Nice Bek Pictures

This one looks like I own an expensive camera and have some photographic knowledge.



Alice took this one.

Kamakura

Kamakura lies about an hour out of Tokyo, and is a hotspot of temples and shrines.



Many armed Buddha.



Temples, like churches, often have cemeteries attached.



I don't know what this is but it's cool. You can see a fox spirit at the bottom.



This seems to be a Jizo, a god dedicated to children.



These guys seem bored by hanging around all day in a temple.

Juxtaposition

Japan is summed up in this picture. It's ancient and modern at the same time. Primitive and efficient. Spiritual and heartless. Beautiful and ugly. Er.. hot and cold.

I like it and it infuriates me.

Confused

The guy with a picture of the Madonna on his back seems to be praying at this temple.

Jindaiji

Last weekend we visited with Yamamoto-san and his family, who took us to Jindaiji temple . Jindaiji is the second oldest temple in Tokyo and is dedicated to the water god, Jinja Daio. The grounds are filled with beautiful gardens and trees, as well as traditional pebbled spaces.

This temple is a Buddhist temple, which you can tell because there are no large red wooden gates, or torii. Buddhist and Shinto temples are, of course, different, however they are not so different as to be obvious to outsiders, and the religions are not really mutually exclusive anyway.

However, the same sorts of things are done at all temples, the standard procedure being to approach the front, make a donation, bow two times, clap two times to get Buddha's attention and then you can bow again or pray.

Before you approach the main hall, it's quite common to perform some ablutions to purify yourself. This ritual also has a special method, you pick up the ladle with your right hand, then pour water onto your left hand, pass the ladle to your left hand, wash your right, pass it to your right hand again, cup your left hand to hold some water and take a sip to rinse your mouth, and finally rinse the left hand again.

Another hall on the grounds. There are always multiple halls and shrines at temples.

Here are some prayer papers which are neatly folded and tied.

We had a nice lunch with the family at a bakery restaurant. With your set meal you could have unlimited small fancy rolls which had been freshly baked. Alice and Noa got friendly and showed each other their toys before snatching them back quickly. We also went to a discount baby store to buy some more warm baby clothes, including beanies, gloves, scarves and boots. Alice was so tired by then, having not slept the entire day that she promptly fell asleep in the trolley.

Then we were invited to Yamamoto-san's mother-in-law's house for a delicious impromptu dinner. The kids slept while we drank beer and talked.

Edo-Tokyo Museum

The other weekend we went out with some friends to Ryogoku and the Edo-Tokyo Museum. Edo is the old name for Tokyo. Most of the museum contained huge reconstructions of Edo era buildings and scale models of the town. From the outside the museum looks like it's hollow.

It's a very impressive looking building on large stilts. It's meant to be a reconstruction of a raised warehouse structure.

This looks like a woodworker's shop. The scenes were very interesting although you couldn't go inside them like you could at the Shitamachi museum in Ueno.

Here is one of the very detailed dioramas. It's so detailed that you can't really see anything in it except a bunch of people.

This one is a little less busy.

Old Japanese phone booths were called white boxes. They look very cool, but so do blue, Tardis-like phone booths.

Alice tries the jinriksha. After the museum we went to a small, secluded garden. It was like the ideal version of a Japanese garden.

Ryogoku is the home of many sumo stables, where young sumoka train to one day fight in the many sumo tournaments each year. Sumo is the national sport of Japan, and it's very entertaining to watch even if you don't know what's going on.

Here we all are at the main sumo stadium. We arrived about ten minutes before closing time, just fast enough to take a look at the small sumo museum.

This was the most interesting photo I saw there. A sumoka playing baseball. I'm sure they do other normal things, it's just hard to visualise those things.

We also visited this temple which doesn't look like a temple. They had a pet cemetary on the side and a lot of cats hanging about. Temples often kept cats to keep the mice from nibbling on the scrolls. These days they are probably kept just to amuse the monks.

We also went to an izakaya, which is like a Japanese pub, the big difference is that they serve a variety of food to snack on as you drink. They have these places in Korea too, it's such a good idea, I wish they had a few in Sydney. It's far less boring to eat and drink, you can drink more, and the food is usually very good yet not everyday fare. I remember eating chicken hearts and lungs on a stick in Korea, here they had tamer options. We ordered a mini pizza, a chees plate, some sultanas, a sausage plate and finally some ice cream for dessert. While there is a lot of food, it's still a pub and drinking is the main idea. We drank beer and I tried some weird Japanese drinks. I can't really remember what they were, strangely enough.

