Fish and kites

Former fish dock on the river (seen from Kachidoki Bridge)

I caught a whiff of the Tsukiji Outer Market area before I reached it. First I had taken a look inside the Buddhist Tsukiji Hongwanji Temple, as large as a cathedral, that had immediately caught my eye as I emerged from the closest metro station, H10 on the Hibiya Line. Walking towards the Kachidoki bridge over the Sumida River, the market area was on my right; I could smell the fish from the other side of that 6 lane road. The fishermen's dock where they sold their fish from the boat used to be here too, but has recently moved elsewhere (to Toyusu).

As usual, this was a very, very hot day and it was a relief to find that some of the stores and shopping areas in that crowded district had cool interiors, the market hall in particular, where I quenched my thirst with a bottle of freshly squeezed mandarin orange juice, a glass bottle for once (plastic is the norm, unfortunately, and most shopping in Tokyo, apart from the very high-end stores, involves plastic bags too). The fishes, large and small, the eels, octopus, turtles and so on for sale in that long, old fashioned market hall, recently caught, were displayed in crates and packed in ice. I found the squishy-looking dead turtles particularly revolting, but I suppose the locals get used to them. Shellfish is sold complete with shells. By the time I was looking round, late morning, a lot of the day's produce has been sold already. In the warren of narrow streets around this place, many other things apart from seafood were on sale, but it was mostly seafood. Tourists can pick up bargain souvenirs here, tawashi brushes, teapots, kitchen utensils, speciality teas, and many places sell viciously sharp looking kitchen knives that wouldn't be allowed through airport security checks. It was a great place for browsing, very atmospheric and noisy, the marketeers shouting out their wares, and two men on one corner literally singing the praises of a local restaurant, in counterpoint. Overhead was a tangle of electrical cables, as in the more chaotic parts of Chinese or Indian cities. I felt thoroughly abroad here. On one alleyway fish was being grilled on a barbecue, charred by means of a flame-thrower. Some shopkeepers and restaurant owners were coming outside to sluice down the pavement outside their premises. I caught one on camera.

My chef at the Sushi restaurant

Beginning to want some lunch, I paused outside one of the numerous fish restaurants, this one called Sushi Say Honten, and was persuaded inside with expressive gestures and welcoming words in Japanese from the man at the door. I was offered a high stool at the counter where I could watch my choice of sushi roll being prepared. The young chef had a sort of conversation with me in which he ascertained that I was from Canada, at which he beamed all over his face, saying "Ah, MAPRE SYLUP!" --- at which I smiled broadly, too. The young man also conveyed to me that he was going to prepare me a very good lunch: using hygienic gloves started slapping some sticky rice together and preparing thin slices of raw tuna, salmon and yellowtail, with serious concentration. It did taste good, with a small cup of miso soup on the side. Whenever any individual or party finished their meal, paid their bill and left the restaurant, all the staff shouted something incomprehensible and cheered: a lively farewell. I got the same treatment.

*****

Exhausted by the stimulating time I'd spent in Tsukiji, I didn't feel like discovering much more in the afternoon, but on my way back to the hotel, after a little searching, I found the entrance to the quirky Kite Museum in Nihonbashi. It appeared to be a popular restaurant, with lines of people waiting for a table; indeed the owner of this restaurant is also the kite collector who owns the small museum upstairs, the entrance to which is at the door of a narrow lift on the 5th floor. When I went, I was the only visitor at this museum. It was quite claustrophobic, packed with kites of every age, size, shape and origin. Most were made of paper, but some were quilted or made of cloth affixed with feathers, etc. Curious children must love it here. The exhibition includes paintings or drawings of kites and kite flying. I liked the demon faces and the extraordinary paper kite that looked like a sailing ship.

The layers of Tokyo

Nihonbashi, with freeway above and canal beneath

We didn't go on the fast roads. We saw them, above our heads or beneath high windows, intertwining on concrete stilts. Below the roads are the surface railways, then the residential and commercial streets, some narrow, some wide. The river and its tributary canals are another level of interconnection. Under the surface lies the network of subway stations and underground trains.

Canal dredging under a motorway

Tokyo's houses used to look like this

This is so for most modern cities, Montreal springs to mind, but cramped and crowded Tokyo is a particularly impressive example of how the multiple layers of infrastructure work. Not only that, but the history of the place appears layered too. Concealed or partly concealed beneath one thing is another. Most of what we saw was super-modern, but below the modernity or in hidden corners we caught glimpses of how Tokyo used to be, in the past.

