Sumo and more

Ok, Sumos over, and the following day too. So I'll go through the two days at once, will give wizard something to read...

Sumo was great , 8 hours of battles, and especially the last two were great, when the arena was actually full and so forth. You can obviously check out the pictures on flickr, I shot a full memorycard so that's 615 pictures from the events. As you can see if you even skim through them it was first fairly empty, with mostly old people, tourists and housewives there. Battles were intresting though and you learned some finer details of the whole thing before you got through it. Once the main guys came , the best top 50 or so pros, the place filled up to the brim, was prolly sold out. And obviously the battles were great, most of them were fairly short but a few went on and on and the crowds obviously rewarded the best fights and best prefight ceremony show offs by the fighters.

Today I've done something totally different, I went to yet another museum. Tezuka Osamu Manga Museum. That's the Tezuka, the god of Manga, the guy who went from a looser with thick glasses as a kid, intrested in collecting and studying bugs, to becoming the god of manga, drawing over 150 thousand pages of manga, tons of series, lots of movies, and a host of legendary and unforgettable characters, some of whom have served as origins for disneys later work. Anyways, the museum obviously compares to the Ghibli museum, though while mainly about animation vs Tezuka being about the Manga first they do share the common grounds of being made mainly about one man/companys products and history which they both show in very different ways. That's where the problem lies though, animation offers alot more than simply manga do, Ghibli end up showing the history of the whole animation idea, along with obviously the thoughtprocess and work that goes into an animated feature by them, along with lots of original artwork and pieces from their movies. Tezuka on the other hand have 3 floors, although there's less space on them. There is a movie theater, then there's basically just lots of screens with the original artwork through time being shown, the bottom floor contains a computer system where you can try yourself at various parts of the animation process, from coloring to adding different effects or shots together to make a small clip. Quite fun for about 10 minutes. But that's about it, there's not much more after that.

Anyhow, apart from that I didn't really do much. There's the Osaka castle, which I was planning on visiting. It's the biggest tourist attraction in all of Japan, but sadly it's a rebuilt castle, this version being in concrete and from 1930 or something. There's even an elevator in there. Great for people in wheelchairs, I however have just visited Himeji, and the biggest and greatest of the remaining real castles in Japan so Osaka's fake one didn't seem intresting after all that, especially since I'd also seen the one in Hiroshima, which atleast can say it's been rebuilt cause someone dropped an atomic bomb on it.

Tomorrow I should head out to Kyoto, check out some more temples, get rid of all those 1 yen coins that aren't worth much but will be good to appease the gods, be it shinto or buddhists... And then it's off to Tokyo again, some final shopping and then home to that godforsaken hellhole in northern europe.