(Ueno Park)
After ten hours of sleep, I felt well rested. We hadn’t eaten dinner, being too tired to eat the previous day, but we got up and had breakfast at the same place as before. We took the train today to Ueno Park which used to be on the far reaches of Tokyo. Nowadays it is part and parcel of the whole city, indistinguishable from the rest, with buildings and streets surrounding a vast park. It is perhaps the second largest park I have ever been to in a city, next to the National Mall in Washington DC. The main draw here was the Tokyo National Museum which is at the northernmost part of the park, though the park itself has several other museums, a zoo and a lot of walking grounds.
Ueno Park is massive by any
stretch of the imagination. Arriving
there by train, it’s easy to presume at first you can walk everywhere that you
wish to see. My advice? Don’t.
Pick and choose specific things and places. Don’t try to see
everything. The spaces between temples,
museums and such are quite large in the park.
When we arrived there, they were celebrating a Tokyo Green Day, perhaps
in celebration or anticipation of Tokyo winning the 2020 Olympics. There were a ton of horticultural displays
all around. There were many people there
later in the afternoon, mostly students or businessmen on lunch, and the park
had a distinctly well-loved aura to it.
(Greenways)
Green spaces seem rare on the
surface of Tokyo, though if you look around there are always areas of
trees. I think this is a genius of the
Japanese in Tokyo because no matter where you are, in a huge business complex
or apartments or restaurants, it’s not far to find a quiet space of green
removed from commotion.
(Kaneji Temple)
We arrived a bit early to a
dusting of sporadic rain, and since the museum was not yet opened, we decided to
be adventurous and walk round-a-bout through the streets to visit Jomoyin and
Kaneji temples. Our first stop of Kaneji provided an
interesting insight into daily life in Tokyo as we passed little schools and
shops, flower stalls and a large cemetery.
People went about their everyday lives, biking or walking past us. The city streets were a mish mash of houses and smaller businesses. The
highrises of downtown seemed far away when we rounded a hill and looked out at
them.
(Ueno Neighborhoods)
Walking here it was easy for me
to pretend I was a local. I peeked in
the windows of shops, or paused quietly at little places where cross streets
met. Here and there on corners were ever-present vending machines. We came
to know the Suntory and Boss vending machines very well while we were in Japan,
and one of our staple drinks was a very lemony tasting soda called
Suntory-C. The package proclaimed 1000
percent vitamin C, and we figured this was as good an excuse as any to drink it
to keep ourselves healthy and fueled. It
helped that it tasted good too.
(Kaneji Grounds)
Kaneji-ji Temple itself seems
like a small set of structures, but it was once the largest temple in Ueno many
hundreds of years ago. It was comprised
of thirty buildings, but now has only a few with a small green area surrounding
a central shrine. There was a funeral
going on so we couldn’t enter the main complex, but the shrine backs up into a
vast cemetery in which there are entombed many famous people including some
shoguns. Most of the complex was
destroyed in a fire and then again in the battle of Ueno. Indeed, many of the other shrines in the park
were once part of the greater Kaneji complex.
There was not much to see here save greenery and some stone placards
with Japanese text. The main hall was
quiet and small, and it was a nice change from the more busy streets beyond it.
(Jomoyin Temple)
Turning right, we continued on to
Jomoyin Shrine which is a very urban style shrine with hundreds upon hundreds
of Jizo statues. Jizo is the protector
of children in Japan, and to see this many statues was quite extraordinary. Some were large and some small, some seemed
new while others looked ancient and need of repair. The whole of the shrine had a very forlorn
sense to it, perhaps because of the cloudy weather. The sight of the quiet statues with faded
red bibs and the utter lack of anyone being there gave a sort of surreal atmosphere.
I felt like I was stepping on
graves, or dwelling where the spirits of children waited patiently for their
parents to return. It was very
unnerving.
(Yes, this is a door)
We got back to the Tokyo
International Museum when it opened at 9:30 AM.
The first stop, on the way there,
was a huge and impressive gate that stands on the road outside the museum. This gate supposedly was the entryway for a
daimo (regional lord) and man was it imposing.
My dad took one look and said, “What do you think, install that at the
house?” I remember laughing and said, “It
would certainly make the trick or treaters nervous.”
(Tokyo National Museum)
The Tokyo National Museum is a large
sprawling complex of two levels. We
opted for the simpler tour package that did not include one of the lower wings,
but what we saw was just fine. Displays
here include beautiful noh masks, swords, armor, netsuke (decorative holders for pouches) and some simple ukioyoe (wood block prints.) It
was very austere and cold. My favorite were the noh masks. They seem to peer right at you with a
presence of the people who wore them for ancient performances. Many of the creatures displayed were
familiar to me, and so it was kind of fun to point out what everything was to
my parents. Other than these, though, the
rest of the museum felt underwhelming, at least until we entered the Jomon
period area of the museum.
The Jomon Period is perhaps one
of the oldest cultural histories on earth and the oldest in Japan. These are the ancestors of the Ainu, the
native Japanese. Little is known of the
Jomon, save that they used straw rope to braid and mark their pottery (Jomon
means straw rope.) I’ve long been
fascinated with them, and I wasn’t about to turn down a chance to see Jomon
pottery, with its weird alien style. If
you haven’t ever seen it, you are in for a treat.
