Tokyo 2022 (Part 8~Yokohama~)

Been too busy so this took a while. This is the last location-based Part, dedicated to Yokohama where I took my second day trip out of Tokyo. There's gonna be many photos here, because the key bits have both day and night versions~

One of the things I couldn't stop taking photos of, which also ended up as my desktop wallpaper.

It was 4 Nov, the second last full trip day. I started off by being short on time, as usual haha. Due to the knock-on effects of the extra Utage show, I had to visit the Shinjuku Gyoen that same morning (chasing autumn was still high on the priorities) and only started making my way to Yokohama around 11am. Luckily, it was only about a 30-min train ride away, but that ride cost about S$5 >.<

I landed at Minatomirai station where the first priority was to find lunch. It was quite an easy decision to go for my first and only sushi meal on the trip. That was so near the end already and my to-eat list was only about 50% fulfilled... As sorely tempting as it was to order the most atas-looking (and most expensive at all of ~S$24) kaisen don which had the full works including uni, I knew I wasn't hungry enough to finish it. So I satisfied myself with an 8-piece sushi set which was tasted great and fresh and was definitely filling enough. 

First and last sushi meal of the trip. Looks like usual fare but quality-wise, it definitely beat sushi express haha.

One more thing to share. While waiting for my sushi, I became conscious that I was resting my folded arms unusually comfortably against the table. Turns out there was a sort of padded rail around the table edge, probably designed for this exact purpose :O

Also not sure if I was being a suaku, but this was the first time I'd ridden a curved escalator (in the Landmark Mall). 

Post-lunch, it was time to commence the packed itinerary. First up, some views from the Yokohama Landmark Tower! I purposely planned two visits that day to get both the day and night views, even if that meant paying the S$10 entry twice haha. 

Each visit took me a good hour at least since there were 4 viewing directions to go round. I thought it'd be fun to mirror the day and night views as closely as possible, so in the daytime I picked out landmarks for easy framing references. The results were not bad! It was just a little more difficult to capture the night views properly thanks to the glare from the well-lit viewing decks.

Here are 8 shots from the 4 faces at 2 times of day:

Northeast (day): This was the first view upon coming out of the elevator. Beautiful, clear view of the harbour, but what caught my eye was the spark of colour from the amusement park and I made sure to walk through it later on.

Northeast (night): This time, it was the ferris wheel that took centre stage. Probably my favourite view out of the set of 8.

Southeast (day): Noticed some golden wispy things floating in the bay, but no idea what those were.

Southeast (night).

Southwest (day): Mt Fuji was supposed to be somewhere out there in this direction. But no matter how hard I stared into the distance, it was justtt a little too cloudy for it to appear. Seems like as much as it was a bright, sunny day, the individual wisps of cloud still added up. 

Southwest (night): The glare was particularly bad at this face coz this was where the lounge for hanging out and enjoying the view with drinks was at. So I didn't try to hard and went to get myself a drink too haha.

Northwest (day): Idk why but this view felt like a screenshot from a world-building game.

Northwest (night).

After my afternoon hour at the Landmark Tower (no visitation time limits but I had to move on), it was time to quick-march over to the Cup Noodles Museum. The thing I really liked about Yokohama was how nicely the attractions lined up near the waterfront. It was so easy to plot a route, even from looking at the map for the first time.

And what a good day it was for walking! I got to cut through the colourful amusement park as seen from the viewing deck and hit the waterfront. 

Along the colourful route towards the seafront. 

I found out upon arrival that the Cup Noodles Museum was targeted at kids, and there were manyyy kids there on that day. So it was rather noisy and joining any special activities like designing my own cup noodles meant queuing up behind a few busloads of kids. I decided I wasn't hard up about it and simply took a walk through the exhibition, which I thought were quite well-designed. 

Basically, the development history of the modern-day cup noodle was spun into a motivational, kid-friendly story about bringing bright ideas to life. Must say that (1) I wasn't aware that there was so much behind it and (2) it was the perfect example of showcasing one's own achievements hahaha. Aside from the whole development story, there were a bunch of interactive exhibits that kept me amused for a while, nudging stuff on the walls to activate projections. 

One of the walls in the famous room displaying cup noodles through the ages. Aji-no-moto in different forms lol.

