Tuesday, April 10, 2018

When Liberty came to town

Odaiba, on the eastern flanks of Tokyo Bay is a peculiar place. A destination in it's own right, it is a late twentieth century vanity land fill which encases one of the six gun batteries (hence the name meaning big, flat place) constructed (more or less) across the marine access to the pre-Meiji era conurbation of Tokyo to protect (less) against the onslaught of barbarian ships (ie European and American). However, the development as a whole then came to a shuddering halt in the mid-1990's deplete of tourists, residents, businesses or access.

Revived as a commercial project in the decades to come, it now boasts tourist shopping, a Madame Tussauds, cinemas, a very strange head office of Fuji TV (the construction cost of which nearly bankrupted the broadcaster at the time) and the first sand and sun beach east of Minato Mirai in Yokohama, some thirty kilometers to the west, the remainder being port facilities and oil storage (yes, we're one spark short of a thermo-nuclear explosion in the heart of one of the largest cities in the world).

It also has its own replica Statue of Liberty which came around more or less by accident. In 1998, Japan was celebrating a year of the French and borrowed the lesser known Parisian statue from the Ile Aux Cynes, an island in the middle of Paris. And it turned out to be a massive hit with the tourists  for the fledgeling commercial developments around the futuristic, though deserted, Tokyo Teleport. And so when it was returned to France they built another one; a replica of a replica of the real thing. And given the number of selfies going off on a weekend, seems like the rather unlikely idea has rather handsomely paid off.







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