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Neo Tokyo: dystopian dreams

Architecture, Japan, Movies & TV, Music, Tokyo

While I do despise the YouTube algorithm as a radicalisation & bullshit engine that human society would be better off without, I must grudgingly admit that it does occasionally dig you up a gem.

It suggested this beauty recently after I’d been listening to some of the Blade Runner soundtrack:

I knew I’d heard that haunting vocal somewhere before; took me a while to place it as I hadn’t listened to the album for years, but it was sampled to great effect by Future Sound of London on their track My Kingdom (from the album Dead Cities):

Great tune that.

The original piece is titled Rachel’s Song, written by Vangelis for Blade Runner but unused in the final cinematic release (or any of the multiple director’s cut iterations); in the above video it’s been set to some interesting CGI renderings of Tokyo, prominently featuring Mori Tower in Roppongi (I wonder if it was originally actually some sort of promo video made by Mori).

It got me thinking again (as I discussed here) about how despite not really having any direct connection to the movie, Tokyo is the city which most strongly invokes the visuals of Ridley Scott’s future Los Angeles. And that in turn got me thinking about future visions of Japan itself in various classic animations.

Japanese sci-fi anime has a tradition of imagining some sort of post-apocalyptic Neo Tokyo rebuilt from the ashes following the destruction of the original in a cataclysmic event; here are three of the most influential (all based on popular manga comics).

Surely the ultimate dystopian future Japan is the one depicted in 1988’s Akira. The opening shot of the movie is Tokyo from a high angle, the skyscrapers of Shinjuku suddenly silhouetted by the glare of what appears to be a nuclear explosion (later revealed to be a psychic singularity, and the trigger for WWIII) which rapidly expands to swallow them:

The story proper then starts three decades later in Neo Tokyo, a new city built on reclaimed land filling up Tokyo Bay, a visually stunning hi-tech dystopia of martial law, unaccountable elites, biker gangs, mass unrest & violent protests, and towering skyscrapers built upon decaying foundations of urban grit. Not to mention prematurely aged children with psychic powers, and a bike gang member mutating into something which I still don’t understand no matter how many times I watch it. It’s all a bit of a headfuck to be honest, but an absolute feast for the eyes – one which was, almost unbelievably, entirely hand-drawn. Check out the iconic bike battle scene:

…which leads the ill-fated Tetsuo to his collision with Takashi and subsequent torment:

This collision awakens Tetsuo’s psychic powers, culminating in his rampage through the city and that grotesque final transformation in the under-construction Neo Tokyo Olympic Stadium:

In a neat quirk of fate, Akira is set in 2019 and has Neo Tokyo building a stadium to host the upcoming 2020 Olympics – while of course the real-life 2018 Tokyo is presently building a stadium for the exact same purpose. A notable difference though – the 2020 Tokyo Olympics will be the 32nd Games, but the movie’s 2020 Neo Tokyo Olympics are the 30th (the implication being that a couple of Games were missed due to WWIII).

The real Tokyo hasn’t missed the coincidence, and has even been using Akira footage in some of its promo events:

Another influential vision of Neo Tokyo was Tokyo 3 in the trippy anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion; the story goes that the original Tokyo was destroyed by a nuclear strike during the chaos following the ‘Second Impact’, a cataclysmic event in Antarctica causing the entire ice cap to melt and sea levels to rise catastrophically, with the Earth also shifting on its axis leaving Japan stuck in an eternal summer – if you’ve ever experienced summer in Tokyo, you’ll know that isn’t a pleasant prospect! The capital was then shifted to Matsumoto (renamed Tokyo 2), before the construction of Tokyo 3 (in the location of Hakone) as the HQ of the Earth’s defenses against the alien Angels.

This series is actually based on the Apocalypse in the Biblical End of Days sense, with the Antarctica incident heralding a series of attacks by 12 alien entities analogous to the 12 angels of Bible prophecy. And the only people who can stop them are 3 deeply disturbed teenage kids (one of whom is secretly a clone) piloting giant biomechanical Evangelion fighting units (Evas), a nightmarish responsibility which doesn’t exactly help with their existential crises. It’s another total headfuck, and it’s one of my favourite TV series of all time.

But anyway, as for its portrayal of a future Tokyo, it depicts a city capable of going into ‘battle mode’, with all major buildings sliding underground on rollers and defensive screens sliding up everywhere while the Evas do battle with the angels. Not something we’re ever remotely likely to see, of course; but in-between the angel attacks we see the daily life of the characters in a city almost entirely alike the Tokyo suburbs of the 90s, when the anime was made. The kids’ school looks like any Japanese high school, they all live in apartment blocks just like the ones everyone in Japan actually does live in, and they rattle around on trains exactly like the ones rattling around Tokyo on any given day. So while it’s a crazy battle-mode sci-fi city, it’s also just like everyday suburban Tokyo, and there are some great little daily life sequences in the anime & spin-off movies like this:

And the never-ending summer is done well, with the constant soundtrack of cicadas and the characters bitching about the heat as they mop their brows with handkerchiefs. Just like real Tokyo in summer, in other words.

It all gets a bit Godzilla when an angel turns up for a mecha-scrap and they seem to destroy half the city each time, but in the end it turns out the real battles are internal, in the characters’ own heads, leading to another ending that left viewers scratching their own heads in turn.

Here’s the angel Ramiel attacking Tokyo 3 (from one of the spin-off movies):

One more for this post is Ghost in the Shell – not the movie version(s), which use Hong Kong as the setting and which I’ve written about here – but the Stand Alone Complex anime series which is set in a clearly Japanese environment. Specifically, the story takes place in Niihama, a new megacity built on artificial land in the Seto Inland Sea after the destruction of Tokyo in World Wars 3 and 4 (real bunch of optimists, these manga writers).

