Thursday 20 March 2008

お台場 Odaiba

Woohoo spring is coming! And to celebrate the coming of spring, today is a holiday and we do not need to work. Yay!

So what shall we do? This night Ryan and me are invited to a Live House concert of Psydoll, which we had already seen once before. But before that
we decided to pay a visit to お台場 Odaiba, which none of us had seen before.

お台場 Odaiba

Odaiba is an artificial island in the Tokyo bay. It was formed during the reign of the 徳川将軍 Tokugawa Shoguns and its last use in this time was as a maritime frontier defense station against Americas fearful 黒船 black ships, with whom Commodore Perry arrived 1853 near 江戸 Edo (former name of Tokyo). Therefore the name お台場 Odaiba (kind of stationary cannon).

Afterwards the island was rediscovered during the economical boom in the second half of the 20th century. It was supposed to host gigantic monuments of Japans wealth and power and be a symbol for Japan's status. The whole project would have cost several billion Euro. Yes would, it was never completed, since Japan's Bubble Economy burst in the early 1990s and the plans for the island were discarded leaving an island of mud and incomplete structures.



The Fuji Skyscaper

After the economy recovered, major industries like Fuji started building their own skyscraper on the island and forming it the way you find it today: An island of amazing futuristic structures like the Fuji building or the inverted pyramids.



Come into the real of SEGA









and drive in cars



on half pipes



or try to escape from prision



you can also stick your feet in this machine and let it tell you your future

A place for fun and recreation the like gigantic SEGA Amusement Game Canter "JoyPolis", which Ryan and I visited. But there are also a lot of things to see for little kids (we ran into many elementary school classes), for girls to go on shopping trips and for guys to go on shopping trips.
There are some interesting museums, like the maritime museum and for car nuts (Toyota MEGA WEB).






The statue of liberty is on Odaiba island, in case you didn't know and you can enjoy a nice walk on the artificial beach, in case it doesn't rain, like in our case. Actually in our case it was more a storm than rain, which effectively allowed us to watch people get their umbrellas destroyed by the wind. We even found an umbrella graveyard.



we found an umbrella graveyard



and a guy reporting in the middle of the rain and street







more impressions from Odaiba

Urga / Psydoll

Afterwards we went to the concert and enjoyed five special bands. Each of them were special in their own account. The topic of the day was 機械魔術 Machine Magic (But imo only PsyDoll met this topic).

First was a cool girl in a red witch dress and a black with hat called Yuka playing the piano. For later song a friend joined her for some vocals.



Second was a guy from Czech Republic, who actually lives close to my home town Passau and has been to Passau on several occasions. He played a didgeridoo and made some awesome music with it. Again later he was joined by a Japanese woman for some awesome traditional Japanese vocals fitting mysteriously the Australlian didgeridoo.





Third were a Goth lady and gentleman. She was covering the vocal part, the music was play back and he was dancing and giving roses to everyone. I got
the very first rose :). It was playback, but they made up for it with a cool performance.





Fourth were the Zombie Soldiers. Three guys dressed in military uniform having corpse paint and black paint to make them look like Zombies. Two of them covered the vocals and one was playing the guitar. The rest was playback again. There outfits were awesome, but the playback music average. Yet I let myself go and enjoyed it though!







Finally came the stars of the evening: PsyDoll.
They completely covered my senses this time and made me create a cyber punk story in my head, which went along with the music. The story was very close to Blade Runner. A special detective for dangerous cyborgs got a clue that one of the PsyDoll band members was such a cyborg. So he went to his bike and drove through the dreary futuristic city of Shinjuku to the concert. There he first orderer a drink and then watched the band perform. During the next song he scanned each band member slowly noticing the the guitarist is a fully armed bodyguard type with incredible weapons and armor. Of course the dangerous Cyborg was Nekoi on the keyboard and vocals. After the show he procured some weapons and confronted them. They made for the exit and a bike car chase through Shinjuku began. Eventually PsyDoll's car crashed and it came to a fire fight. After a heavy exchange the body guard went down however injuring the detective greatly. Just when the detective was looking for Nekoi, she appeared behind him and set him unconscious. At the last song he awoke numbed and tied up in Nekois apartment. Then the last song was over and thus the story ended.







Later I had a great time with some friends, which I already met at other concerts and got to new some new guys and some of the bands above. Later we went to a bar and slowly drew to the end of the day.

No comments: