Take me to Electric Town.

First thing in the morning, we took a train over to the Ghibli Museum in Mitaka (40 minutes by train, west of Tokyo). The museum is dedicated to the work of anime master and Academy Award winner Miazaki Hayao. It shows rather than tells the steps of the animation process, with reproductions of the work spaces of those that create the storyboards, the backgrounds, the characters of each work. Likewise, exhibits illustrated how characters move, how backgrounds provide depth and richness, how sound brings a movie alive. If anything, this should strip away the magic of animation. Yet the museum does just the opposite: it feels like a sort of magical workshop where imagination comes to life.

The building itself is also sort of dreamlike creation, part modern curves, part French country home, with stained glass and spiral stairs and huge ceiling fans, a mixture of bright paint and earthy materials. Some doorways are only big enough for children. There's also a miniature Louvre, with small reproductions of master works. Inspired touches -- characters popping up in unexpected places, like a window, a robot standing in the rooftop garden -- add to the feeling of wonder. It's all very un-Disney, and better for it.

Outside, the Japanese blaring out of speakers made it feel very Blade Runner indeed.

A ticket also includes admission to a short film created especially for the museum, in this case the story of a boy who trades an oversized vegetable to two animal travelers who give him a seed that, with care, allows him to grow a miniature world with life on its surface and its own atmosphere.

After lunch -- Cory and Kelly had hot dogs (hotudogu)  that tasted, well, not like hot dogs; Kristin had a green tea ice cream that tasted like exactly that -- we wandered through the adjacent park, where families were picnicking under the flowering cherry blossom trees (sakura).

Later, we traveled to the upscale Tokyo neighborhood of Ginza. Here there痴 some striking modern architecture: a building shaped in a wave, another with irregular holes cut out of a pink exterior, another of glass blocks, and at least two with a sort of glass-like skin. One of those is the huge department store, Matsuya Ginza, where we wandered a bit and later returned to see the basement. It's home to a seemingly limitless parade of food, from fine chocolates gift-wrapped and ready to go to hot Chinese food to fresh baked goods to some of the most expensive oranges you'll ever see.

We ate an early dinner at an amazing tempura restaurant, where we sat at a low bar while the chef expertly battered and fried each piece for us. There were fish of all description, plus something buttery like crab to something that may well have been eel, which tasted a bit like freshwater fish (like, say catfish) to asparagus.

We also stopped off at the Apple store -- an excuse to check e-mail and Facebook, really -- and the Sony building, where we saw four showroom levels of the latest high tech gadgetry. And really, who doesn't want a purple laptop?

A need to sort out a camera problem made for a good excuse to visit Akihabara (Electric Town), where buildings are jammed with gizmos and anime and games. A clerk at one electronic store raced this way and that to help us find the Canon-specific USB cord we needed. -- going so far as to take the cord we needed from a display model (suck on that service, Best Buy). Outside, the Japanese blaring out of speakers made it feel very Blade Runner indeed. The neighborhood is definitely guy-heavy, between the gizmos and game parlors and slightly -- to very seedy -- anime and stores (seven-story sex shop, anyone?), the sort of place where young guys in suits go to blow off steam (and smoke). If anything, despite all the bright lights, it felt a little dated and, maybe more so than anyplace else we went in Tokyo, slightly creepy.

Rather than stay out, we settled on a late-evening stop a hotel restaurant that was somewhere between mediocre and disastrous for its glacial service -- the only bad service we've had so far -- and awkward attempts at American staples. Already grumpy over missing a chance to see a Japanese Beatles cover band, Cory, for his part, would have rather eaten Shaka Shaka Chicken at a nearby McDonald's than eat lukewarm hot dogs slathered in what tasted like Pace picante sauce (this was a chili dog, all while listening to a worst-of collection of 80s pop hits. Suffice to say, a happy time was not had by all.