Old Doll Festival

The Ningyo Kuyo, or Old Doll Festival, is held at Kiyomizu Kannondo temple in Ueno park each year. The ningyo used in the festival are old and worn and belong to school children who come to pray for the dolls.

The kids are quite young as you can see. The priests do some chanting for the dolls' spirits, burn incense, march around sombrely and stoke the fire. Did I say stoke the fire? Yah, they stoke the large metal fireplace in preparation.

For what? Ah well, these dolls are used, they are broken, they want relief from the earthly realm of grabbing hands and careless play. They want deliverance into doll nirvana.

So, they shovel the dolls in and the children file past and give a little prayer for their playthings. Hopefully the dolls will be reincarnated as Barbies far away from Japanese infernos.

Marriage

Bek and I will be getting married at the Ward Office this Friday, for visa reasons.

Edit: It's been postponed until next Tuesday, October 2nd.

Kamakura

Kamkura was the old capital of the Minamoto clan. They ruled from here for two centuries, away from the distracting and corrupt Kyoto.

These guys took shifts at drumming very loudly. Alice thought it was great. They were playing at the main Shinto shrine in Kamakura, the Tsurugaoka Hachiman-gu. I had a brilliant idea to cycle around the small town, so we had hired a couple of bikes, one with a kiddy seat. However, Bek was less than Tour de France material and had worn a skirt to boot. So we only cycled to this one place and then cycled back to the shop.

I didn't want to tell the priests that someone had toilet papered their sacred tree. Japanese kids can be so cruel.

I also saw a chipmunk or squirrel or something. I mean it definitely wasn't a possum. I proceeded to take fifteen photos of it, all blurry except this one which makes it look like a plaster replica.

Next stop was KFC, er... a traditional Japanese sushi bar and then the Daibutsu, or Great Buddha. It's great because it's a huge bronze statue and it's buddha because everything is buddha. This buddha is an Amida buddha,the buddha of infinite light and life. Amida is mainly concerned with overseeing the buddhist afterlife, the "pure land" where the enlightened go to shoot hoops or something.

I liked this picture the best, showing off his ventilation hatches. It's hot work sitting in the sun all day saving everyone and being made of bronze. He used to be housed in a hall until a tsunami washed it away.

In case he needs to get up and go to the bathroom, his sandals are located nearby. Or if he need run from a bonfire thoughtlessly lit by a tourist unaware of the Japanese people's distinct aversion to spontaneous arson.

We also visited Hase-dera, a temple with a nine metre high wooden Kannon Buddha. Kannon sees all and hears all, so prayers are his main concern in the earthly realm. The Hase-dera Kannon has eleven faces, one regular face and ten others to signify the ten stages of enlightenment. If you want something, Kannon can make it happen.

Unfortunately you can't take a picture of Kannon, seeing all leaves you more susceptible to camera flashes or something. I suppose he doesn't want to miss anything. Anyway, here are some more Jizo.

We also visited a souvenir shop / weapons shop. They had postcards and nunchaku, statues and rifles, wooden carvings and crossbows. I suppose it makes sense to have an armoury next door to ten temples. They had shuriken, Freddy Krueger claw gloves, pikes, caltrops and smoke grenades. Just in case the monks get uppity.

Omote Sando

On Saturday we went to Yoyogi park again to see some freaks. Of course the place we were looking for, we couldn't find. There was a section of park where everyone hangs out which we'd been to before, but we got side tracked into going to Meiji Jingu shrine again along a long dark tree lined tunnel. Yoyogi is quite a big park. Well at least Bek got to go there and we saw a wedding also.




Alice befriended a bunch of women who promptly gave her their mobile phone to play with. She didn't want to give it back and they didn't want to take it back, so I stepped up into my natural role as the bad guy and took it. Of course she started crying very loudly in the middle of the large echoing courtyard where the wedding party was marching.

We hustled her away into the dark surrounding forest.

When we emerged on the other side of Yoyogi we did at least find a smattering of freaks. There were a group of four people standing about with 'free hugs' signs.

While a noble sentiment, I couldn't help but wonder why they didn't just pair up and hug each other. Leave the civilians out of it.

We avoided them and made our way down to Omote Sando road, which is kind of the fashion and shopping mecca for young people. Bek forced me into Snoopy town and we bought a bento box for Alice, an empty reusable one to pack her lunch in. She ran around in the press of people, and even assisted us with a few choices.

I bought a nice shirt with a carp on it. No, really. Then we pretty much just wandered around the backstreets browsing the little boutiques until Alice fell asleep and we went home.

Shrine

This is my kind of shrine. It seems they'll do anything to get Buddha's attention.

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 ...