Much like Evangelion, despite the post-apocalyptic scenario the action takes place in an environment very much recognisable as modern-day Japan, but with far more advanced AI and cybernetic enhancements as routine. It’ll probably prove to be the least wildly inaccurate prediction of the future Japan on this page, but it’s the setting of the Hong Kong-based movie version that leaves the stronger impression.

So there you go, apropos of very little, some waffling musings on depictions of post-apocalyptic visions of the future in dystopian Japanese anime – aka how I just passed the time on the shinkansen from Kyoto to Tokyo!

Check out my posts on Blade Runner and Ghost In The Shell. More Tokyo posts here, and check out my quick guide to Tokyo; for more on Japan click here

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For my Japan overland travel guide, click here

Gundam Got An Upgrade

Japan, Movies & TV, Tokyo

Having never seen an episode, I know very little about Gundam other than that it’s a classic Japanese anime about giant mecha robots defending the Earth, or something like that – I’m more of an Evangelion fan, though to be fair that could be described the exact same way! (see here for some random musings on different future anime Japans)

But you don’t really need to know the show to appreciate a giant life-sized robot statue (especially one that does light displays while it transforms), you just need to be a bit of a geek.

The original Gundam statue stood outside the Diver City mall in Tokyo’s Odaiba district (an artificial island in Tokyo Bay with various attractions) and became a popular tourist sight despite never having been intended to be permanent. So when they (whoever ‘they’ is) finally decided to remove it as originally planned, they went one better and installed a permanent, upgraded Unicorn Gundam.

This badboy transforms, as the Unicorn Gundam did in the show when it went into Destroy Mode, and the flashing lights produce a particularly good effect after it gets dark.

This isn’t something to get too excited about to be honest, but Odaiba’s an interesting enough area to check out for half a day and you might as well time it for the transformation – at time of writing the statue transforms at 11:00, 13:00, 15:00, and 17:00 every day. For something random to do, you can reach Odaiba by walking over the Rainbow Bridge.

For some more random things to do in Tokyo see here

Click the banner to pre-order a JR Pass for a 40-dollar saving:

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Into your cyberpunk? Check out my posts on Blade Runner and Ghost In The Shell

More Tokyo posts here, and check out my quick guide to Tokyo; for more on Japan click here

For my Japan snowboarding guide, click here

Check out my guides to hiking in Kyoto and Tokyo

For my Japan overland travel guide, click here

Tokyo, Blade Runner, and 2049

Architecture, Japan, Movies & TV, Tokyo

I first came across this lovely video montage of Tokyo cityscape footage set to the mournful tones of the Blade Runner score while writing this post about Ghost In The Shell; with the Blade Runner sequel, Blade Runner 2049, about to be released, the gods of the Youtube algorithm just (perhaps not so) randomly served it up again as part of my morning Youtube spiral (recommend hitting play and listening while you read):

The footage is great, the buildings standing like sentinels with their winking red lights, the trains and motor vehicles pulsing along the arteries like the lifeblood of some sentient being; and Vangelis’ Blade Runner Blues is just the perfect track for looking out over and down into a vast cityscape like that, and pondering what it all means. It’s a perfect match really, and whoever made that video did a great job.

Watching it again just now, it got me thinking (once again) about how Blade Runner seems to have influenced so many people to want to visit Tokyo – despite actually having very little to do with Japan. The scenes that people want to find in real life, so to speak, when they visit Tokyo are the cityscapes of Blade Runner’s dystopian future (2019!) Los Angeles, and the street-level scenes in that LA’s undercity. The only clearly Japanese elements are the Japanese background signage and advertising (including the prominent Coca-Cola geisha billboard the car flies past), and the old Japanese guy running the noodle stand Deckard eats at:

…and yet, for most Blade Runner fans Tokyo is the city that seems most closely to evoke director Ridley Scott’s vision; hence all the videos people post on Youtube of Tokyo set to the Blade Runner score – the one above is just my favourite among many, here’s an awesome time-lapse on the same theme:

…and hence articles like this about photography like this. Richard Corliss (film critic for Time) describes Blade Runner as being “set in the year 2019, in a big city that suggests a Tokyo gone daft.”

I guess it’s the combination of Tokyo’s top-down immensity and its mostly bland and monolithic architecture, with the bottom-up neon and noise of its shopping & entertainment districts and the nitty gritty of the street-level details, the alleyways with their steam-billowing soba stands and fog-windowed ramen joints, that invites the sensory comparison. But there’s also something altogether more difficult to put your finger on… perhaps I can describe it as the soulful alienation one can sometimes feel in Tokyo – the biggest aggregation of humanity on Earth which yet somehow often feels like the loneliest place on Earth.

Pop a plastic umbrella and go for a lone wander in Shinjuku on a rainy day with Vangelis on your earphones, and that’s about as close as you can get to recreating the atmosphere of the film without actually going jumping across rooftops in a storm while monologuing about moments “lost, in time, like… tears… in rain.”

And that brings me to the point of this post; where to go in Tokyo if you’re a Blade Runner fan hoping to catch some Blade Runner-esque top-down cityscape visuals and bottom-up street scenes during your visit.