View of Tokyo station from the roof garden of the Kitte building

Yurikamone Line near Daiba station

Fuji headquarters on Odaiba, Tokyo's artificial island

Bank of Japan (built 1896), new skyscrapers beyond it

For all my observation in public places, I could not see below the surface of the Japanese people themselves. They are reserved people who would hesitate to let you penetrate their privacy.

Perhaps the reason the parks of Tokyo are so soothing is that they offer an escape from the multilayered modern city and its complexity. You are at last in a setting that looks relatively natural; even though the layout of the garden is artificially designed. Without distraction, you are free to concentrate on one thing at a time.

Flying to Japan

San Francisco - Vancouver - Tokyo, July 31st - August 2nd

This was the luxury stretch! One snag though: due to someone's incompetence at the San Francisco airport, my suitcase went missing for five days; it was not so luxurious to manage without a proper change of clothes for that length of time.

Approaching Vancouver

Anyway, apart from that, we had seats near the front again for the evening ride from SFO to YVR (Vancouver) going parallel to the coast, and I in a window seat, which gave me extraordinary views to the east of the semi-dessert terrain in northern California and then of the still snow-capped, isolated mountains of the coastal range in Oregon, their peaks glowing in the semi-light after sunset. This was unworldly scenery. As we descended into the Vancouver area too, my views of the lit up city, the ships anchored in English Bay and the mountains beyond were exciting.

It was in Vancouver that we realised my suitcase, despite its red "priority" label, was not going to show up. Before we could catch a shuttle bus to our hotel for the night, we had to wait at the carousel in vain and then report it, taking a long time. 

The name of the hotel (on Cessna Drive) was The Pacific Gateway, appropriately, but we shall probably not return there; the room was over-priced. Before tackling the Pacific on August 1st, we managed to find a walk along a trail along a bank of the Fraser River, where sweet, fresh blackberries, straight from the bush, supplemented our hotel breakfast; it felt good to get some fresh air, knowing we had a 9-10 hour flight ahead of us: AC3. 

Signature Class, what self-indulgent snobbery it encourages! The Maple Leaf Lounge was full, but was serving plenty of snacks and drinks at its lunch buffet, so we didn't need to line up at an airport Tim Horton's. Priority boarding for that full flight made the departure more tolerable too. I was right to anticipate that the luxury would spoil us on flight AC3; little details make a difference, the deferential "Would you like a glass of champagne, Mrs. Hobbs?" as you settle in to your little den with the comfy bedding and shelf space in the Dreamliner, while trying to work out what all the knobs and switches do to your seat, the complimentary "amenity kits" with their eye shades and black socks, the stainless steel rather than plastic cutlery for your in-flight meals, and the large, clear, modern screen for the map and movies, the noise cancelling headphones. I thoroughly enjoyed wallowing in the novelty of it, although I'm old enough to remember when the standard of Economy Class service on long haul flights used to be quite similar. The map showed a straight line between Vancouver and Tokyo, across the Aleutian Islands. For entertainment I watched two comedy films, learning a good deal about men in the process. 25 Km/H, in German, was about a pair of brothers who decided to fulfil a teenage dream of riding across Germany on their mopeds, each coming to terms with his very male mid-life crisis in the process, and the other was that northern British-humoured comedy about six unemployed men and a boy --- The Full Monty --- starring Robert Carlyle, who also acts the no-good father in Angela's Ashes, a film I happened to watch later on during this trip as well.

In an aisle seat with the cabin windows tinted in changing colours to conceal the view, I saw nothing of the ocean we were flying over. I did succeed in lying flat and getting some sleep, about two hours worth. When we landed at Tokyo it was mid-afternoon on August 2nd.

