How Underwhelming Can You Get?

Tokyo SkyTree. You can’t miss it. It’s that gigantic over-hyped TV tower rearing its unremarkable, yet insistently lit-up head out beyond Asakusa. For twenty bucks you can go up it and see the view. Except today. Today all I could see was, well, this.

The most expensive clouds I have ever seen.

Fortunately for us view-challenged types, every vista is equipped with massive photo touchscreens that have a quasi-nifty interactive feature that lets you point your finger anywhere and move around a magnified and/or night view of what would be right outside the window if only there weren’t so many damn clouds in the way.

Okay, have to admit, this slightly made up for the lack of actual view.

I imagine that the twenty-buck view itself might be slightly better than the nine-buck one at Tokyo Tower, but mostly because if you’re standing inside the SkyTree, you aren’t looking at it.

The view from Tokyo Tower, with SkyTree poking up underwhelmingly in the background.

Urban view tower smackdown: This? or…

…this? (I’d kinda like to say, NO CONTEST. heh.)

Jonelle Patrick is the author of the Only In Tokyo mystery series, published by Penguin/Intermix.