For the former, heading up to one of the city’s various skyscraper viewing decks at night should do the job nicely. Take your pick from Tokyo Skytree, Tokyo Tower, Roppongi Hills, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building (in Shinjuku), and Sunshine 60 (in Ikebukuro). They all have great views of Tokyo’s urban sprawl, and you see the major hubs lit up like the synapses of some huge bioelectrical organism, all those countless red lights winking away from the buildings as though the city itself is making some sort of chromatophoric display, relaying some mysterious message in a pattern of light that can only start to be grasped from on high.

On the other hand, to find something akin to the street scenes in Blade Runner, consider this quote attributed (in the On the Edge of Blade Runner documentary) to Ridley Scott: “The future is old.” When he and his team were designing the sets and props for their future city, they concocted something that looked simultaneously futuristic and worn; there are in fact many locales in Tokyo that capture this layered and textured feel of new built upon old, but there are three spots in particular that I’d recommend visiting – all conveniently located a short walk from Shinjuku station.

As noted above, a solo wander under an umbrella in the drizzle through Shinjuku is the best way to ‘feel’ Blade Runner in Tokyo – to be more precise, the specific part of Shinjuku I’d suggest doing this is the Kabukicho red light district. It’s hardly an exact match to anything in the movie, but the onslaught of neon and the dense gathering of shady characters makes it about as edgy as Tokyo gets, kind of futuristic yet most definitely grimy and dirty under the nails.

But the two places that really nail it for me are Golden Gai (Golden Street) and, most of all, Omoide Yokocho (Memory Alley), the latter better known as Shomben Yokocho, or Piss Alley. Click the links to read about them in more detail in separate posts, but essentially they’re two small alleyway areas that have survived intact through the decades of rampant development around them, retaining the character of Tokyo immediately post-war while the rest of Shinjuku sprouted skyscrapers, heavy infrastructure, and department stores galore; the future is old, and Golden Gai and Shomben Yokocho are what’s left of old Shinjuku.

Golden Gai is a few alleys packed full of tiny little bars (only big enough for a handful of patrons at a time) each with their own unique styling, and it’s a great place for a beer or two after a wander through Kabukicho. Shomben Yokocho is a pair of intersecting alleys running through a small city block nestled right next to the Japan Rail train tracks outside Shinjuku Station, both of which are lined with small eateries. At the intersection of the two alleys, right in the middle, there’s an awesome little noodle joint which serves absolutely killer soba and udon; they have seven seats and you wait in line until a seat becomes available, and once it does you’ll be expected to sit, order, pay, and leave with an absolute minimum of messing around – someone will usually be waiting for your seat, so don’t sit there photographing your food, just eat it! The gruff blokes behind the counter, and the way the customers call out their orders as they sit, all with minimal airs & graces, means a bowl of noodles here should scratch your Blade Runner noodle scene itch (my usual order is the ten-tama udon, though the ten-tama soba is their most famous).

Given the location of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building in West Shinjuku, you could hit that first for the cityscape night view, then find your way to Shomben Yokocho for a bowl of noodles, followed by a wander through Kabukicho to Golden Gai for a drink; this little Shinjuku walking itinerary should be satisfying to any Blade Runner fan visiting Tokyo, and even if you’re not a Blade Runner fan it’s still a cool way to spend a few hours on an evening! Wait for it to rain, grab your umbrella and your camera, and hit the streets of Shinjuku… after first watching this:

(or just go for the full movie on Amazon!)

Any questions about any of the places mentioned above? Give me a shout below!

Update: Tokyo 2049

Well, I thought the new film was great, and was greatly relieved that it managed to continue the story while fully respecting the original and without re-writing, re-interpreting, or re-booting anything. It doesn’t change anything in terms of visiting Tokyo as a Blade Runner fan, either, as the film doesn’t spend so much time fleshing out LA 2049. We do see a bit more of the wider world – the protein farms & solar arrays beyond the urban limits, the waste dump of San Diego, the wasteland of Vegas – but the city itself is less of a feature. There’s also a less Japanese, more pan-Asian influence – K does have a scene with a Japanese-speaking AI, but we also see him talking to an Arabic-speaking street fixer; in addition to Japanese background signage there’s also prominent use of the Korean Hangeul script and some Chinese, plus a little Russian (the Korean 행운 above the entrance of the building where K finds Deckard reads haengun which means ‘good fortune’ – the building’s a ruined casino). Interestingly it was mostly filmed in Budapest – see here for a run down of the locations.

As for how Tokyo itself will actually look in 2049, given the rate at which that city reinvents itself it’s hard to say – but I’m guessing it won’t look like either of the Blade Runner films!

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More Tokyo posts here, and check out my quick guide to Tokyo; for more posts on Japan click here

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Following the Path of the Setting Sun that Leads to El Dorado and… The Mysterious Cities of Gold! (Central American travel for 80s cartoon geeks)

Central America, Movies & TV

It may well only be because I grew up in the 1980s and therefore have nostalgia for that time, but it seems to me that the 80s were something of a golden decade for kid’s cartoons – Transformers, Ninja Turtles, and Thundercats, to name a few, are the stuff of childhood memories. The slew of recent big screen movie versions of 80s cartoons is evidence of how cherished they are by a generation – Hollywood knows this and seeks to cash in, though unfortunately they put douchebags like Michael Bay in charge and the results are predictably shit. But actually, having said that, going back and watching most of those cartoons again today is also pretty disappointing – aside from the pleasant feelings of nostalgia they induce, they do tend to be a bit crap. All but one:

The Mysterious Cities of Gold

There’s one 80s cartoon I’ve watched again as an adult and still absolutely loved, and it was the one that made the greatest impression on me as a kid; in fact, I honestly think it’s one of the reasons I ended up so obsessed with travelling and exploring the world (it was certainly the earliest influence I can recall for my wanderlust, perhaps along with The Hobbit). More specifically, it made me want to go to Latin America and see the ruins of the ancient Mayan and Inca cities – those readers who know it will probably already be humming the tune in their heads by now:

