Scenes from Tokyo Midtown

With a two-hour window and nothing to do thanks to poor information, I was stuck in Tokyo Midtown, a champion shopping mall. Lots of bright light, and a huge outdoor atrium with a glass ceiling at maybe the 5th storey, which let in just a mist of the drizzle outside. This caused the wooden deck outside Starbucks to get wet and a cute young thing to slip and fall on her stilettoes, but gather herself quickly. A golden opportunity to take advantage of a damsel in distress wasted.

As I walked into the mall from the area outside Starbucks (where I did not have a coffee, thank you), a group of 4 women was walking out, including a chubby, puffy, rosy-cheeked sweetheart of maybe 3 or 4 years, cute as a dumpling and her tights stretched to bursting. She was accompanied by three old women and a middle-aged one - the doring grandmothers and the mother perhaps? I don't know, but this is one of the world's oldest countries.

Inside, more old women. In gaggles of fours and sixes, whispering excitedly walking by the shops or sitting on the ample wood furniture. Two old women steering a wheelchair seating a Jurassic gent. Besides light, the mall had great simple smoothly-hewn blocks of light-colored wood in wonderfully functional shapes: a set of cubes here with a dimple, as if a very heavy, large lead ball had been placed to leave its perfectly circular imprimatur; a set of cubes there, but twisted, so that the sides now were rhomboids; long planks gracefully shaped, like catamarans. Accompanying these were signs that said "Do not eat, drink and stay long please".

The grandmas did not care, and right outside the Suntory Museum of Art there were a few sitting on these wooden benches, whispering, talking, cacking, looking over an atrium from their seats through the glass dividers.

I entered the Museum, which was featuring glass. Yes, glass - Suntory is after all a beer company. More old women inside, with a smattering of younger females and the odd gent here  and there. Many of the exhibits were from the 19th century, leading me to curse myself for having cleared the ancestral attic some years ago. In fact some garishly colored glass tableware looked like the stuff the previous occupant had discarded in one of the many apartments I have live in through the agess. The Kiriko cut glassware reminded me of a glass bowl that my grandma kept for loose change, which I used to dip into liberally for candy money.

The old ladies were excited, whispering to each other and doing that peculiar exclamation that Japanese do, starting low and ending higher pitched even as they speak.  Arthritic knees creaked as one bent to get  a closer look at some glass object, excitedly and simply talking to herself - there was nobody in a 5-foot radius except yours truly. 

Glass was obviously big when it made it into Japan commercially, even though they trace its history to the 8th or 9th century.  In the 18th and 19th century, it apparently made a commercial resurgence, with experts of the age reluctantly agreeing it was as good as "rock crystal". It went on to make sake "ewers", sake cups, table ware, and even combs and hairpins.  Indigo was a popular color.

At their apogee, glass sake bottles were clearly sexy. According to one of the write-ups, it was common then to tell a beautiful woman her "face looked like a glass sake bottle turned upside down". Oh the golden age, when a man could get away saying stuff like that. Today, sued and keelhauled for that.

Interspersed were paintings of the era, including one that was titled "Modern Methods of Teaching Women Decorum", showing a woman in a kimono right at the top of a flight of stairs, dress slightly lifted to show naked feet and a bit of her leg, frontally. For all I know, she was mooning the people at the bottom.

I looked at the old folk. All said and done, twilight has been good to them - a better standard of living and more to see and do than most, I'd reckon.