Japan 2009: Pokemon World Center & Tokyo Tower

So when I found out there was something called “The Pokemon World Centre” in Tokyo, I added it to my Japan itinerary pretty much immediately. Sadly, it was kind of… well, it’s in an office building. I don’t know any way to put it better than that. But I got photos!

Pokemon World Center Tokyo & Tokyo Tower
Photos by Christopher Butcher and Andrew Woodrow Butcher

We got off the train at Hamamatsucho JR Station on the yamanote loop. We were reminded that POKEMON was just down the street, with signage leading the way. Despite that, we still got a little lost. Just so you don’t (in future), here’s a map:

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Scenic Hamamatsucho is… kind of awful really, just a block after block of office tower. It’s still The Future in the way that everything in Tokyo looks like The Future, it was just way more nondescript than I think I was expecting.

It’s grey buildings and green blue glass and as much greenery as they can shove in.

This shopping concourse is nice enough, I guess, but does this look like the entrance to POKEMON WORLD?

And Yet.

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The Pokemon are pretty neat though.

So the store is basically like a giant gift-shop for an attraction that doesn’t exist; it’s a ton of pokemon related merchandise (including all sorts of cards, video games, etc.) all in one place. But there’s no… there… there…

I mean, it was filled with adorable things. Plushes, candy, stationary. If you wanted a pichu (the baby/unevolved form of pikachu) then you were in luck.

Corn flakes! I don’t think breakfast cereals are that big a thing in Japan, but apparently you can get the corn flakes at Pokemon World.

I did think these were sort of cute. I dig this style of design.

And hey, if you’re a girl, they’ve got PINK Pokemon stuff for you!

All kinds of gear to customize your Nintendo DS (the main game platform of Pokemon), including carrying cases, game holders, and swanky stickers to jazz-up your design!

Bought this one.

Didn’t buy this one.

This dude was All Over the store.

I didn’t get a huge number of pictures of the store, but I did want to take a pic of the single-worst piece of Pokemon merchandise, and this was it. It’s a Pokemon-themed banana protector. But only for small bananas. I realize that the last two sentences are begging to be euphamisms, but they’re not: pay $5 to protect your child-sized banana. With Pokemon.

I’m probably on some sort of list now for having typed the last sentence.

Even the exterior signage is grey… blah!

Then we took our leave of the store. Actually, inside the office building and just around the corner was a little room where you could… do something… withe Pokemon. Honestly at this point my lack of Japanese language skills were really letting me down:

But not being in the Pokemon Union, I decided to pass. I guess they hold events or something here.

So yeah, Pokemon World in Tokyo is… well I’m sure it makes the kids who are rabidly into Pokemon happy, on some level. But I feel like it’s a total failure, the complete opposite of something like the Ghibli Museum. Hell, even if you outright hate anime and the films of Hayao Miyzaki, just visiting the Ghibli Museum is impressive. Hell, I’ve been to studio ghibli boutiques in toy stores that were nicer than this space. Cold, anti-septic, under-designed, poorly-merchandised, it’s awful. It’s a corporate outlet version of children’s dreams.

I realize that some people hate Pokemon, but I honestly thought before I went to Pokemon World that it wasn’t just a cynical cash-grab designed to separate children from money–that it was just a demand-based outgrowth of the popularity of a smart, well put-together children’s game. Now? I’m not sure.

At least the graphics are great. Feel free to make up your own mind at http://www.pokemon.co.jp/pokecen/english.html.

Meanwhile, in the distance, poking through the mediocre grey office towers was the sun! And it was shining down on Tokyo Tower! It’s like a mini Eiffel Tower! It’s the starting-point for countless magical girl anime, from MKR to Escaflowne! It’s a bonafide tourist destination, and after dragging Andrew to see Pokemon (and sucky Pokemon at that) we need to see something he might actually enjoy. And so, we head off in that direction. A map we pick up along the way says it’s about a mile. Easy-peasy.

Walking at street-level, you really begin to appreciate the density and uniqueness of Tokyo. I really dug this picture, so I uploaded a bigger version. Click through to see it full-size.

Oh, and, between that last picture and this one, we passed the station again, and as it was now the beginning of end-of-workday rush-hour, the used manga salesman had shown up. This is a guy who scavenges through recycling bins grabbing fair-to-decent copies of manga anthologies (and occasional tankoubons) and sells them for the bargain basement price of just 100 yen. It was suggested by Patrick Macias in Cruising the Anime City that this is the end of the manga food chain, and a must-do event in Tokyo. Well I lugged my Shonen Sunday (with first-appearance of Takahashi’s Rin-Ne!) all over Tokyo that fine day, my wallet a 100 yen coin lighter.