The Mysterious Cities Of Gold was a Japanese-animated, French-written & produced, historical mystery adventure which in places veered wildly off into the realms of science fiction. Set in the 1500s during the Spanish conquest of Latin America, it told the story of Esteban, a young Spanish orphan in possession of a mysterious gold amulet who goes to South America on a Spanish galleon, picking up his companions Zia (who also has a medallion) and Tao plus a few others (trustworthy and otherwise), and going on a quest to find the fabled cities of gold and, hopefully, the meaning of his amulet and the answers to his identity and destiny. Along the way they acquire a solar powered galleon and a solar powered aeroplane in the form of a golden condor, the gold-obsessed conquistadors pursuing them at every turn, and end up in Central America doing battle with the Olmecs – a pointy-eared alien-looking race with a volcano-housed solar power array, cryogenic chambers, and a death-ray equipped flying saucer in the form of a giant Olmec Head (the Olmecs were actually an early Mesoamerican civilisation, and the Olmec Heads are large stone carvings that they left on the east coast of what is now Mexico).

But I know if you’ve read this far and you’re feeling the nostalgia, the thing you really want to see is the first flight of the golden condor. So, here you go:

I hope that sends shivers down your spine! And how about that music? The same music plays during all the most awe-inspiring scenes throughout the series, and it still triggers that childhood sense of wonder when I hear it… and I’m surely not the only one – the above video is actually a fourteen minute edit someone made of bits of the cartoon featuring that music, the “song of mysterious awesomeness” as they call it. Once you’re done watching the flight of the condor, I suggest playing the video from the start as you read the rest of this post!

And here are the reimagined sci-fi Olmecs:

The Olmecs, as depicted in The Mysterious Cities of Gold — The Olmecs as depicted in The Mysterious Cities of Gold, as primary antagonists in the show’s final episodes

The Olmec flying machine in The Mysterious Cities of Gold — The Olmecs preparing to massacre the Mayans with their death ray flying machine

So yeah, it was all pretty far-fetched! It was also very dark in places, with first the avaricious conquistadors (looting and plundering the Inca lands) and then the Olmecs providing some pretty nasty bad guys – the Olmecs at one point capture the children and intend to use their cells to bring back the cryogenically frozen members of their people, which was some pretty full-on stuff for a 6-year old! But this giddy combination of the mystery of ancient civilisations (portrayed broadly accurately) with these utterly bonkers sci-fi elements invoked a sense of wonder which really struck a chord with my childhood self (and so many other kids at the time), and I really am not joking when I say it’s at least partly responsible for my wanderlust today.

And before I continue to the travel tips part of this post, if you didn’t already realise it the entire series (39 episodes) was released as a DVD box set a few years ago and you can buy it on Amazon here. It has absolutely stood the test of time and deserves its status as a classic, and it’s well worth watching again.

Who knows, it may even inspire you to book a trip! As I said, it definitely inspired me to travel, and this is especially true of course for my desire to travel around Latin America; I’m yet to visit South America (it’s at the top of the list along with Nepal & Tibet), but I have backpacked the length of Central America from Mexico to Panama. It’s a great region for travel, with so much to offer – beautiful beaches, towering mountains (many of which are active volcanoes), steaming jungle (and all the teeming wildlife therein), great food, even greater coffee, rum & tequila, gorgeous lakes, the faded grandeur of the old colonial architecture, great hiking and scuba diving opportunities… pretty much everything I love in a destination other than snowboarding… but the jewel, for me, was the chance to visit the Mayan ruins that I’d first seen in the Mysterious Cities of Gold and had dreamt of ever since.

My companion on this trip was my then-girlfriend, who was a great sport about me insisting on planning our route through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras to include all of the Mayan sites that were depicted in the Mysterious Cities of Gold. After much reading around fan forums, viewing of clips and googling of photos for comparison, I had a list of the ancient sites depicted or visited in the cartoon.

Which Ancient Cities Were in the Mysterious Cities of Gold?

The first part of the series takes place in South America, where they visit the Inca sites of Machu Picchu and Winay Wayna in what is now Peru. It’s near Machu Picchu that Esteban and pals obtain their golden condor flying machine, which it turns out they can control using their mysterious medallions; it flies them on autopilot up to Central America, escaping the clutches of the Spanish conquistadores and bringing them to the ruined Mayan cities, their eventual confrontation with the Olmecs, and the truth about their own pasts.

The specific Mayan cities featured in the cartoon are:

In Mexico: Chichen Itza, Palenque, and Uxmal

In Guatemala: Tikal

In Honduras: Copan

Check out these comparison shots:

The main pyramid at Chichen Itza, as seen in the Mysterious Cities of Gold intro

The golden condor flying over Chichen Itza in the Mysterious Cities of Gold intro

Steps and pillars at Chichen Itza — The same pillars at Chichen Itza

The main pyramid at Uxmal, as seen in the Mysterious Cities of Gold intro

The main pyramid at Uxmal, as seen by me — The main pyramid at Uxmal

Tikal, as seen in the Mysterious Cities of Gold intro (with Zia)

Palenque doesn’t feature in the intro sequence, but its buildings are clearly depicted in one of the episodes; likewise, Copan doesn’t feature in the intro sequence but is one of the sites they visit in an episode (Copan is particularly noted for its steles, and we see Esteban chancing upon them as he runs through the jungle).

