Our group met up in the hotel lobby to go over itinerary for the day. We would be visiting Ghibli Museum in Mitaka in the morning and then spending the rest of the afternoon at Microsoft in Daitabashi. I was excited to see Ghibli Museum because I learned about Studio Ghibli in an Animation History course. I remember how imaginative Hayao Miyazaki's animations were and I was curious to see how everything in the museum was displayed. And of course I was super excited to be able to visit Microsoft, because it's one of the few companies I keep apprised of since I own an Xbox 360.
Arriving at Ghibli Museum was surreal, with the main building's statues and twisting stairwell standing out against the cloudless sky. We were given a few hours to explore and find food, so we set off to wander through the first floor of the museum. People were moving in and out of rooms and it seemed like there was no order to the way you were supposed to view each exhibit. In fact, at one point we were looking for an exit and tried leaving the way we came in only to be turned back toward a different entryway. I didn't realize until afterwards that the museum was striving for a maze-like feel, with the brochure declaring "Let's lose our way, together."
The museum had a great exhibit about achieving motion with still images. On the wall they had images of characters in different stages of a pose. Then in a separate glass display they had physical models of those images revolving around an axis illuminated by a strobe light. The effect was amazing because the tiny 3d models of the characters appeared to move on their own, like a physical 3d animation. Other rooms in the museum were filled with sketches and drawings from Miyazaki's older films. One room they even had a drawing table set up with tools as if an artist was working there.
On our way to the outside levels of the museum we walked past the Cat Bus room. Cat Bus is a character from Miyazaki's My Neighbor Totoro and a giant version of it was filled with children playing on top and inside of it, almost an inside playground. Once outside we took a spiral staircase up to the top level of the building. There was a giant statue of a robot character with a line of people waiting to get pictures in front of it. Then we took a winding path through some small trees that ended in a small opening with a large metal cube sitting. I wasn't sure what either of these statues were at first, so I looked it up online and found that they are both from the film Laputa: Castle in the Sky.
Aside from the expensive soup I ordered for lunch the visit to Ghibli was a fun experience. I even bought a small plush keychain of Chibi Totoro, another character from My Neighbor Totoro, so I have a memento of our visit there.
Left to Right: Inside Microsoft Japan's waiting room,
Xbox 360 banner with some cool doodling
From Ghibli we made our way over to Microsoft where we were taken into a waiting room. They gave us guest tags to put on our shirts and then brought us into a large conference room. We didn't actually get to tour anything there, except for maybe the lounge area. Instead Microsoft had prepared a special presentation for us.
An XNA Program Manager, Mr. Yuji Suzuki, started off the presentation talking about the latest additions to Xbox 360 content, including the change of interface and avatars through Xbox Live. Then a developer came up to the front and spoke for awhile about the latest games they were designing and the use of middleware (Unreal Engine). He said that it was harder for the teams to use middleware engines because of translation issues and that they were in the process of building their own game engines to work with instead.
Two more representatives gave presentations from a marketing perspective. I really enjoyed the PR presentation because we got to see some examples of localizing game content, like the differences between the Halo 3 commercial in Japan versus America. We also participated in a workshop at the end where everyone broke into teams and had to come up with global and domestic marketing solutions for a game. My team had some pretty bogus ideas (like advertising things with Japan's Boss Coffee), but the Microsoft reps liked it and we won some nice prizes. We received a bag with a Halo 3 t-shirt, Xbox 360 Halo 3 faceplate, and some other small goodies.
After all the excitement at Microsoft (we were there for over 4 hours!) we left to find a place to get dinner. A local Mexican restaurant, called El Torito, seemed to be everybody's first choice. It actually turned out to be really good and as authentic as it gets in America (except for maybe the portion-size). I ordered nachos and got a tiny plate with four chips covered in beans. However, the Mango Margarita I ordered made up for this since it was normal size!
Very happy with a normal size Mango Margarita!
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