The Park at World City Towers
This is a re-publication of an old post. I added a bunch of pictures and some more information. Original publication date: 8/14/2007.
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The pictures above are from the park adjacent to the gargantuan World City Towers residential complex in Minato. It’s Tokyo’s largest, with 2,090 residential units. Click the bottom right picture for a video of Eidan – from Kai he learned the trick of pretending to bump into a pole and exclaiming “unh!,” as if he’d hurt himself. And here he’s doing it repeatedly. This park was a short walk from our apartment, and during the spring it was a daily destination for Eidan and I in the mornings. We’d play in the park after Maria left for work and Kai left for school, then I’d do our daily shopping at the wonderful Maruetsu grocery store. We’d go home for lunch, Eidan would nap for two hours while I worked, Kai would finish school, the three of us would go somewhere for a few hours, and then be home in time for dinner with Maria.
I enjoy doing write-ups of the parks we visited in Tokyo, but this one isn’t worth much commentary – it’s main attraction was that it was nearby. It’s a new park, and is quite large, but with only a few play structures, and an enormous, smooth gravel area in the middle. The Tokyo Monorail line runs along the edge of it. Eidan always enjoyed when the Pokemon train occasionally came by. Every morning a workman came by to empty the trashcans, and to sweep the entire gravel area with nothing more than an old fashioned Japanese broom. The one astonishing thing is that the grassy area of the park is strewn with rubble. It’s peppered with small pieces of broken concrete and tile, from the recently completed World City Towers. It’s just another idiosyncrasy of the otherwise fastidious Japanese: in so many ways they have the most exacting standards, but when it comes to parks, they’ll just throw grass seed down on top of the rubble and call it a day.
The two pictures below are from a smaller park that was across the street from our apartment in Minato. We didn’t go there much because it only had one small play structure and it tended to get very dusty (the ground around the play structure was just packed dirt, which would blow around when the weather was dry). But it was fun to see the kids from the local daycare literally get carted out for playtime.
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