Bullet train back to Tokyo yesterday. Once again, first class, and once again a super comfy and enjoyable trip. As usual we got up with the Sun and were on the train when lesser people still slept. Here was my breakfast:
After dropping our so-heavy-even-Hercules-would-struggle suitcases off at the hotel, it was time for Odaiba! Now we’ve been before, and I’ve even posted photos of the giant Gundam on this blog, so today I’ll show a dramatic one taken from the back:
You can’t see the (new) head in that pic, which features a single prominent horn. As you can see the weather was beautiful, and the Gundam shone even more beautifully than Himeji castle 🙂
After lunch we headed to the main attraction of the day, Teamlab Planets. Three years back I went to the now-closed Teamlab Borderless installation also in Odaiba and it was breathtaking. We had high hopes for this one as well.
Much like Borderless it is a series of art installations utilizing light and projections, and the viewer walks through them to experience them. Most are in large spaces, and the use of darkness and mirrors makes it difficult to gauge exactly how big the rooms are. Where borderless was almost exclusively light projections (albeit creative ones) Planets has a few more tricks up its sleeve.
Such as this room full of large inflated ‘bubbles’, many of which can be freely moved around.
Or this room which includes hundreds of strings of real orchids that dangle from the (mirrored) ceiling. You crawl under them to get into the middle area, after which you feel like you’re in a cave of orchids. It’s quite special, especially since it’s currently winter here and the orchids all seem healthy and as you can see are flowering.
The two highlight parts of Planets for us were difficult to photograph due to them being mostly dark and involving projections. The first is a gigantic domed space with a mirrored floor. Intricate and super high resolution animations of flowers are continuously projectors onto the dome in such a way you feel you’re floating. Imagine a planetarium, only the show is gigantic flowers floating through space. It was a dazzling display, and because it’s constantly spinning and moving around the optical illusion of movement in the viewer was astounding. We sat on the floor for a while in this room, and it really felt we were spinning around and not just the flowers.
The other amazing exhibit was this room of shin-deep warm milky water on which were projected colorful koi fish. They were extremely realistic, and the opacity of the water made them seem an inch or two underneath the surface. When you touched them they left flowers in their wake, the petals of which would drift away in the ‘current’. Both this and the previous room were random projections, so you could spend all day in them and not see the same thing twice. We were both extremely impressed by these fish 🙂
Needless to say Planets was incredible, and although (perhaps?) a bit smaller than Borderless I’d say equally worth visiting. Unfortunately Borderless is gone now and Planets will be gone in six months or so, so don’t delay if you’re interested!