Tokyo Journal 2003: Day 11, Part 1
We had to get up early today, so of *course* I was sound asleep when the damn alarm rang!
The bus was the same company as the Tokyo Morning Tour - we were picked up, taken on the same route and eventually to the
Hato terminal where we got on a different bus. It had a really disturbing decoration on the side, which made sense later. We set off for
Fuji-san with about 20 people on the bus. After an hour we had a potty break, then the road started climbing. The scenery was lovely through
Kanagawa into
Yamanashi - all glacial mountains - alot like the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virgina, at this point along the route. From this point on, we were just riveted to the view of Fuji-san dominating the landscape. Pictures and words don't do it justice, so I won't bore you with the hour of awesome views. The day was crystal clear and you could see the whole mountain perfectly.
Because of the snow a few days earlier, we couldn't go further up the mountain than 1000m, which was fine, because higher up you can't see the summit. So the bus took us to the Visitor Center which was closed because it was Monday (which turned out to be a good thing, as you will see) for a photo op, then to the gate that leads to the road up Fuji-san. In the spring and summer, the buses let you off at Stage 5, about halfway up the mountain, and you can walk the rest of the way up. There's a tradition of climbing Fuji-san to see the sunrise during July and August. But since we weren't going up, we just touched his feet and left offerings. (We bring small semi-precious stone chips whenever we travel, so we have something to offer when we're moved to do so.) Fuji-san is simply magnificent, we were just blown away. How can you *not* worship something that awesome?
We ate lunch at a hotel not too far from the mountain, next to a huge amusement park - it looked shiny and sparkly in the sun and it explained the bizarre design on the bus, too. There was a great view of the park from the bathroom of the hotel and we had all the women on the tour in the bathroom checking out the people on the roller coasters and ice skating. While we ate lunch, looking out at Fuji-san, the wind was howling like tortured souls in hell. It was *really* disturbing. Despite the fact that it was Western food, lunch didn't suck (one of the problems of our Nile Cruise in Egypt was the insistance that we eat Western food, instead of Egyptian. We both *much* prefer local food wherever we are, for many reasons. When we finally got food from a street stand in Cairo, it was spectacular.)
The bus took us to the Pacific side of Fuji-san and (because it was Monday and the
Vistor's Center had been closed) up to a temple in
Gotemba.(It was right across from a Ferrari museum, which of course gave me an evil idea for a Sailor Moon Outer Senshi story.) Thank heavens it was Monday! The Temple, which is for a relatively new and evangelical form of Buddhism, was gorgeous and had the most awesome view of Fuji-san. I was deeply moved by the beauty, as I apologized to Buddha for profaning his temple and using his view for picture-taking.
To get up to where Buddha sits, you pass through a path that had pairs of lions from each of the countries of Asia. Malaysia's and Thailand's were magnificent. You pass the big bell and the purification trough up past the lions and up to a traditional incense burner - I paid for some incense and lit that, then changed my shoes for slippers for the marble stairs. The older woman waiting behind me boggled a bit as I lit incense and prayed, but hey, one of the nice things about being henotheist is that I can take my deities as I find them. Today was a banner day for me. LOL
From Gotemba, we drove on to
Hakone, one of the glacial/crater lakes at the base of Fuji-san's feet. We took a ferry across the lake. One the way, we passed a ferry ship that looked like a Spanish galleon, and everyone on our tour wanted to be a pirate. Pattie and I launched into the theme from
One Piece, of course and waxed poetic about pirates. We arrived at Komagatake (I think) where we got on a cable car up a very steep and very high mountain and my brain collapsed and died. Between the long day, the lack of oxygen and the cold, I just stopped. The day was getting old, the sky was getty misty and smoggy, but Fuji-san stood there, majestic and amazing and well worth the effort. From the top of the mountain, you could see it on one side, and the sun setting over the Pacific on the other. Eventually we took the cable car back down, had just enough time to be unimpressed by the gift shops, then got back on the bus. The ride to the train station was dull...but we were headed by to Tokyo by
Shinkasen, the high-speed bullet train. We couldn't wait!
When we got to the station, the five of us who were taking the Shinkansen and our tour guide stood there, waiting for the train when another Shinkansen shot through the station. And I mean *shot* through. That thing MOVED. Pattie started jumping up and down like a kid, shouting, "I wanna ride it! I wanna ride it!" and when I said, "You will, honey, in two minutes," I noticed that everyone else, including the tour guide and myself had a big ass grin on their faces. It *was* pretty darn cool.
The bus ride back to Tokyo would have been 2 hours - the Shinkansen took 30 minutes.The train expanded audibly when we passed through a low-pressure area, and shrank with a "whoomf" when we left it. Things passed by like they were a time-lapse film, the thing was so fast - and we weren't at top speed, because we were in populated areas. We got back to the room about 6:30 or so. We were trying to decide what to do about dinner,and we decided that it would be a lark to wander aimlessly through Tobu and Seibu, the two department stores that frame the train station. We decided to wander through their food sections and blow whatever yen we had left on whatever food might appeal...they have tons of fresh, high-end, ready-to-eat stuff, so we thought it would be a cool way to sample new things. But when we got to the room, we found that Emi had left us several messages, asking if we had plans. So, I called her and we decided to meet at Takadanobaba at 8, so Pattie would watch
Detective Conan. I got us a light snack and some much-needed caffeine and we tossed those down and set out for our final adventure.
Next time: What a night!
