Sunday in Ueno

Last Sunday we met up with Kiriko and Toshikatsu, two of my former students, and they took us for a tour around Ueno. First up was the Toshogu Shrine, which means the shrine of the Sun God of the East. It's small but rarely visited, at least when we were there it was practically deserted. It is surrounded by an open lattice type wall with a lot of intricate gilded woodwork depicting dragons, fish, birds and flowers.

You can see how small the doorways are, I suppose people were even shorter then.

That's my samurai face.

We also ate a small lunch at a restaurant hidden inside a huge building that normally we would have thought to be a museum. It certainly didn't look much like a restaurant but it had a spectacular view of the park.

Toshikatsu had planned some of his favourite places to go, and the next was the one I liked best. It was the Shitamachi Museum, which shows how the common people lived in the past. It was a quite recent past, about one to two hundred years ago, but it still seemed worlds away. The museum contains mock ups of rooms in shops and houses of the period.

These are living rooms.

The next one is meant to be the lobby of an 'onsen', a Japanese bath house.

The last place we went was the Kyu Iwasaki Tei Gardens. It's an old house that was built in Western style for the founder of the Mitsubishi company, Iwasaki Yataro. It's huge and rambling, with a massive English lawn and a Swiss mountain chalet on the side. Attached to the back of the house is a Japanese style extension where they serve tea. When we got there a concert was playing in one corner of the house. The whole place had a considerably sophisticated air to it.

We strolled around the empty rooms while Toshikatsu kindly looked after Alice as she slept. On the way back to the station we pushed through a crowded market with some interesting sights.

Some cherries. One hundred yen is about one dollar. We decided not to buy them ...

even though they were ...