I wish I hadn’t spent so much time in the Fuji TV building. We left the house after noon, walked around some subway station getting lost, and when we emerged from underground clouds had blanketed the sky. There are tons of things to do and see on the man-made island of Odaiba where the Fuji TV building is located. There’s the Aqua City mall, Sega Joypolis, Palette Town Amusement Park, Maritime Science Museum, National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation, Panasonic Showroom, the Tokyo Big Sight convention center, the artificial resort beaches, the mini Statue of Liberty replica, etc... I saw Fuji TV and Aqua City from the inside, but all that other stuff I saw from the Fuji TV observation deck.

That being said, the Fuji TV Building was really cool. It really is two buildings, an Administrative building and Production building, joined by a framework. The framework is what you would have it you took everything out of a building except the hallways, and then added a huge sphere observation deck. There is a self-guided tour through the production building. It’s probably only interesting to people who have watched a lot of japanese TV in their lifetime. When I think about the anime One Piece I think of the word ubiquitous, now of course the TV studio producing it would have a display, but publicity and merchandising for this show were everywhere. Anyway, moving on. There was a display for an old sketch comedy show that had a conehead-like character. It is, well, just look at the photo below.

After getting tickets to the observation deck, we went up and looked around. Unfortunately,  they were setting up a walk-through display for some submarine movie/show. So most of the observation deck was closed off. I was still able to get some photos of the city. The bridge in the photos is called the Rainbow Bridge. Beyond it you can see such landmarks as Tokyo Tower and the Roppongi Hills building. On the other side, I grabbed a few photos of Palette Town’s Ferris Wheel, which looks really cool at night. We were all hungry, so we went to see if we could get some food in the Aqua City mall. There was a Hawaiian place where I bought some “Hawaiian Spaghetti” I didn’t really notice anything Hawaiian about it, but it was pretty typical mall food. Bad. After that we headed for Tokyo Tower where one of us needed to meet a friend. I’ll photos of that next time.

Odiaba is a man-made island. And while that may seem like the giant modern metropolis invading the boundary of the sea, the island was built in the 1800s. It was part of a series of fortress islands built to protect Tokyo against invaders (read Commodore Perry).