In between Hamamatsucho JR Station and Tokyo Tower is a massive shrine complex. I’m sure once upon a time we wouldn’t have all of these buildings and things between this outer gate and the main shrine, but the passage of time is a bitch and real estate is hella expensive.

If you’re going to have public washrooms, why not make them the most beautiful public washrooms you possibly can?

Here’s the outer gate to the shrine, which I’d like to repeat, is about a half-mile down a crowded Tokyo street from the boring-ass grey office block from the beginning of this post. Japan is nifty.

So what I’m saying is, just seeing this shrine made up for dragging Andrew to the Pokemon World Store. Lookit how happy he is. Gosh I love him.

Standing inside that big gate, we look back down the street. Those fuzzy-grey buildings all the way in the back are where we’ve come from. You don’t really notice the walk, the streets and architecture are so lovely.

It’s right around here that I probably oughtta start watermarking my photos, but whatever. This giant shrine and garden sits in the shadow of the tower, neatly juxtapositioning old and new Tokyo.

Continuing along through the shrine complex, we came across rows and rows of Jizo statues.

Until at last we were right underneath Tokyo Tower. I’m going to spare you most of the interior pictures… the whole thing is set up exactly like every tourist attraction you’ve ever been to, complete with food court, and it hasn’t changed much since at least the late 70s. There’s not just a gift shop, there’s a gift-arcade, and when we visited on a slow day there were no less than 100 Japanese schoolchildren. Loud ones.

These are photos from the first observation deck, the one you can get to with your “general admission” pass. It’s still pretty high up, mind, but for an extra five bucks you may as well go all the way to the top.

See. Pretty far up. Not AS far up as we could be though.

There we go.  That’s all the way at the top, and you can see Tokyo sprawled out in front of you. It’s pretty overwhelming… in the best possible way.

On the way back down through the main observation level, we passed this band doing a few Beatles covers. I was a little disappointed that despite being a professional band (albeit playing a club set into a tourist attraction) their grasp of the lyrics to popular Beatles songs was shaky at best. Still, they had a lot of heart.

Oh, and here’s something that’s so cool I almost put it into its own post:

What’s this?

…

If you guessed “braille” good for you. It’s one of the braille instructional panels set into the ledge beneath the observation windows at Tokyo Tower. And that trapezoidal bump in the long line up there? FUJI. Mt. Fuji is so badass it gets its own braille demarcation, to let blind folks know they’re facing the direction of the mighty mountain. I never really thought of braille as pictographic before, but yeah, I was totally blown away by this. Awesome.

Despite being a 50+ year old tourist attraction, this Tokyo Tower shaped bottle of water was the only good souvenir in the whole shop, and it wasn’t even that good. We ended up settling on a fridge magnet, but even that was the wrong colour (red instead of this awesome safety-orange). Someone needs to tell the people making this stuff that their tower is Orange, all of their merch was red for some reason.

This was a lovely little diorama showing what the area looked like before the tower was built.

So since we’d decided that it was going to be too late to do much of anything else once we were done at the Tower, I decided I was going to see every last scrap of what this place had to offer. In case you were wondering, there are two floors that are essentially this: big white empty rooms. Mysterious and depressing.

Maybe this is where people hang out who are afraid of heights?

Although it did have stuff to look at. Thanks to being brutally outdated, it still lists Toronto’s own CN Tower as the tallest freestanding structure in the world! Oh, Canada!

So we’re poking around on one of these barren, empty floors, and what should we come across but a music/alt-culture store. Seriously. There’s nothing on this floor but an empty white room, a broke-ass video arcade, and this store selling X-Files Posters and Camp Crystal Lake wood signs. Check it out:

Being tucked away on the empty 4th floor of a Tourist attraction, I can understand why they might be having a sale or two.

Yes, an actual mannequin.

Spider-Man/Venom yin-yang? Damn right. And no, I did not buy any of this.

We did pick up some awesome 1″ buttons (badges) featuring musicians of the British Invasion, so that was something! We took our leave and walked through the more traditional gift shop area (it was more like a giant gift-flea-market) before heading out.

TCAF represent!

This is a weird thing to have on a towel. I almost bought one as a souvenir, but there’s no Japanese writing on it anywhere. It’s just… odd…

Anyway, we hit the McD’s in the food court on the way out (large coke for only 120 yen!) and called it a night.

By this point I’d been on my feet for the better part of 8 hours, and decided discretion was the better part of valour, and we cabbed it back to the station rather than walked. Still, we had a great day all-around (even if we were slightly let-down earlier) and got to see a couple of bonafide Tokyo landmarks. And we MAY have stopped in Shinjuku for a nightcap or three too. There’s no better way to end your evening than with a happy-hour that goes until 11pm.

Thanks for reading!

– Christopher