On the Ginza line train, August 2nd

Immigration in Tokyo was very quick and efficient, but again, the fruitless wait for my suitcase at the carousel. It took an extra hour before we could set off from the airport after helping a novice but sincere and courteous baggage-handling girl fill in the online forms about the shape, size, colour and contents of my case. I used vocabulary she didn't know and she had to get assistance from her superiors. The Japanese take enormous care not to give offence, which I appreciate, and I was given another little amenities kit as a compensatory gift from the airline. Then after clearing customs we had a longish conversation with the man in the railway office who sold us (for cash only, N.B.) our return tickets + extra metro tickets to central Tokyo. It cost us almost 10,000 yen which seems exhorbitant, until you remember that $1 (Canadian) = about 80 yen. We had to change from the Keisei express ("Skyliner") train to the Ginza Line metro at Ueno, not as difficult as I'd feared, but we were tired and hot and didn't know which "gate" to aim for at Mitsukoshimae (三越前) station, our metro stop. It should have been A10; we emerged at one of the other exits and had to use the GPS on Chris' phone, as in the Californian forests, to find our destination. The Mitsui Garden Hotel Nihonbashi Premier was actually not so far off, opposite two enormous skyscrapers, one of which was going to be Chris' place of work. The other (the Nihonbashi-Mitsui Tower, 34 storeys high) was floodlit after dark in the Olympic colours, next year's big event being much on the minds of Tokyo's authorities, obviously; they are getting ready for it already.

The Mitsui Garden Hotel's reception desk is on the 9th floor and our room was on the 12th. In a corner of the lifts are survival kits in case you have the misfortune to get stuck there during an earthquake *. The receptionist, bowing politely, looked askance when we told him we had a booking for 10 nights. I wondered why he felt so sorry for us. The room was in fact pretty small and all the furniture and walls were black, which looked chic, but made it seem smaller. Outside our window was another high wall to look at. There was very little space for our things and no desk, but the bed was comfortable, and during our stay Chris was able to work on his laptop at a small glass table. The pull-out washing line in the shower was useful, my change of clothes being so limited, although the humidity was such that it took a good two days for washed socks to dry, even after rolling them in the towels. 

We arrived Friday. My suitcase finally reached me the following Tuesday evening.

Too befuddled to search far for supper on that first night, we found a narrow Vietnamese eatery hung with pretty lanterns in a nearby side street and enjoyed some comfort food there, perching on high stools. Cash only, once more. It was already dark.

Mitsui Tower, Chuo Ciy, Tokyo

*As far as I could tell from the pictures, the emergency kit contains food and drink, a portable toilet, a first aid kit, a set of dominoes to play with, a blanket and a fan.

Two National Museums

Cardiff's National Museum is on Gorsedd Gardens Road

Within a week, I visited the National Museums in Wales (Cardiff) and Japan (Tokyo), both of them full of artworks worth discovering. What an education I got!

In Cardiff with my mother and sister (Feb. 9th) I chose to (re)visit the Davies' Collection of French art—such good taste, those ladies had—as well as my favourite British art by the neo-romantics John Piper, Paul Nash, and company (Graham Sutherland, Ceri Richards, Stanley Spencer, Barbara Hepworth ...) They had a whole room full of David Jones' pieces, wonderful! It struck me how similar to the Canadian David Milne's his art was. We spent some time in a retrospective exhibition of paintings and photographs of the Queen as well which included an excellent portrait of her by Karsh.

Welsh is easier to understand than Japanese

The collections in the Tokyo museum (Feb. 15th) looked less familiar! I saw terracotta figures (haniwa) made to protect a dead person's tomb or soul. In the next room were scrolls of Buddhist "scripture"; Buddhism came to Japan through Korea in the 6th century. Further on in the galleries was a 12th century painting of a Utopian scene entitled Nirvana, with echoes of the lion lying down with the lamb from Isaiah, but in this case the animals and humans in the picture, painted on silk, were encircling a reclining Buddha. It reminded me of what I'd seen in China, and the copies of poems by Bai Juyi were an even more direct link to that country, as was the tea ceremony paraphernalia, the Ming Dynasty cups and bowls.

Entrance to the TNM beside Ueno Park

I found rooms full of 16th century (Muromachi period) screen paintings, a lovely scene of Pine Trees on the Seashore for instance and another with birds, flowers, boats, waves, willows and a hunting scene. Then there was a Zen Buddhist screen, Moon and Plum Tree, simply done in ink. From the 17th century I saw beautiful folding screens featuring blossoming plum trees on gold leaf, adorned with peacocks, and an 18th century one told the allegorical story of four old men on an "outing," accompanied by riders on horseback and young servants who were pushing and pulling them up a steep slope and carrying them across a mountain stream.

The museum also had a large collection of Samurai armour. The Samurai were "strong and stoic," keeping their swords in lacquered scabbards. The "warrior class" of Japanese society in the old days played games like snap with painted scallop shells instead of cards, the shells kept in octagonal boxes. They played a so-called "Incense Game" requiring something like a chess board. They did play card games too; the cards were circular. Battledore and shuttlecock was a popular pastime and they also liked theatre with its Noh masks and elaborate costumes. In the permanent collection at the museum were many paintings of actors and "Beauties"––young women of the Pleasure District in their fashionable 18th century attire.