(Jomon Pottery - Taken from Wikipedia, I couldn't take pictures)
There were figures of horses, buildings
and humanoid people. It is the humans
that are the oddest. They have huge
heads and massive eyes like something out of the grey men we associate with
Area 51. Many of these pieces were
included in tombs and contribute images of horses, people, fish and also
include regalia. Swords, jade and
mirrors are among the treasures here, and I could not help but liken them to
the imperial regalia of Japan. It is
said that the Sun Goddess Amaterasu was drawn from hiding by a mirror such as
the ones here, and the imperial treasures of Japan include a mirror, a sword
and a jewel.
No one has ever seen the imperial
regalia, save the imperial household, so it was rather neat to think of these
ancient things and remark on the culture that made them. It
was sort of otherworldly because the horses and the people (I use the term
people broadly) have blank holes for eyes.
One can look into the darkness of them and feel as if something is
staring back.
After the museum, we walked
through Ueno Park and bought some apples for a snack. We visited the Toshogu Tokyo Shrine, which
was under reconstruction and saw plenty of neat old lanterns on the way up to
it. The shrine also included a large
pagoda, but that was on the grounds of a nearby zoo. Toshogyu is a proxy of the larger shrine in
Nikko that we would see later. West of
this was Kiyomizu Tokyo Shrine which is a proxy of the Kiyomizu Temple in
Kyoto that we would also see later. On
the whole, these weren’t too impressive, but they were a nice part of the larger
park.
(Ueno Inari Shrine)
The small treat was on the way
down to the pond where we found a tiny shrine of Inari, the rice deity. Inari is also the patron god of the kitsune,
the shapeshifting foxes I investigated for my book. Here there were bright vermillion torii in large numbers, a small warren enshrined with fiercely stoic guardian foxes, and
a tiny cave. The cave itself was a
rather neat experience, though I don’t know the function. It may enshrine a
fox's den. There were candles and
statues here, and we could clearly tell it had been used recently for the religious
purposes.
Beyond was the lotus pond
and the Bentendo Temple that stands in the middle of it. The Bentendo Temple is a bulbous structure
that looks out over the waters.
Unfortunately, the lilies weren’t in bloom, but I have seen pictures of
the temple with them flowering and it’s quite beautiful. Bentendo enshrines the goddess of wealth,
happiness and wisdom. We had lunch at an
Italian place (Yes, Italian in Japan) up at one of the tombs that commemorates
the battle of Ueno that happened here.
This battle marked the end of the last shogunate and the return to
imperial power.
(More modern neighborhoods. I wondered what was in this building.)
We went down to Ueno Station and
quickly found other, better, and less expensive food there. This is very common to find food and
restaurants underground or surrounding stations. A common staple is for businessmen to eat on
the way home or after work in places like these. On the whole, the Ueno Station was one of the
largest surprises of this trip. The
lowel level had a neat book and manga store, restaurants and bakery. Doing more research when we got
back home, I was disappointed because there is a big food culture around Ueno
Station itself. We were not a block from
a conveyor belt sushi joint that would have been a highlight of the trip. Still, we had a nice snack at a tiny bakery called
Hokyuo then took the Ginza line to Asakusa.
(Asakusa Gate)
Asakusa Temple is the largest
shrine or temple in Tokyo by far. It’s a
huge complex in the heart of the city and within spitting distance of the
Skytree. We probably could have walked
or taken a taxi to it. When we got
there, we stood at the entrance, and all we saw from us towards the temple proper
were mobs and mobs of people. This is
the famous Nakamise shopping street, rows upon rows of shops selling little
knick-knacks and other things to the throngs that populate it. There are two massive gates on either end of the street with huge paper
lanterns hanging from them. These
lanterns are decorated on the underside with images of Japanese dragons carved
from wood, and on the back of the shrine are huge straw sandals. The one we stood under is known as the
Karanimon.
(Nakamise Street)
We aptly decided to forgo the
main street and went around the side areas to avoid the crowds. There are shops here as well, including a fan
shop. We stopped here, and I perused the
goods until I found a lovely depiction of a kappa (water sprite) sleeping
peacefully next to a pumpkin. This was
such a delightful looking piece that I had to buy it.
(That's a big shoe...)
We eventually emerged beyond the
Nakamise Street and into the plaza in front of the temple itself. The crowd was a bit smaller here, and a smell
of incense wafted from a censor in the center of it all. The first thing one notices approaching the temple is how blood red it looks.
The color is quite vibrant, offset by images of gold with a picture of
a dragon painted on the roof. The
amount of gold inside was amazing to see as well, enshrining a Kannon or
Buddhist deity.
(Asakusa Pagoda)
To the left of the temple is a
five story pagoda, and all of it is within sight of a little amusement
park. We didn’t stop here long before we
took the Ginza line back to the hotel by 4:30 pm. I must say right now that our timing was
impeccable leaving and returning. Over
the course of our time in Tokyo, we would pass trains packed with people coming
into the central portion of Tokyo or leaving to return
home.
Sitting there, paused in the space
between worlds, I thought how miserable it looked. My dad and I are very claustrophobic, you see,
and we specifically wanted to avoid the rush hour. While there were a few times where we were in
standing-room-only subways, we never once felt squeezed in. My best advice for the subways, leave
early. By the time you are finished
seeing most of what you want to see, most everyone else is just arriving
wherever you are leaving.
