MeSci

Harajuku did have musicians. Rock, punk and Jazz fusion bands slowly slowly slowly arrived to set up, chat, look cool, chat, drink, laugh, look cool, tune and look cool. I sat and waited, watching two old geezers play on electric guitars with tiny battery powered amps. They quietly strummed out the beginning of a few rock classics and then stopped, chatted, drank, and then played the same few chords again. The yoofs, after two hours, had sorted out their looking cool and had begun to make a few noises as they waited for the rest of their cool looking band to set up. Clearly, this wasn't going to start until much later. So off I went to the MeSci museum, also called Miraikan

What a find. This quickly became my second favourite museum in the world (the first being the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford). Yes, it is geeky, but in the best possible way. There is very little dumbing down here, if you want to learn about quantum wells, you go ahead madam, there is plenty to read, help yourself, it's an all-you-can-eat information buffet. As I toured the Information Science section a quiet, orderly swarm of children amassed in a semi-circle around a few static robots and a woman with a headset in front of a large screen. Something was awry... and that awryed something was the children. They sat, absolutely silently, attentively and expectantly with no fuss for 10 minutes. I've never seen such well behaved children. I couldnot decide if this was good or not. Were they already so controlled they had no will to run amok? Or did they have such presence of mind and respect that they controlled their more primal instincts? Finally, the presentation began. A short talk and then :



It's difficult to express what effect his has on you when you see it with your own eyes. I'd seen this before in documentaries and other such footage, but seeing it live is... spooky.