I saw some lovely watercolours by Hokusai and tiny, intricate ivory netuske as well as a large Map of All the Countries of the World, with Japan at the centre, of course, Australia featuring vaguely as part of Antarctica at the bottom.

I took a break for lunch, a tasty wonton soup served with tea for $10 in the peaceful museum restaurant outside the main building, then went to explore another floor of the museum, seeing lacquerware (an artform that dates back to 5000 BC!) with inlaid mother of pearl, iron sculptures of a snake, a lobster, and fish, of bronze quails and elephants that doubled as incense burners, and an ox. In the Edo period they loved collecting miniature objects: those Hina dolls that I mentioned in an earlier blogpost often had dolls-house furniture with tableware to match. Some of the dolls were made to nod their heads or dance in circles.

In the last gallery visitors were being encouraged to sit down and create their own design for a kimono. I did this too and was given a leaflet about the meaning of the patterns used on kimonos.

Near each museum (my blog is all about juxtapositions!) was a large public park, Bute Park and Ueno Park, respectively. The spring daffodils were starting to bloom in Cardiff; at the bottom of the hill near Ueno Station in Tokyo I walked past a lotus pond that had not yet sprung to life. I'd have to return in midsummer to see those flowers in bloom.

My impressions of the people

Poster at the Tokyo National Museum

I was among the Japanese for hardly more than a week. I can't claim to know them after so short a time.  However, they seem a most orderly, self-sufficient people. They look smart and well groomed. Having seen in the Tokyo National Museum centuries-old books on how to care for one's appearance, I believe this must go back many generations; it certainly has a lot to do with their upbringing. The children, even the pre-school children, are uniformly dressed in neat clothes and behave in a docile manner. Little girls wear school hats and clean socks. Elderly ladies do not go grey, but have black, dyed hair. I saw some ladies, not only the ones attending wedding parties, wearing kimonos around town and the traditional clogs on their feet. They look lovely, but I doubt if it's easy to walk in them.

Mitsokushimae underground station
with floor tiles for blind people
to walk along

Japanese women tend to stay at home to look after the housework and their children; the ones who do go to work wear tailored suits or dark-coloured dresses. The male commuters are nearly all clad in black suits. This looks like a serious, disciplined nation. Our hotel was close to the IBM offices. We watched the employees coming up the escalators and striding along the metro station corridors on their way to and from work, travelling in ones, making no eye contact. We saw no pushing and shoving. Gangs of construction workers dress differently, in bandit-like headscarves and baggy, wide-bottomed trousers.

The citizens of Tokyo appear to work till they drop. In the evening the men return home after 8 p.m., pale and exhausted. Their eyes close and often they fall asleep on the underground trains despite the constantly broadcast announcements about the next station and how to behave there. A majority of people wear disposable facemasks, ostensibly to guard against germs, but I suspect also as a barrier to too much social contact. After a few days' observation I'd come to the conclusion that they must be a nation of introverts. At breakfast time (the Parisian style coffee and croissant is a popular choice) and in the lunch hours Japanese office workers often eat on their own at solitary tables in "hole-in-the-wall" restaurants, immersed in a book and / or smoking. Smoking is generally allowed indoors, but not on the street, unless you are in a designated smokers' area.

Lunchtime at a quiet restaurant in the business district

We witnessed no graffiti and no rowdiness. We did see teenage boys studying together and trying to get their homework done. The Japanese seem to have a sense of pride in their work. At any rate, the standards of service in Tokyo are excellent. Every place that deals with the public is well manned. The servers behind the counters in cafés were gracious, repeating the standard polite phrases to every customer and proffering change in two cupped palms, hands together, with a little bow. We watched two besuited gentleman saying goodbye to a third on the platform of an underground station; they made a whole series of obeisances to him as his train pulled away. The bowing is ubiquitous. After a day or two, Chris and I were doing it ourselves!

