On the weekend I went to Odaiba to see the new “Alien Science” exhibition at the Miraikan (or “Future Hall”), known in English as the Museum of Emerging Sciences. Odaiba – a city built from scratch on a reclaimed island in Tokyo Bay – is a strange, soulless, hulking place. I had to walk right through it, under grey rainy skies, to get to the museum. It was as bleak and dystopian as I could possibly imagine. I had just finished reading the book ”Dogs and Demons”, a critique of Japanese society that places an addiction to building huge, sterile, unnecessary monuments at the heart of the country’s psychological problems, so this billion-dollar ghost town of sci-fi towers amid weedy fields and big empty roads, was particularly unnerving.
One of these buildings was the Miraikan. The Future Hall is one of those lavishly-built museums that would take pride of place in almost any other city, but here people are only vaguely aware of its existence (if that). I had never been before.
So I was surprised when I got in to see its soaring modern atrium
And by this incredible LCD globe that hangs over it, flashing from climate map to desertification chart, to advertisement.
Underneath the huge, glowing globe people were lounging on couches, looking up, or children were running around it on a spiraling walkway which shook violently as they passed, giving me (honestly) a mini-panic attack, seeing as we were suspended a good four storeys above the lobby floor on a narrow, shaking ledge.
It was a great opening number though.
After this, the alien exhibit itself was a bit anticlimactic. It was a bit more lowbrow than I had expected with lots of big plastic models of the baddies from the “Alien” movies and cutesy movie characters - but there was a “Roswell” exhibition with this:
And these, reassuringly hightech light tables, where passers-by can manipulate the images by touching, sorting through characteristics that aliens might have on different kinds of worlds:
There was, in the permanent collection, another funky piece of equipment – a circular pitch black chamber with the walls covered in blue lights that would suddenly blink on in rippling patterns, then unpredictably disappear. I think it was supposed to be a simulator of some kind of reactor or something…
