Totoro and friends

If you would like to go to Studio Ghibli and you live in say San Francisco, then you should try to get tickets before you go to Tokyo. We did not, and all the wkends were completely sold out. It is closed on Tuesday, so we ended up going on a Weds. The best way to get tickets is at a convenience store called Lawsons. They have a machine that sells tickets. It is not an easy machine to figure out if you do not read Japanese, so what we did was have the hotel write a note to Lawson's saying these people would like two tickets to Studio Ghibli on Weds at 12. You have to pick a time. It takes about 4 hours to really thoroughly go through the museum. If you get there a little later than your time, it is ok. The station we went to is Mitaka and you can there from Shibuya pretty fast on the JR line, but we had tickets for the other lines so we went from Shibuya to Kudanshita on the Hanzomon line and then switched to Tozai line to Mitaka and then switched to a bus (that was covered in SG characters at bus stop number 9, down a level from the trains, 300Y or so) - that took about 90 minutes.

There is a lot of things suited for kids at the studio - a catbus to crawl in and around, small doorways to go through. And at the end we watched a 20 minute film that was just great, that we had never seen before, but with all the wonder/joy that is Studio Ghibli. There is a lot at the studio that teaches you how animation is done - very informative. The place is maze like and it feels like wonderful things are all around. We had lunch at the takeaway stand since the sit down restaurant was so crowded. We had hot dog, 3 kinds bean curry with rice, beer, apple juice, white milk ice cream and chocolate ice cream. There is also a wonderful souvenir shop, that some people said doesn't have everything, but I thought they had lots.