How to Access the Mysterious Cities of Gold Sites

This map shows our route in red, and the Mayan cities featured in Mysterious Cities of Gold are blue numbers 1 – 5. Green numbers 1 & 2 are two other Mayan sites we visited which weren’t featured in the cartoon:

Map of the Mysterious Cities of Gold — Blue: 1.Chichen Itza 2.Uxmal 3.Palenque 4.Tikal 5.Copan. Green: 1.Tulum 2.Coba

Chichen Itza is located near the Mayan Riviera region (Cancun & Playa del Carmen) and can be visited as a day trip from either – bus loads of cruse ship passengers do exactly this, and it’s by far the most heavily touristed Mayan site. It’s also one of the most impressive, but the large crowds of visitors and vendors of tatty souvenir junk unfortunately rob it of any deep sense of mystery. We actually visited as a stop en route from Tulum (another Mayan site – see below) to Merida; catching the first bus from Tulum to Chichen Itza, we left our backpacks at the luggage office in the bus terminal there while we checked out the ruins for a few hours, then jumped onto another bus to Merida, arriving in the evening.

Uxmal is located near Merida, but the only way we could find to visit it was on a guided tour; not usually my thing, but I just had to see it because it’s this:

We booked the tour through our guesthouse in Merida, and it was a full-day job including two more minor Mayan sites in addition to Uxmal itself. Seeing the main Uxmal pyramid was awesome, but I didn’t really enjoy being ferried around in a minivan on a group tour by a guide who monotonously recited his information as though on autopilot. Due to the less straightforward access, I’d probably only recommend this one if you’re a serious history buff or Mysterious Cities of Gold fan!

Palenque is very straightforward to visit, being just outside the modern town of the same name. We simply caught a public bus from Merida to Palenque, and took a colectivo (shared taxi) to the ruins in the morning. Palenque was also the first site we visited to really spark the sense of childhood wonder I was chasing; although the buildings are less impressive and imposing than those at Uxmal and Chichen Itza, the location on a steamy jungle-clad hillside gives it a wonderfully mysterious atmosphere.

Tikal, deep in the rainforest of northern Guatemala, was the most impressive of the lot. The city itself has the best collection of pyramids we saw – of similar stature to the Uxmal pyramid, but greater in number – and is surely the most impressive ancient site I’ve yet personally seen after Angkor Wat. The remote jungle location gives it an atmospheric setting, and the wildlife alone would have been worth the visit on the day we went – we saw monkeys, tropical birds, vultures, army ants (my feet and legs got swarmed all of a sudden and I copped a few painful bites before I managed to sprint out of their way), and even a snake eating a frog – the victim was still alive and struggling when I snapped this pretty useless blurred photograph:

The pyramids of Tikal rising enigmatically above the forest canopy is quite a famous image, and one which will be familiar to Star Wars geeks as well as Mysterious Cities of Gold geeks (there’s a lot of overlap there, I know) – it was used as the rebel base on Yavin IV in the first Star Wars movie (and again in Rogue One):

The pyramids of Tikal as seen in Star Wars — The Millenium Falcon arriving at Yavin IV (screenshot from Youtube)

Tikal is near the town of Flores (a town built on an island in the middle of a lake in the middle of the jungle, which is a pretty cool place for a town); from Flores, it’s about 90 minutes by road to Tikal. You’ll want at least two nights in the area, and you can stay at one of the lodges at Tikal or a Flores hotel; we stayed in Flores for two nights, making a day trip to Tikal from there.

Copan is the name of both an ancient Mayan site, and a modern Honduran town in the same location (its full name is Copan Ruinas). To visit the ruins, simply take a bus to Copan and stay in the town for a couple of nights, and you can walk to the ruins from your hotel. Copan can be visited as a stop en route between Guatemala or El Salvador and Honduras’ Bay Islands (Central America’s main scuba diving Mecca), see my Central America travel page here for details.

The Copan ruins are also home to some boisterous and colourful locals:

All these sites are great and all worth visiting, with Tikal and Palenque the stand-outs for me. Uxmal is probably only worth going out of your way for if you’re a massive Mysterious Cities of Gold geek though!

Another point of interest for movie buffs is that Predator was partly filmed in the Palenque area, and the waterfall where Arnie has his final showdown with his alien opponent is Cascadas de Misol-Ha, located between Palenque and the beautiful mountain town of San Cristobal de las Casas; we took a minivan from Palenque to San Cristobal via Misol-Ha and another nice waterfall called Agua Azul, which was a nice little route (though I recall it being quite a long day).

The Misol-Ha waterfall — Misol-Ha waterfall; we were there during rainy season, so the volume of water is far greater than seen in Predator

Other Mayan Sites we Visited

In addition to the above Mayan sites that featured in The Mysterious Cities of Gold, we also visited the sites of Tulum on Mexico’s Caribbean coast (south of Cancun), and Coba in the jungle a short distance inland from Tulum. Although not seen in the cartoon, both are also worth visiting if you’re in the area and (despite its modest size) Tulum is particularly photogenic thanks to its cliff-top coastal location; it’s also home to lots of ctenosaurs (a large species of iguana) and these lizards are quite happy to pose for you:

Have you been to the Mayan cities in Central America? Are you a fan of The Mysterious Cities of Gold? Got any questions? Leave me a comment below!

