2001-08-14 - 9:13 p.m.
she blinded me with science

Home and de-jet-lagged, I proceed to begin catching up. Workin' from week-old notes here, the price I pay for sloth, so this entry may not be up to snuff.

8-7-01

So after the Imperial Palace, we went straight back to the hotel because my brother had a migraine, had some lunch (my dad and I, because my brother was lying in the dark hotel room with said migraine and my mother doesn't eat meals like a normal person[1]) and hopped the subway to the Tokyo National Science Museum. By the time we got there, we had maybe forty-five minutes to explore the place. (My dad and I; my mom sat outside because she didn't have the energy left for a museum.)

Pretty much everything was in Japanese, and what little there was in English wasn't very enlightening. I didn't learn anything about dinosaurs that I didn't already know from the very brief English blurbs on the displays. I did, however, get to see some really sweet dinosaur fossils (mostly reconstructions thereof, I think, but still). Dinosaurs are always cool. Was anyone of my generation *not* into dinosaurs at some point in childhood? Me, I never even made a pit stop in the supposed pony phase that all little girls go through. It's all about the dinosaurs, dude.

There were quite a few models of various animals--early mammals and fish and so on--on the first floor where the whole Origins of Life bit was going on. They were all incredibly anthropomorphic. I'd noticed this tendency in the much earlier Japanese artwork I'd seen, at temples and such, especially when it involved animals that the artists hadn't actually seen (elephants, for instance). And here it was in these scientific reconstructions, a very animated and human quality to the faces of all the prehistoric animals, from the weird giant-capybara-like thing to the proto-lungfish-y thing.[2] I found the same thing in the next building where they had models of more modern animals, though in those rooms the anthropomorphization was mostly concentrated in the simian type things like the gorilla, whose face was so expressive that I got an almost interactive effect out of it--I glanced at the gorilla, looked at his scientific name, which turned out to be "Gorilla gorilla gorilla," then looked back at the gorilla, who seemed to be saying, "I *know.* Don't start."

The animal models at the Academy of Sciences in San Francisco do not have such qualities. I'm not sure what any of this means, but I'd welcome theories.

The other scientific name I made note of was "Calamites suckowii," for the juvenile amusement factor, but now I can't remember what sort of being it belonged to. A sea creature, I think.

In the modern animals gallery, there were a bunch of preserved formerly-living specimens in addition to the models. My notes say, "giant fucking dead squid," because there was one. I mean, that sucker was HUGE. The lab specimen in a jar was bigger than me, like I was in a damn Far Side cartoon or something. Remember what "awesome" meant before it applied to pizza? That's kind of the effect of seeing a giant dead squid pressed up against the very thin glass that separates you from it.

I moved on to the marine life exhibit in the next building. This sounded cooler in the English-language brochure than it was in person. Don't get me wrong, it had cool exhibits and video things that would have been very enlightening if I spoke Japanese, and models of a kelp forest and various creatures, including a pretty cool sunfish hanging from the ceiling. But--not to be a marine life elitist or anything--I've been to the Monterey Bay Aquarium and watched a real live sunfish for up to half an hour at a stretch, so I moved on.

Upstairs there was the science exploration floor for the young'ns. If you have ever been to any science museum anywhere, you have been to this floor. They have things to do with mirrors, and the chair where you sit down holding the spinning bicycle wheel and it spins you around, and the thing where you hold up a beach ball with a jet of air, and so on. You don't have to speak the language to watch kids explore the world and just stand in the midst of it feeling good about humanity for a while, which is what I did. I watched one kid play around with an exhibit in a way that wasn't what the instructions said to do (like I said, if you've ever been to a science museum you know this stuff). Part of me wanted to show him the right way to do it, which I knew I couldn't do anyway since I didn't speak the language. I decided that this was a good thing. He was figuring something out on his own, and maybe learning something other than what he was supposed to. Good for him.

The kid left, and a couple of girls came around and looked at the exhibit curiously without actually coming up and doing it. Without acting like I was trying to show them something, I did it once the "correct" way and wandered off. They took it up as soon as I moved on.[3]

Stay tuned for next time, in which I find the quietest place within 100 miles of Tokyo and a weird Japanese guy hits on my mom. (Not in that order.)

[1] At the moment I was typing that, Alanis Morrisette, on my headphones, said, "How 'bout me not blaming you for everything?"

[2] Man, I just remembered, I *have* to go to the Steinhart Aquarium before I go back to Portland.

[3] I'm not trying to be cryptic about what the exhibit was, I would just have a hard time explaining it in text. It was one of those universal kids' science exhibits.

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