Yokohama port opening

Today I did get the chance to see the giant robot spider in Minato Mirai. (That link will take you to Kirai Net, a very interesting blog about Japan. I wasn't able to take any pictures of it, so you can see the spider there.) And I didn't have to pay the 2400 yen admission fee, either; I just watched it from the World Porters bridge.

So, right now they are having the 150th anniversary of the Yokohama Port Opening. This is a several-month-long expo being held in Yokohama, especially around the Minato Mirai area. If you live in Yokohama you could not fail to be aware of this. It seems a lot of advertising has gone into it. Their official website is here.

The spider was pretty cool - it did a kind of elegant dance, extending and setting down its legs - but frankly, the port opening celebrations seemed rather underwhelming to me. I think they were too ambitious in expecting lots of people to pay to see them; they should have tried making all the attractions free and tried to recoup their money some other way.

After such a huge amount of publicity and seeing posters, newspaper articles, fliers, decorated trains, etc, I did expect a certain amount of... well, *something*. But I guess to be fair, it was a Monday and no scheduled big events were on at the time. This event is running for a long time, so I accept that it can't be all fireworks and balloons every day.

I did poke around the 'international food hall' (which seemed like any food court with cheap food ordered from one of those ticket vending machines) and the 'Open Country, Open Port' display, which seemed to be a bunch of merchandise from local department stores. 

Amusingly, there were all these posters with tons of information about how the port opening introduced internationalisation to Japan, and the various foreign influences, and so on. That's really the whole point of this anniversary event. But there was not even a *sentence* of info in English, or any other language but Japanese.

(Now that I think about it, even in the 'international food court', the food dish titles were *only in katakana*! No Roman characters, so if you can't read Japanese characters, you can't order your food. Welcome to internationalisation!)

Okay, I'm dissing the event a bit too much for someone who didn't actually go into any of the paid displays. From what I've read, nothing in them was in English, so I wouldn't bother. But from the outside it seemed the thrust of the festival was to a) sell Tanemaru goods and b) put up Tanemaru 'port opening festival' posters and flags over every square inch of Yokohama.

In the interests of absolute veracity, I suppose I should confess that I myself bought a Tanemaru hair-tie... hahaha...

(Note: I wrote this over a month ago. However, the displays and buildings are still there and will continue until September 27.)