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Ghost In The Shell: chasing ghosts in Japan, Hong Kong, and Taiwan

Architecture, Hong Kong, Japan, Movies & TV, Music, Taiwan, Tokyo

This week saw the release of Ghost In The Shell, a live action Hollywood remake of the classic (1995) Japanese anime movie (itself based on the original manga by Masamune Shirow). The casting of Scarlet Johansson in the lead role caused some controversy (as her character – a special ops cyborg called ‘the Major’ (Major Mira Killian) – was the (Japanese) Major Motoko Kusanagi in the source material) but I don’t really care to discuss that on a travel blog, and nor is this a movie review or movie comparison; with the film having only just come out I’ll avoid any spoilers and won’t discuss it much more than to say that although I wasn’t too keen on the changes they made to the story, visually speaking it’s stunning and it was great to see some of the original’s most iconic scenes recreated (to good effect) as live action:

But rather than posting about the new version, I’m here to talk about how the original Ghost In The Shell movie was a seminal influence not only in cinema but also on a generation of travellers to Japan, and where to go if you’re visiting Asia and want to get a sense for some real-life GITS-esque locations and cityscapes.

Ghost In The Shell: influence on Western cinema

The original Ghost In The Shell is one of the absolute classic movies of Japanese anime and has had a long-lasting impact on Hollywood, cited as an influence by James Cameron and Steven Spielberg, among others – Spielberg’s Dreamworks is behind the new live action version. It was perhaps most obviously influential on The Matrix (which drew heavily from it), though it’s worth also noting that Ghost In The Shell had in turn drawn on and made allusions to plenty of earlier sci-fi such as Blade Runner.

As well as Hollywood directors, it’s also frequently cited as an influence by movie buffs who visit Japan. I’ve had plenty of gaijin bar conversations in Japan with people who were visiting because of certain movies, and in its tourist-pulling power Ghost In The Shell is probably second only to Scarlet Johansson’s previous Japanese outing Lost in Translation (alongside the peerless Bill Murray in what many consider his career-best performance). The Studio Ghibli catalogue is the other big draw, along with Ghost In The Shell’s fellow dystopian near-future sci-fi anime Akira, still jaw-dropping almost 30 years after its release (and I’d like to see someone try to tackle that for a live-action version!)

Ghost In The Shell: Hong Kong

But here’s the thing… the monolithic Asian metropolis in which Ghost In The Shell takes place isn’t even in Japan… while the story is set in a vaguely defined future Japan(*1), the visual model for the city in the film was actually Hong Kong (albeit a flooded version, making it a city of canals). The neon signs reflected in puddles of rain, the umbrellas shuffling down the sloped side streets, vehicles splashing past… these things can of course be seen, producing a similar atmosphere to the movie (and Blade Runner too, while we’re at it), in Tokyo just as they can in Hong Kong; but if you watch this outstanding mise-en-scène that takes place halfway through the movie, it is unmistakably Hong Kong:

The crowded skyscrapers, the neon and water, the signs and air conditioners hanging out over the narrow roads, the steep alleyways, the blend of English and Chinese lettering and names (we see the name Walter Ma in a boutique window, and I’m no fashion expert but Walter Ma appears to be a genuine Hong Kong designer), and (for those who see the difference) the fact they’re traditional Chinese characters(*2); it’s Hong Kong all the way. A Japanese movie featuring Japanese characters speaking entirely in Japanese, yet set in Hong Kong with Chinese writing everywhere… go figure! Yet, it works… Hong Kong’s atmospheric streets and fairly extreme juxtaposition of the gleamingly new and the shabbily old, the hi-tech and the lo-fi, form the perfect backdrop for the story.

So anyway, if you watched Ghost In The Shell back in the day and it made you think “Holy shit I wanna go to Japan!”, you might want to get yourself to Hong Kong instead of Japan… although really, you should probably get yourself to both of them!

(I should note here that I’m specifically talking about the film version of Ghost In The Shell; there was also a TV series (called Stand Alone Complex) which didn’t use Hong Kong as the location and is more clearly set in Japan)

And then there’s the even more outstanding parade scene from 2004’s Ghost In The Shell 2: Innocence, surely the best 3-minute sequence in animated cinema, and I’d even say one of the best 3-minute sequences in all cinema. Blending CGI with hand-drawn animation (apparently taking an entire year to complete), it’s set to the same haunting Japanese minyo chanting used in the first film but with the added kick of taiko drums, and I just love that rising bass line as we see the seagulls flocking past dragon-gargoyled skyscrapers; this scene is a real visual and aural masterpiece and alone makes the movie worth watching:

And while I’m on the subject of the music used in these two scenes, have a watch of this 18-minute live performance (it’s absolutely incredible stuff, but if you don’t fancy the full 18 minutes, start it from 8:34):

(I actually once saw a Japanese DJ drop this Ghost In The Shell theme in the middle of a techno set in a Beijing nightclub; it was pretty intense, though no one on the dance floor knew what to make of it!)

Anyway, back to Ghost In The Shell 2: Innocence; we’re left to assume that the action in the sequel takes place in the same city as the first film, but while it looks the same in the close-in details the movie lacks any establishing shots which explicitly show it to be Hong Kong, and the parade and temple are clearly of a Hokkien Chinese style. If you’ve been to Taiwan, you should recognise the style of the temple as the majority of Taiwanese are of Hokkien roots(*3) (the language usually referred to as Taiwanese is the Taiwan dialect of Minnan Chinese i.e. Hokkien); this is confirmed in the movie’s DVD commentary by the director, who tells us the team made two trips there to get the inspiration for this scene from Taiwanese temples and a parade – which specific parade isn’t made clear, but it looks a bit like the Keelung Ghost Festival.

So, if you’re a fan of Ghost In The Shell 2: Innocence, you might also have to add Taiwan to your anime travel wishlist!