Tokyo Journal 2003: Day 10
We interrupt this broadcast for some Important Yuri Anime News! ADV has announced licensing of
Azumanga Daioh - a snortingly funny look at high school with an honest-to-goodness lesbian character, who is more realiztic in her unfulfilled crush thatn anyone else I've ever seen in anime. As soon as you can, run out and buy this - it's whacked out and hysterical.
And now back to our usual programming
***
Today we had a first - despite the stereotypes and our expectations, we *never* saw anyone on the train reading manga. Everyone was reading the paper, magazines or novels. Today we saw one old guy and one little girl actually reading manga on the train. Woo-hoo.
Also, while I'm blowing stereotypes, I'd like to say that there were plenty of young couples hanging all over each other, holding hands, kissing...you know, the usual PDA (
Public
Displays of
Affection) I've been told, right up to recently, that there aren't PDAs between couples in Japan. Well, maybe that *was* true (and it's obviously still true in anime, where the mere holding of hands has been written in as a *major* plot complication...don't even get me started about the apparent sexual dysfunction of Japanese men from years of exposure to anime and manga.) Anyway, we saw young folks all snuggly together everywhere we went, except Comiket. Read into that last sentence however you'd like.
People do stare at us, but rarely hostilely. Only the guy in the sukiyaki place, really. Kids are the funniest, though - they are puzzled by us and ultimately, the most likely to smile or wave back. Mostly they just hide from us, while the parents stare. Since I and my friends (who all have "character") are often stared at here at home, I don't care much about that.
So the discovery for today was that the question, "Where *are* all the foreigners" actually has an answer! They really are in
Roppongi, the section of Tokyo traditionally reserved for foreigners. I kind of assumed that that was another cliche, but to our surprise, it totally wasn't. But I get ahead of myself.
Pattie wanted to see
Venus Fort, which was out by the Tokyo Big Site, because it's meant to look like a 17th century Italian village. So we took the Yurikamome line, the way we did the first day going to Comiket. This time I wasn't so dizzy and sick and was able to enjoy the ride over the Rainbow Bridge.
We essentially headed towards the Babylon project - all sorts of places "reclaimed" from Tokyo Bay. On the first day I had pointed out a cone-shaped pylon in the water of the bay - I *think* its the remnant of the obstructions built by Tokugawa Ieyasu to keep the Black Ships of the Jesuits out.
Venus Fort was a 17th century Italian village as seen through the eyes of a Short Hills mall designer. Pleasant and nicely put together - lots of pretty lights and about as Italian as I am. Which is to say...not. We had a crepe for a snack at Cafe Very Very (they have these filled snack crepes everywhere yound women are likely to be, and they smell *so* good and we totally caved.) We bought some stationery and stickers which were beautiful. The mall had a bagel place, go figure. The sky was painted to look like day turning into evening, then night. They had a laser show in the night portion, which wasn awful, but not awful enough to be funny. The best part of Venus Fort was that it was definitely designed for women. The shops, yadda yadda, but it was the *bathrooms* that really stood out. Every corner of every courtyard had signs to the nearest bathroom and all of them were spotless (and Western style, we noted.) According to the guide book (Yes, Venus Fort was in the guidebook) it has the world's largest women's bathroom, with 86 stalls, but we never saw that one. We didn't consider ourselves deprived.
After we wandered a bit more, pondering the literally priceless plastic fish at Comme 'Ca ("Le est Comme ca ism" reads the signs) we decided to try for lunch at Moti, an Indian restaurant I wrote into an Utena story and wanted to try. We took the train to Shimboshi, then the Hibiya line to Roppongi...where we answered that age old question...where are all the foreigners? Well, they are in Roppongi..and we should feel pity for them. Roppongi was repulsive. It's all cheesy clubs, bars and chain restaurants. We "found" the Hard Rock Cafe'...bleah. There are also Thai, Indian and Malaysian restaurants, which we had seen none of anywhere else. oddly, Italian and Chinese restaurants abound all over Tokyo - I guess they aren't really "foreign" any more there than they are here. Some things are universal....
When we switched to the Hibiya line, we ran into an immediate three foreigners. One blonde woman got off with us at Roppongi, but sprinted away without a word. We saw a few other scattered folks biking the streets, and walking and generally just being foreign abroad. It was creepy, because they all looked like they felt foreign and it was uncomfortable.
We found Moti easily enough with the map from their website and the food was perfectly nice - hot, but tasty. So I, at last, ate at the restaurant in
my story. Afterwards, we walked a little, but there was trash everywhere - it's obvious that the city neglects the streets of Roppongi. We debated whether this was on purpose because its only foreigners, or whether us foreigners are just dirtier.But there we so many chains that by the time we saw Subways, we were skeeving and we turned back. (Not, however, before I bought a Batz Maru washcloth and pencil at a 100-yen store.!)
We decided to go back to K-Books one last time since the first time we were there we were beat and this was our last shopping day. (If I had had one more day, I'd have gone back to Mandarake and looked at the used manga again, 'cause, y know, we didn't freaking *have* enough, for pity's sake...) Pattie went upstairs to the doujinshi and I headed downstairs to the used manga section. In mere moments, I had found a couple of good volumes, then joy of joys found the finale to
Hen and the first two
Devilman Lady issues. I found a few other promising things too, and helped stimulate Japan's economy, so that was pretty good.
Since the holiday is now over (it's Monday) the streets have been packed. I love that, walking out of the hotel onto busy people-filled streets. We managed to finally see kids in school uniforms and I can honestly say that I'm amazed. The skirts really are, sometimes, that short. