I'm not sure which Tokyo Ferris wheel it is!  The famous one is Daikanransha, but that wasn't finished in 1997.

There is the tower that shutin links to here.  Raven is pretty sure it's the Yokohama Marine Tower, which fits with the Kanagawa addresses we occasionally see on people's Mikage Seminar applications.  It does look exactly right.

Googling for Ferris wheels in Kanagawa doesn't turn up the Ferris wheel in episode 33, with its distinctive concentric circles.  Kanagawa's notable Ferris wheel is Cosmo Clock 21, which looks nothing like the one in the screencap.  But it's also definitely not Daikanransha.  I'm not sure how to go about identifying it.

Edit: I've fired off an email to a website that keeps a directory of Ferris wheels.  I gave them the screenshot and said definitely Japan, probably Kanagawa, in an anime aired in 1997 that pays a whole lot of attention to detail.  It's a long shot, but maybe they can help!

Last edited by satyreyes (08-28-2013 03:38:53 PM)

satyreyes wrote:

I'm not sure which Tokyo Ferris wheel it is!  The famous one is Daikanransha, but that wasn't finished in 1997.

EH?  Oh no . . . I must have misremembered things from my past conversations in that "location of Ohtori" thread, where I seem to recall someone saying Ohtori could possibly be in the Tokyo suburbs . . . and i just assumed this means the Ferris wheel is in Tokyo.   Guess I'm wrong there (sorry!).

Anyway, Phul, Satyreyes and Frau Eva both gave some good pointers as to what an Ikuhara fan could look for in Tokyo.  I guess my only thing to add would be that you might want to also visit certain stops along the Tokyo Subway Lines, plus the Sunshine City Aquarium, if you happen to also be a Penguindrum (Ikuhara's most recent work) fan.

satyreyes wrote:

Does that Ferris wheel appear in any episodes besides 33?

Totally not sure.  It's seen from the highways that Akio Car passes, I think, and seem somehow too memorable to be a one ep prop.

satyreyes wrote:

If you were writing a show about revolutions, perpetual motion machines, circular infinity without end, and so on, don't you think you'd pick a clock-themed Ferris wheel as your symbol? 

That's a very good point that I've almost missed.  I always just assumed that the ferris is simply representative of fanciful girlish carving that leads to delusion . . . but come to think of it, the stairs to the duelling arena are spiralling/circular too.  And who can forget that nightmarish merry go round 'Dios' used as prop to taunt Utena with in Ep 39?

Last edited by gorgeousshutin (08-30-2013 09:16:20 PM)

I would also love to hear answers to this question. Anime as old as Utena tend to disappear to make way for newer, more popular series here, so other than the exhibition I attended last spring I haven't seen a single Utena-related thing the entire time I've been in Japan. I'm hoping that might change now that I'm in Tokyo, which seems to have every niche.
On the other hand, for fans of Penguindrum it's amazing. I went to Ikebukuro/Sunshine City a few times since moving near it, and everything looks exactly like in the anime. Plus, the aquarium/planetarium is pretty fun.

Pratyeka wrote:

On the other hand, for fans of Penguindrum it's amazing. I went to Ikebukuro/Sunshine City a few times since moving near it, and everything looks exactly like in the anime. Plus, the aquarium/planetarium is pretty fun.

I'm envious!  I didn't get to Ikebukuro on my one (very brief) trip to Tokyo, and Penguindrum wasn't even a gleam in Ikuni's eye at that point in any case.  It would be fascinating to tour the district having seen the show.

I'm still on the track of the Ferris wheel.  My contact at the directory of Ferris wheels suggests:

I haven’t found anything definitive yet but Cosmo Clock makes the most sense. Hard to tell just by the lighting pattern because those can easily be modified. I haven’t found any pictures from before 1997 either.  It’s hard to eliminate other wheels as possibilities for the same reasons. I can’t find any night pictures (or any good daytime pictures for that matter) of Technostar/Technocosmos. Have you tried contacting the producer or anyone involved in the creation of the show?

Which strikes me as reasonably sound advice!  I wonder who among SKU's production staff (or animation staff?) might be A) in a position to know the answer, and B) disposed towards replying to fan mail.  Thoughts?

(The other wheel he mentions, Technostar, would have been in Osaka in 1997, so it only makes sense if we're radically wrong about the location of the show.)