Where to Visit in Asia for a Ghost In The Shell Fix

The new version of Ghost In The Shell also takes place in a vaguely defined future Asian metropolis based on Hong Kong (it was partly filmed there), but this time it features an international cast of characters and is filmed (mostly) in English; the Japanese influence is diminished (though a number of key characters are still Japanese) and if the visuals of the new movie blow you away and inspire you to go to Asia (and the visuals are absolutely stunning), then Hong Kong is definitely the place you’re looking for.

If it’s locales reminiscent of the original anime films that you’re searching for, then again Hong Kong is the main location to visit – check out this awesome post on Recreating Ghost in Hong Kong, and also the amazing photography of Andy Yeung; you might also want to visit Taiwan’s temples or a parade like the Keelung Ghost Festival to see the inspiration for the sequel’s parade sequence. Among many options, Taipei’s Longshan Temple, Ciyou Temple, and Bishan Temple are good ones to visit, especially the latter if you like the sound of a mountain hike to get up to it – with some cracking views to reward you at the top.

Roof carvings at Bishan temple — Bishan temple roof detail

Screenshot from Ghost In The Shell 2: Innocence

Ciyou temple, Taipei — Ciyou Temple, next to Raohe night market, Taipei

Amazing view over Taipei from Bishan temple — View over Taipei from Bishan temple

But what about Japan? After all, even though visually based on Hong Kong they’re still Japanese movies based on a Japanese story – so where to go if you’re a Ghost In The Shell fan visiting Japan and hoping to catch a whiff of Ghost In The Shell there?

Well, the obvious answer to that is central Tokyo, and more specifically, the area around Shinjuku station with its skyscrapers and neon-decked shopping & entertainment district. West Shinjuku is home to Tokyo’s main skyscraper district, and you can go up a few of them for the city views. The Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building has observation decks up on the 45th floor of each of its twin towers, the Shinjuku NS Building has a couple of dining floors at the top with great views (though you’ll need to actually go into a restaurant to eat in order to see them) as well as an amazing hollow interior, and the New York Bar on the 52nd floor of the Park Hyatt Tokyo (aka the Lost In Translation bar) has outstanding views to go with its outstanding cocktails.

View of the Park Hyatt from the Tocho building — The Park Hyatt from the Metro Government Building

The Metropolitan Government Building is free, but the other two are more interesting. The NS Building is a neat bit of architecture, utterly non-descript on the outside but having a hollow interior with an atrium going right up to the roof and an enormous water clock, and if you go for dinner on the upper floors you get the views thrown in (the restaurants up there aren’t crazy expensive either, unlike in some of the other skyscrapers in town); visiting the Park Hyatt bar means paying an entrance fee in the evening, but it’s free to enter in the afternoon and you just have to pay for your drinks (it’s not a cheap bar though – think in the region of 2,000 yen for a cocktail).

All these buildings are cool to go up, though there’s nothing particularly GITS-esque about them, beyond having somewhat futuristic views of an Asian metropolis. Perhaps better is a wander around the shopping streets and alleyways of East Shinjuku – head there on a rainy day and get yourself a plastic umbrella from the convenience store, and walk around in the neon-lit drizzle while listening to this and you might just capture the feeling you’re looking for. Or alternatively, stick some Vangelis on and pretend you’re in Blade Runner! It works for both:

For a walking tour of Shinjuku taking in the above and more, see my post here (with maps)

Notes

*1 although vaguely defined in the film, things are much more fleshed out in the manga and TV series. Although the two differ, they both have the main centre of the action as the fictional Japanese city of Niihama, built on reclaimed land in the Seto Inland Sea following the complete destruction of the Greater Tokyo area in World Wars 3 & 4

*2 although the film is mostly consistent in using traditional Chinese characters, I do spot a few simplified (i.e. mainland Chinese) characters in the sequence:

This could be a mistake on the part of the animators, or perhaps they actually did see those characters in Hong Kong and so reproduced it on film – but given it was made in 1995, prior to Hong Kong’s return to China, this doesn’t seem all that likely. Or, perhaps, it was even a prescient prediction of the increased future influence of mainland China on Hong Kong

*3 The overseas Chinese communities of Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines are also mostly Hokkien, with significant Hokkien influence in Singapore & Malaysia too, so if you’ve visited the Chinese temples in Bangkok’s Chinatown, or elsewhere in Southeast Asia, you’ll likely have seen a similar style there

Any questions or comments? Give me a shout below!

More Tokyo posts here, and check out my quick guide to Tokyo; for more posts on Japan click here

For more Taipei posts, click here

Also check out my overland travel guides to Hong Kong, Japan and Taiwan

(This page contains affiliate links i.e. if you follow the links from this page to the movies on Amazon and make a purchase, 4corners7seas will receive a commission from Amazon. This commission comes out of Amazon’s profit margin at no extra cost to you. Thank you in advance should you choose to do so, and all above-mentioned movies are awesome and money well spent!)

Being a Movie Extra in Vancouver (aka Hollywood North)

Canada & USA, Movies & TV

One winter’s day I emerged from the office building I was working in to the puzzling sight of a ‘genuine’ New York hot dog stand before me, a puzzle further compounded by the NYPD police car that came cruising past.

All of this would’ve been pretty self-explanatory were I actually in New York at the time – but I was 3,000 miles away from the Big Apple, in the Canadian city of Vancouver.

And the obvious explanation for this, as any Vancouverite can tell you, is Vancouver’s thriving movie industry – in the movie world, Vancouver is often referred to by the nickname ‘Hollywood North’ and has served as the filming location for a host of American movies and TV shows, usually playing the role of an American city rather than appearing as itself (see this great video for more on that, with loads of example footage). The New York stuff I saw that day was for the TV show Fringe, and there’s actually a photo on the Fringe Wikipedia page of them filming in December 2010 near my old workplace in Vancouver that I think must’ve been taken on the same day.

