That Monday was the beginning of a special deal that Japan Rail was sponsoring with Ghibli. If you rode to four different stations (which were the stations connected to the three Ghibli exhibits plus one other) and got your special "passport" stamped at eache one, you got a prize. Here is the advertising poster they had in all the stations about it. But we decided to skip it. You have to draw the line somewhere... ^_^
Instead we went off to do more traditional sightseeing thinking we were through with the Miyazaki and Ghibli stuff. But this is Japan, and there is no escape from Totoro. We went to the famous Senso-ji Buddhist Temple or "Asakusa Kannon", the temple dedicated in 628 AD to Kannon, the Buddhist goddess of mercy. To get to the main temple complex you have to go through a long arcade of shopping stalls, and the gate to enter the arcade is the Kaminarimon Gate (or "Thunder Gate") as shown below.
But look to the right of the gate at the yellow and green sign. It's the logo of NTV, the TV network that co-sponsors all of the Ghibli films. Here's a better shot of the store itself.
Now you can see the green pig logo (that I think that Miyazaki and Ghibli designed it) on the sign. This was tiny store, I think it was about 12 by 12 feet total and you were hard pressed to get more than 5 or 6 people into the store at the same time. Obviously I didn't get any pictures of the inside (there wasn't room), but I did get a picture of their display window.
Even though we had been to the Ghibli Museum and the Tokyo Museum of Contemporary Art exhibit, there were things at this tiny shop we still had not seen. We loved the towel/banners of Totoro art done in traditional Japanese art style. We bought one like the blue one with the moon on the right and have it hanging in our house now. Here you have a close-up of the plush Totoro. They have tied one of the towels over his head so that he is disguised as .... a Totoro!
Nobutoshi found one thing there that he had been thinking of buying for years and he finally broke down and bought it: the famous Catbus tissue dispenser. You put your box of kleenex in this plush Catbus and the tissues come out of the slit on the top that Becky is showing here.
I would have liked to have bought one for us, but at this point we were worried about whether we were going to fit all the stuff we already had into our suitcases, so I ruled out buying anything that big at that point. (I was right too, it wouldn't have fit.)
To end all this I have a small gallery of some of the Ghibli "loot" we did manage to bring back. First is a picture book (in Japanese) about the Ghibli Museum itself. Then Miyazaki's Daydream Notebook, the Comics Box special issue about Spirited Away. In the second picture are the booklets for Mei and the Kittenbus, the Castle in the Sky and alternative history of aviation exhibit, and a reprint of the Roman Album for Future Boy Conan. The last picture is of the exhibit booklet from the show at the Tokyo Museum of Contemporary Art.
Perhaps the strangest item I bought is the tin of hard candies from Grave of the Fireflies. I don't know if this is the same company who made the candies before the war, but I have mixed feelings about eating them from a box with a picture of Setsuko on the cover. Maybe I'll just save it for the next time we show the film in class. Below that are some more Totoro dangles.
The Ghibli Museum sold little figurines from each of the films. The Nausicaa figurine here is the only Nausicaa item they had in the entire store so I had to buy it. Same goes for the angel from On Your Mark. Actually I was surprised to find anything for sale from On Your Mark, but I had hoped they would have had more items from Nausicaa, at least a pin. You can also see two more Totoro keychains and one of the Totoro washcloths.
And even more pins and one rubber stamp from the Ghibli Museum. (I think Becky is going to use the Totoro stamp on the papers of her students next year.)
Here is a refrigerator magnet of Baron and the Lady next to one of Catbus.
Here is the soundtrack to Mei and the Kittenbus along with a set of postcards from the Castle in the Sky exhibit and a set of postcards of the Ghibli Museum itself.
And finally, after years of searching, I am the proud owner of a plush Teto. (Okay, so I know it's marketed as a foxsquirrel from Laputa, that doesn't matter.) Plus the cute plush of the small bird carrying Bou (there's a string from the bird so you can hang it with the bird holding Bou). And last, but not least, something you can only get at the Ghibli Museum itself: a plush Kittenbus. You can tell it's a Kittenbus since it only has one window on the side.
Marc Hairston