class trip

This morning C went on a field trip with his class, the Year Two Blackberries, to the Tokyo Tower, a replica of the Eiffel Tower that was assembled in the late 50s using steel made from U.S. tanks destroyed in the Korean War. "We didn't go to the tippitty top," C reported to us later. "We went to the second-from-the-top." (He used a photo to show us where the observation deck is and it's pretty close to the top!)

"Did you see the whole world from the Tokyo Tower?" his 5-year-old brother asked. "No, I didn't see the whole world," C replied. He showed us pictures of the various views (north, south, east and west). "I didn't see Mt. Fuji, it was too cloudy," he said. Tower stats: it's 333 meters high (13 m taller than its French model), weighs 4,000 tons (3,000 tons less than Eiffel), has 176 lights and required 140 drums of orange and white to paint.

There are cartoon mascots for many things here-- the city bus has the green and white birdie, traffic signs often sport a cheerful mouse in uniform-- and the Tokyo Tower is no different. It's got the Noppon Brothers, created in 1998 to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the tower's inauguration. They look like the SNL Coneheads only more phallic, if you ask me, but my 7-year-old thought they made perfect sense: "They basically are the tower," he said. "They are two Tokyo Towers that talk, with T-shirts on, and hands, and feet." Go to tokyotower.co.jp to see what I am talking about. The site has little animations of the characters as well as screensavers and wallpaper to download to your desktop.

Stunningly beautiful or "blatantly derivative" (as per one Japan Times article)? You decide.