And here's Colonel Sanders of the cup noodles world!

Well, cup noodles definitely ranks high up there in the list of successful innovations haha. Best thing since sliced bread? At the end of the exhibits, there was a food court specifically serving noodle dishes of different nationalities, including laksa (from Malaysia :}). It's a good thing I didn't attempt to eat there though, would never have been able to get a seat in that crowd.

Anyway I was aiming to get to the next destination latest 3.30pm, so back out into the sun it was. The sunshine was pretty powerful in that almost cloudless day, but the sea breeze balanced it out perfectly. It wasn't bitingly cold (yet), as I experienced in my last visit to an overseas port city (Incheon). But I thought it was a good plan to use my double layered north face jacket on this day. The denim would've been fine for that sunny afternoon, but severely insufficient later on.

Ahh those wide spaces~ The waterfront walk was the sense of freedom embodied - I really love doing these things!

From the museum, the route covered the Red Brick Warehouse (unfortunately not open for biz while I was there), Zou-no-Hana Park and Yamashita Park. It was almost an hour-long walk with quite a few stops for admiring the blue/green views (graced by ships, submarines and flowers) and just standing and savouring the rushing wind like Pocahontas. There were many many other people out and about too - always a sign of a great day!

The viewers.

The view.

Got to catch some more autumn views at the end of Yamashita Park before entering the Gundam Factory.

I arrived well on schedule at my main attraction of the day - the Gundam Factory Yokohama! This schedule was also built around sunset (at the convenient timing of ~4.50pm), as an extension from the online tip for Shibuya Sky. I'd pre-booked my tickets (including the Dock experience that was sold separately) and was so enthralled once I went in that I only stepped out 4h later, well into the night xD

Was brimming with excitement at this point! This was one of the destinations I'd make special effort to visit, such as Leavesden Studios in London. No regrets at all.

Omg there it was! Shortly after I entered, a performance started, so I got to see the RX-78F00 kneel into an anguished pose.

After the headless Unicorn at Odaiba, this was my last chance in the trip to see a (whole) full-sized Gundam. The RX-78F00 Gundam at Yokohama delivered and was impressive wayyy beyond expectations! This was one of the days when I bothered to share instastories and received quite a few responses along the lines of "wait, it moves?!" xD That was indeed the special thing about this particular full-sized model, which made me extra keen to visit.

In fact, it was a choice between this or visiting the Kirin Brewery Yokohama Factory (due to clashes in availability) and it was one of the easiest decisions ever. Importantly, this Gundam Factory is meant to be a temporary installation. But it recently got extended to Mar 2024 due to popular demand. In any case, I even set reminders to standby and purchase tickets once they became available about half a month in advance. But seeing the Gundam in real-life was really on another level.

Standard standby position to "receive repairs" in between performances hahaha.

One key attraction at the Factory was the Dock, sort of a life-sized replica of a repair station. So it offered a great view of the Gundam at two levels (near the head and the waist) and drove home how massive and yet precise an effort it was to create this moving robot. From there, we could observe so many details, from the huge motors moving the arm and leg joints to the armour decals. 

Behind the glass, right next to the Gundam head! Close enough to read some of the words which said things like "check before and after combat" and "manual release". The attention to detail!

This was goosebumps inducing, especially when the eyes lit up.

Finishing off with the signature pose.

Adding on some details on my Dock experience for posterity. My slot was at 4.05pm (separate ticket required). The wind really started to pick up around that time and the clouds had rolled in. I'd already put on my windproof layer by that point (started feeling it over tea break), and ended up zipping it all the way up while waiting in the queue to take the lift in batches. One of my fellow visitors had only a sweater on, and the poor guy had his hands in pockets all the way through. I think there were about 40 pax per slot, so we were herded in batches round the different view points. This included kneeling/squatting in front of the glass if in the front row and shuffling around in a queue so that everyone would get to experience almost the exact same views (though the Gundam itself might be in a different position). Very systemically Japanese. 

Even the exhibit areas surrounding the Gundam were impressively detailed and in English at that. It definitely helped complete the illusion that the Dock was a high-risk work area. I was quite tickled to see them use the Gundam footprints to mark the standing areas haha. 