Street in Shirakawa, Tokyo

City streets are kept incredibly clean (by teams of uniformed sweepers such as we saw in China) and smooth. No paving stones to trip over here as there suddenly was in Reading when we landed back in the UK (along Caversham Road Chris tripped and fell flat on his face, grazing his knee.) On the streets of Tokyo are grooved paving stones to guide the blind towards and across every pedestrian crossing. The underground stations, with their colour coded, numbered exits, entrances, multiple maps and indicators, labelled in Japanese and English, are mopped clean at regular intervals. We were very impressed by this and as foreigners felt reassured by the efforts that had been made to make the complex network easy to follow. Goodness knows, other nations could learn from the standards set by the Japanese in public transportation!

Cars parked in Shirakawa, a residential area

I assume they feel they have to be efficient because their cities are so huge. Even after our exposure to Beijing and Shanghai last year, the vastness of Tokyo came as a shock. Not a corner of space in the city is wasted. Buildings are squeezed between buildings in peculiar, three-dimensional shapes. They were constructing a wedge shaped one near our hotel adjoining the network of flyovers; under the great concrete pillars of those main roads was a playground for children, used by a local school for football lessons. It's noisy, dark and polluted there, but at least the children have somewhere to run around. In the residential districts there is rarely room for a private garden so people put rows of plant pots outside their front doors. In the suburbs they have room for bonsai trees and topiary around the gravel paths beside their homes. Cars in the city are parked one above the other in tiered garages. In parking spots beyond the garages, the Japanese never fail to park their vehicles facing forwards.

We saw Mt. Fuji after all ...

Fujisan is on the horizon: look carefully. It was hazy today.

... but from a distance. Chris saw it, wreathed in a torus (as he called it) of clouds around its middle, from the Shikansen bullet train on his way to a meeting with some engineers in Nagoya. Not to be outdone, I found that I could see it too, hazy on the horizon but wonderfully high, conical and snowy, once I'd taken a ride in a lift to the 52^nd floor of the Mori Building in Rippongi Hills. I ate a sandwich up there, looking out at it through the window. Before I took the lift back down I also saw a peculiar exhibition of sci-fi creations by the Korean artist Lee Bul which I could describe at length; I'll postpone that for now, though.

Mori Tower in Rippongi Hills

Today was our last day in Japan. We'll check out of the hotel before breakfast tomorrow morning aiming to catch the 7:30 a.m. “Limousine” (bus) to Narita airport. We already have our boarding cards printed.

Before we turn in for an early sleep tonight let me illustrate this post with some of the pictures I took today. I couldn't resist discovering one last Japanese garden, as you see. This was the Kyu-Shiba-rikyu Garden, close to the Hama-rikyu Garden I visited a week ago. It was a necessary place to go after all those tall new buildings and the weather was finer and milder than ever. A dozen turtles were sunning themselves on the rocks around the pond and I saw frogs too.

Eiffel Tower? No, Tokyo Tower

For those of you who remember my blogposts about Hangzhou last year: there was a bridge and little causeway over the pond I walked around today, and the leaflet states: “This part of the garden was designed and built to be reminiscent of Seiko Lake (Xi Hu) in Hangzhou, China [...] The real Seiko Lake was a place inhabited by holy men and Reizan, a nearby sacred mountain, was said to have mythical powers to prevent aging and bring about immortality.” A little hillock in the Kyu-Shiba-rikyu Garden recreates that mountain here in Tokyo.

The view towards the Sky Tree. Our hotel may be in this view

A city cemetery near the base of the skyscraper

The district known as Shimbashi, Hama-rikyu gardens on the left

The little "mountain" in the Kyu-Shiba-rikyu Garden

Japanese carp in the pond

Another tree in blossom

Art, football and tombstones in Shirakawa

I began the day by taking pictures of the view from the 20th floor of our hotel. The sky over Tokyo is extra clear again today although there are hazy clouds to the west which I think may be hiding an interesting view. It's hard to tell whether the dark shapes over there are clouds or mountains. Sky conditions permitting, Chris may catch a view of Mt. Fuji on his way to his business meeting in Nagoya tomorrow.

We agonised over whether it would be worth making a journey out of town to see Mt. Fuji today, Sunday. In the end decided against it. The see-it-all guided tour for occidental tourists like us would have meant leaving at 8:30 a.m., returning at 10:30 p.m. (14 hours), and would have cost us >22,000 Yen (around $300). The alternative would have been to arrange the transport for ourselves, but when I looked at how difficult that would be, changing trains at a Tokyo station (Shinjuko) listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the most confusing station in the world, with 200 exits, handling 3.7 million passengers each day--that's half the population of London--I abandoned the plan. Chris, who has caught the cold I've been fighting off all week, needed a restful day, and so did I. We have a 13 hour flight to look forward to on Tuesday!

