On Friday, our last full day in Japan, my friend Kristin Yamaguchi invited us to meet her and her three kids on [Odaiba](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odaiba), an artificial island in Tokyo Bay.

There are a couple of ways to get to Odaiba. We were hoping to take a boat down the Sumida River. Specifically, this boat, the _Himiko,_ designed by a famous manga artist:

I didn’t take this picture, because we didn’t take this boat. The forecast called for high winds, and the boat trips were canceled. We were bummed. But we perked up on the Yurikamome Line train, the other way to get to Odaiba. This is one of the newer trains, and it’s elevated. While transferring to it, we followed a huge crowd of people who, we figured, must be heading the same way we were. We ended up at a security turnstile in the lobby of a bank building. They were heading to work. The guards pointed us in the right direction.

The Yurikamome line goes across the Rainbow Bridge, which is spectacularly lit at night but just your basic suspension bridge during the day. (Its awesomeness is further limited by the fact that if you Google for “Rainbow Bridge” you will find many copies of a poem about how you will be reunited with your dead pet in the afterlife.)

Right about the time we disembarked and met up with Kristin and her son and two daughters, the windstorm hit. Odaiba is known for being the windiest place in Tokyo, and this was one of the windiest days of the year. For a few moments, it was so windy we couldn’t stand up. I was pretty sure we were going to die. Iris thought this was completely awesome. We took cover inside Starbucks, where Iris and the kids went to work building elaborate spitball guns while I drank my favorite Japanese Starbucks beverage, the [Hojicha Latte](http://everyonestea.blogspot.com/2010/04/hojicha-latte-at-starbucks.html).

Kristin is from the midwest, and her husband is Japanese. Her kids are totally delightful. Iris made friends with Julia, the middle daughter, immediately. They went inside a haunted house, the kind where people in costumes jump out at you, and retreated the same way they’d gone it, clutching each other in terror. Now it was my turn to laugh.

Kristin had asked what we’d like for lunch. “I asked Iris about lunch and she said gyoza, which sounds good to me too if it’s not too boring for you,” I wrote.

“My children all just cheered!” she wrote back. “There is plenty of gyoza to choose from in the Little Hong Kong area that takes up two floors of one of the shopping areas.”

This was exactly as cool as it sounds. We perused a bunch of plastic food and decided on a place specializing in gyoza crowded onto a round, sizzling platter. The dumplings stick together, and you have to tease them apart with your chopsticks. Iris announced that she was going to eat thirty dumplings. She didn’t, but she ate a bunch. I ordered dandan noodles, which were terrific and spicier than I expected (“spicy” in Japan generally translates as “not spicy”).

Then Iris, Kristin, and the girls went on this ferris wheel:

Hide, age 8, and I did not. If you’re keeping score, that means Iris is ahead in the scare contest, two to one. Although I guess I didn’t go inside the haunted house, so maybe it’s three to nothing.

Then we went to this absurd Vegas-style shopping mall called Venus Fort:

By the time we headed back to the Shigetsu, Iris wanted to be adopted into the Yamaguchi family.