It was getting dark after I got off the Dock, and I stayed the rest of the time mainly to catch the night performances. The performances were a large part of the attraction anyway - movements, sound effects and lightshow after dark. I found the schedule on the official site (Japanese version only - after some hard searching) and planned my visit to capture all 4 versions, including both day and night views where possible. The movements were not fast by any means (definitely not like in the anime hahaha), but the sheer 18m scale was what made it sooo impressive. And between day and night, I felt that the impact really went up a notch after dark.

Case in point.

Case in point 2, this eerie look. Gundams are machines of war after all. In fiction, thankfully.

And then add on the familiarity of the music and voice acting mashup from various series... wow it was nostalgic. Gundam series have good music in general, at least out of the pool of animes I used to watch. When paired with the movements and lightshow, it was pure magic. I alternated between taking videos and watching in awe. Below are two very iconic sequences (sped up).

(Sped up 4x) Ok looking at this sequence in normal speed reminds me of my own sometimes creaky knees. But then again, forgiven since its an 18m-tall, multi-tonne robot.

(Sped up 2x) Love how the lights flashed white when the finger was fully extended.

The end-position: all systems green. At night, the eye colour change was very obvious.

Can't forget the merch! In between marveling at the Gundam, I zipped around the other attractions on site i.e. the Gundam Cafe, Base and Academy. I'd gone there with a list of things I wanted to buy... and actually bought them all and a bit more (in the Cafe and the Base) hahaha. 

One of the things I'd set my sights on was the Haro bottle. It's cute and perfect size for a small bag but unfortunately the cap seal seems leaky :/ Ordered the cheesy hotdog set along with it since it looked decent and I was hungry at teatime, and parked myself at a good position to eat and watch the Gundam some more haha.

Not part of the things I was originally eyeing, but ultimately couldn't resist revisiting the Cafe to get the pudding just for the glass cup haha (the pudding was just a pudding).

Along the way, I managed to educate myself a little in the Academy which was an exhibit dedicated to the creation of the moving Gundam. Not surprisingly, many Japanese heavy industry companies were involved. It feels like this would be a dream project to work in for engineers!

One thing I noticed about the RX-78F00 was that it had a sharper and less blocky/cartoonish look than the original Gundam and seemed more similar to the Strike Gundam overall. Turns out, it was a real design choice to make it "evoke the image of a fearless athlete"!

I wasn't actually planning to stay till that late, but I just couldn't pull myself away until the end of the final performance of the day. By then, I'd already withstood the cold wind on full blast for some time, and my large plastic bag full of Haropla was getting hard to control xD There was a reason the bag was so large. While I was definitely eyeing the Haropla sets (unique to this Gundam Base), I wasn't originally planning to buy all 7 colours xD However, they had a system of allowing only one check out per customer... So there was only one chance to purchase and I refused to regret anything while on holiday haha. That night, it took some creative reshuffling to fit all 7 (really light but bulky) boxes into my luggage xD

It was too easy to spend money in Japan haha. The large surface area and lightness of this bag made it a real runaway risk in the buffeting wind.

At ~7.30pm, eyes and nose watering from the wind, I bid farewell to the amazing moving Gundam and popped over to Yokohama Chinatown since it was almost just next door on the tourist trail. One more parallel to my Incheon tour - another port city with a famous Chinatown. This Chinatown felt somewhat like the one in London, medium-sized streets lined with food stores on both sides. But somehow, despite the wide world of Chinese food, most of them seemed to be selling varieties of dumplings and xiaolongbao. Wasn't keen for that, so I returned to Tokyo later on for some more conbini food haha.

Before that, I made my last stop back at the Landmark Tower. It was about just as crowded as in the afternoon, but this time with adults rather than kids on excursion haha. I went round for the night shots. Then seeing as the lounge had opened, got myself a beer and sat down (behind the couples in their plush pre-booked sofas) to enjoy the view and rest my legs - the schedule since morning was rather hectic after all.

Close to 9pm and I was still out in another city with a beer haha. Not usual for me, but Japan was safe and reliable enough.

I'd wanted to wrap up the Tokyo saga by Mar, but life (or more like work) just had to get in the way. Just 1 or 2 Parts (I haven't decided) to go. Either way, Part 9 will feature a combination of some of my favourite activities!