On another occasion while walking home at night along West Georgia street (one of the main thoroughfares in downtown Van), I happened across a movie shoot and joined the watching crowd for a while; an action scene, involving a stuntman clinging to the roof of a wildly swerving taxi as a bunch of police cars pulled around the corner ahead, lights flashing, to block the road. The production staff were tight-lipped about what they were shooting for (as I suppose they usually are), but I eventually spotted the shot in Tron: Legacy in the BASE jumping scene near the start of the movie.

Vancouver’s popularity with Hollywood film studios is down to a number of reasons – first and foremost being that the Canadian government offers generous tax breaks to American movie producers to attract their business north of the border. But it’s not just that – Vancouver is a beautiful city nestled between the mountains and the sea, with a downtown core of chic cafes and grimy alleyways running between a forest of sleek skyscrapers, and thus offers a plethora of filming locations which (perhaps with a little CGI from the digital makeup department) can easily be passed off as San Francisco (as it was in Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes), New York (as it was in Fringe), or LA and various European cities (as it was in The A-Team; see below).

While I was living in Vancouver and working several part time jobs (and always in need of a little extra cash), I signed up with one of the various extras agencies in town. They get you in for some paperwork, take your measurements and a photo, and then contact you if they have any suitable gigs. The pay isn’t great, obviously, but it’s a way to make the odd extra bit of income if you have the free time.

I was asked to be an extra on Fringe several times but the shooting times never suited my schedule, and then finally a 1-day shoot came through that I was available for – to be an extra in The A-Team.

Yes, The A-Team. But the rubbish movie version. Specifically, this ‘humorous scene’ in which they get their fake passports muddled up while passing through immigration in disguise, but Murdoch saves the day with his unexpected mastery of Swahili:

If you watch that scene, I’m somewhere in the crowd in the background, though it’s totally impossible to make any individual person out in the back. I think the scene actually takes place in a Danish port, but on set they told us (if I remember correctly) it was a ferry terminal in Germany… and it was filmed in Vancouver’s Rocky Mountaineer railway station (a station which only handles a few trains per week, and only in summer, making it a pretty handy location if you’re shooting in winter and in need a station of some sort).

It’s impressive how much care goes into the detail on a set like that – the station had been decorated with signage and advertising in multiple European languages, even though none of that stuff can be made out in the footage, and we extras were instructed to dress like north Europeans.

Being a north European I simply went dressed as myself, wearing a fleece I’d actually bought in Helsinki – and was told I looked ‘too Vancouver’, and sent to the costume guys for a change of clothing! (none of which made any difference to anything)

If the attention to detail was interesting, the day itself was most definitely not. Working as an extra mostly means sitting around for hours, passing the time with books and idle chat and waiting until they need you; and this was Vancouver on a rainy day in winter, so that meant sitting around in a big tent trying to keep the feeling in your fingers. At least food and drink is provided – and if you’re lucky it’s decent! In Hollywood North it was so-so, but as it was laid out to help yourself at least I could stock up on some free calories – I was severely broke at that point. The one other time I’ve done this sort of thing, for a TV commercial in Japan, food was served at fixed meal times but consisted of good quality bento boxes which went down very well!

I didn’t get called onto the set itself until the final takes of the day, when all hands were required on deck. And even then, it was quite a bizarre experience – to make the crowd look natural, a lot of us were given little things to act out in each take. In my case, I was paired up with a girl my age and a middle-aged lady; they were to be my mother and sister come to meet me, and in every take we had to go back to our starting positions, seek each other out in the crowd, wave excitedly, and then have a joyful reunion hug – all in complete silence.

That was the weird thing really – all these people walking around looking for someone or something, shaking hands and hugging, waving and gesturing and pretending to talk, and all you could hear was the shuffling of feet and the voices of Liam Neeson and Bradley Cooper speaking their lines (though I was too far back to hear what was being said). The background noise you hear in the scene was added in later, and all the waving and hugging is reduced to blobs of vague background movement anyway. A remarkable effort really, to gather hundreds of people to be an airport crowd and then only have them as a couple of fuzzy blobs on screen!

So that was interesting to see, and it was easy money – but only if you find boredom to be easy. I’m glad I did it a couple of times, but I don’t think I could be bothered to do it again.

As to whether you can do it as a traveller to Vancouver, the answer is no, unless you have a working holiday visa. And to witness something being shot simply requires being in the right place at the right time – in my year-and-a-half in the city I just randomly saw those two scenes being filmed for Fringe and Tron: Legacy.

But what you can easily do, once you’re familiar with Vancouver, is feel the regular pangs of recognition when you’re watching a Hollywood movie set somewhere in America and you realise they filmed it in Hollywood North and you once had coffee in that shop in the background!

Here’s a list of movies filmed in Vancouver

And here are a few more memorable scenes filmed in Vancouver, the shooting locations of which are immediately recognisable to anyone familiar with the city:

Highway mutant fight in Deadpool:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=U68kZxgqETM

The laughably gory bridge disaster in Final Destination 5:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QHBL7IjnhdU

And this one from NeverEnding Story shows that Vancouver’s been doing this for decades:

(This page contains affiliate links i.e. if you follow the links from this page to Amazon and purchase a movie, 4corners7seas will receive a commission from Amazon. This commission comes out of Amazon’s profit margin at no extra cost to you, and thank you in advance should you choose to do so!)