance to check out the exhibition, giving us an excuse to go back, but aside from looking interesting, the Nomadic Museum was the perfect ending to a long day of oddities.

In a town where past, present and future, old and new, traditional and modern, all co-exists happily in a unique reality of their own, Odaiba is definitely an oddity. A cold and consumerist island, that feels at times like America, at times like a possible future, and always like something you can never quite imagine. It’s fun and interesting, if you let yourself be taken in by its uniqueness and its feeling of being out of place and just not quite right.

There’s a bunch of pictures from the day here:
Day out in Odaiba - Flickr Set

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written by Laurent \\ tags: futuristic, odaiba, pictures, Tokyo