On Saturday Yvette and I decided to goto Ginza. I wanted just to walk somewhere in Tokyo. We’ve been to Ginza before if you recall, with K and Angel. Its an interesting place, so its OK to go again.

On the way to Ginza, we came across the “Communications Museum”. Since it was only 110 yen to get in, and since I am a geek, we went in. Upon entering the museum we discovered that today some kind of special event was occurring. I’m not sure but I think it might happen every Saturday, so lets drop the “special” and just call it an event. In anycase it was special to me.

I decided to take a seat and go along for the ride.

Sitting down at a painting school from Ashley Mills on Vimeo.

We were informed that this was some kind of postal envelope painting class. Sounds bizzarre, but actually it was really cool. Let me explain. In the museum shop they had hundreds and hundreds of old stamps from, I don’t know, the 50s right through to the present day. These stamps had different values on them like 10yen, 20yen, 80yen, etc. Stamps with denominations 5 to 20 Yen were all in one plastic container, 30-50 Yen in another, and so on. The cost for stamps in each container was about 10yen more than the maximum denomination in that container. So for the first container, each stamp cost 30 Yen.

This sounds a bit ridiculous, that you would pay 30Yen for a 5Yen stamp. But the point is that these were old stamps that you wouldn’t otherwise get, unless you had been hoarding Japanese stamps from the 50s. The stamps were quite interesting stamps, with different pictures on etc. The idea of this workshop was to stick on your envelope, stamps with denominations amounting to the postal cost of your envelope to your desired destination, and then to paint around these stamps so that they were incorporated into the overall design.

I’m sorry that I don’t have pictures of the stamps I chose, so unfortunately you can only see the finished product.

Here are my masterpieces:

The envelope on the right is the first one I drew. As you can see, I put the Fugu fish in the lake, which is being from the waterfall. Up some steps at the top of the waterfall is an old house. Around the lake’s edge, are various animals. In the top right the sun beams down on everything. I sent this one to Nicola.

The envelope on the left is the second one I drew. I started off with the train in the top right, and extended the tracks across the envelope. Unfortunately, this bright idea left me with little space for anything else. So I just shoved some scenery around the edge and an Olympics stamp on the actual tracks. I sent this one to my Parents and Sister.

The stamps on each envelope total 110 Yen.

Lets take a look at some other people working:

It seems quite popular to use the fish stamps and put them in water. I mean, this is a pretty obvious thing to do, right.

If you noticed, there is a cameraman in the background. They appeared to be filming some kind of documentary or news footage. They actually came right over my shoulder and filmed me drawing my envelope. It was ridiculous, I was drawing some “trees” like a total douchebag, embarassing. Who knows, maybe you will see me on some obscure program about Japan one day.

After finishing my envelopes, I posted them in the provided postbox:

I made a small video of the people painting and stuff:

Bizarre envelope painting school from Ashley Mills on Vimeo.

After this we had a quick look around the museum, here is the slideshow:

After this we carried on walking into Ginza:

In Ginza, I posed by a pumpkin:

In Japan they go beserk about Halloween. They have pumpkins and stuff and halloween themed menus or whatever for the entire month of October… crazy.

The last thing we did in Ginza, was visit “Wendy’s” where we proceeded to purchase “Super Mega Wendy’s” burgers.