Rainbow Bridge to Odaiba

I found out recently that it’s possible to walk across the Rainbow Bridge.  On a nice sunny afternoon, what better way to explore Tokyo than walk across the bridge to Odaiba?  On reaching Odaiba, I found old Edo-period fortifications, a beach, and a Statue of Liberty scene that didn’t quite resemble New York…

It’s usually easy to forget that Tokyo is a waterside city, but the bay sparkled in the afternoon sun.  Looking across Tokyo Bay, Tokyo Tower doesn’t quite look like it would belong in Paris either…

This is the underside of Rainbow Bridge from my starting point, near Shibaura.  It was about a 15 minute walk from Tamachi Station.  There’s an elevator up the bridge pylon (out of the below photo to the right), and the walkway shares the same level as the passing traffic on the lower deck.

All of the below photos are from the north side walkway.

When I got to the Odaiba side of the bridge, a walkway took me onto the south side.  This view looked over the Odaiba area, which is one of a growing number of man-made islands that make Tokyo Bay smaller and smaller.  But in the foreground of the below photo is one of the reasons behind the name Odaiba (お台場).  In English, I guess it might be called the “Number 3 Fortification”, or “Dai San Dai 第３台” in Japanese.  “Dai” means “stand” or in this case, something like “raised gun placement”.  There were 6 of these built in the Edo period to fortify Edo, manly against the threat of Commodore Perry’s black ships, and No 3 has been turned into a park.  Far from keeping the foreigners out, it’s now a tourist attraction with a fair share of foreigners included. No 6 is apparently somewhere out in the bay, and the others have probably been subsumed into larger artificial islands.

The Fuji television station headquarters is the most architecturally standing out building in Odaiba.

The walk around from No 3 Dai to Odaiba was along a beach, no doubt artificial.

The most unexpected thing I found in Odaiba was a miniature (at least compared to New York) version of the Statue of Liberty.  She looked just a little out of place, but I guess that on the day that Barak Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize, I should hold off cynicism.  (I think the last time I saw a Statue of Liberty in Japan, she was atop a gaudy love hotel…)