Chris fancied a visit to an art museum and there's one within walking distance across the river in the Shirakawa district, the Museum of Contemporary Art. As we passed that garden I liked so much we were held up by a long and cheerful line of elderly people coming out of it, many of them wearing green jackets, many of them shorter than I am, and all following a smiling gentleman with a yellow flag, who helped them (and us!) across the main road like a lollypop man. It must have been a Sunday outing for retirees.

Chris and I really like exploring the non-touristy parts of town and finding out how the ordinary people live when we're on these trips abroad. The Shirakawa district is residential, with little flower shops and petrol-stations on the street corners and a large variety of plants in pots in lieu of what we'd call gardens in front of people's houses. Pollarded poplar trees without leaves yet, and orange trees with both leaves and fruit, miniature palm trees too. The cars are stacked in two-tier garages and people's bikes are (tidily) parked everywhere, not usually locked. Streets in Tokyo are kept remarkably clean and at every zebra crossing are grooved and bobbled paving stones that aid the blind. There are rice shops and tea shops with the merchandise in sacks, and book shops. We see books, newspapers and magazines being read everywhere, whenever people have a moment to themselves.

The art museum had several outdoor sculptures and installations on display including a rectangular boxlike tower in which small clouds were being manufactured by steamers powered by solar panels produced by Canadian Solar, Inc. of Ontario) You could climb a flight of metal steps inside so as to penetrate the clouds and see them from above. Indoors we enjoyed the surprises in the foyer and looked at some of the museum's permanent collection including two or three rooms full of abstract art by Japanese women artists of the 1950s and a sound and light show running in a curtained off section, for which we had to take our shoes off. When we fumbled our way in, the entrance very dark, we found that we had to step up onto some big cuboid cushions so soft that you couldn't help sinking down into them and relaxing (some people were lying flat) to watch the “film” (projected onto the ceiling and also reflected in a circular, pool-like mirror at our feet) upon which a “bubble” was superimposed showing a contrasting film, the contrast being between city structures and nature, with a definite bias towards nature! In one sequence a woman's hand was caressing the bark of a tree as if she were making love to it. In another gallery were wall-sized paintings for which the paint had been clay of different colours, strongly reminiscent of aboriginal art from Australia. The dots had been done with Q-tips. Then came a room full of 1960s Japanese pop art, political in its intentions but not as provocative as the American equivalent, perhaps because the Japanese find themselves incapable of total disrespect.

In the basement was a posh museum restaurant where we had lunch ... and that reminds me that I haven't yet described my visit to the wonderful Tokyo National Museum last Wednesday, oh dear ... but beforehand we thought we'd see what was in the park behind the museum and came across an astonishing sports field, astonishing by virtue of the fact that hundreds of children, mostly very young (our grandson Alexander's age!) were engaged in a 7-a-side soccer tournament, divided into teams all wearing differently coloured shirts. Their parents were egging them on, on the sidelines and there must have been literally thousands of people on the grass. Each short match was centrally timed so that when the whistle blew all teams stopped playing, lined up and bowed to the opposing side. Very entertaining to watch.

On the way to the station in Shirakawa we noticed that we were walking past the entrance to a cemetery, with memorial plinths rather than graves; I assume the dead are cremated. Stone statues of the Buddhist saints wore red skull caps and red bibs. I had my red beret on today which I hope wasn't too disrespectful in this context. The cemetery or crematorium buildings were elegant and symmetrical, the gardens outside were tranquil and neat, with some narcissi blooming in a neat clump and a row of wooden pails and wooden ladles for the water you might need to keep your loved one's cut flowers alive in the vases attached to each tomb. By the memorial stones stood stacks of wooden sticks with vertical lettering upon them, names perhaps, or prayers. We are illiterate here so have no way of telling. We'd seen these in country cemeteries from the train on Thursday, too. A white funeral car pulled out as we were looking round; white is the colour of mourning here.

Rather than return to the hotel straight away we caught a combination of trains to Asakusa, the district we explored on our first day in Tokyo, which I now realise should be pronounced Asak'sa. After strolling over the Umayabashi, and sitting out of the cold wind in the sun on the far side of the river we walked back across Asumabashi to the Sensoji Temple again, which didn't seem so extraordinary as it had done this time last week. We must be getting used to Japan already. The monkey doing tricks on a lead wasn't there today, though. I could have bought a kimono in the back street bazaar.