GHIBLI

The Ghibli Museum was several stations from Shibuya, in Mitaka.

At Mitaka Station, we waited for a bus to take us to the museum. I hoped against hope that it would be a catbus, but it was not quite.













The line in front of the museum snaked in an orderly fashion, and was propelled forward by my constant prayers to escape the heat. After 15 minutes or so, we crossed the threshold and produced our advanced tickets—this got us both admission and tickets to a museum-only short film.

The film tickets were themselves made up of three cels from various Miyazaki movies. Lana and Sebastian got Spirited Away, and Taeko got Ponyo. No one could quite fix the source of mine—it was three nearly identical scenes of Miyazaki greenery.

The film we were going to see was called Mei and the Kittenbus, which is a 12-minute extension of Totoro.

But first we went up to the top floor so that the kids could spend some time on the catbus. Any potential self-consciousness about playing on a giant stuffed animal melted away pretty quickly. Lana crept inside the bus and stuck her head out the window, cooled by an imaginary wind. Sebastian leapt from the roof of the bus, not trying to fly, but flying.

We then walked outside, where a spiral staircase surrounded by a wrought-iron turret brought us to the roof of the museum. There was a small arbor there, where we met this fellow:













It was hot on his watch, but he didn’t seem to care. I stood sentry with him for a bit, gave him a little bow, and then headed back to the air conditioning.

We rushed down to catch the next viewing of Mei and the Kittenbus—the ushers told us we’d need to sit on the steps, but we found some empty bench space there in the Saturn Theater.

The movie was adorable—Sebastian next to me stomped his feet gleefully several times, and talked about it for days after. I was very happy just to spend more time in that world.

We toured the rest of the museum. There were many nice displays that spoke to the sheer mechanical effort of traditional animation. The final thing we looked at was truly amazing—a large wheel filled with figurines from Totoro in slightly different poses. The wheel spun quickly under a strobe light, and the figurines themselves became animated. I was dumbstruck. I want one.

The gift shop was sizable, and contained many items that were not available in the Tokyo toy stores. Sebastian got a pewter Nausicaa robot and Lana got a stuffed Teto; I picked up a t-shirt.

We took the bus back into town for lunch at Pancake Days. I ate a small stack of three fluffy pancakes with a perfect round scoop of vanilla ice cream on the side.

And days don’t come much better than that…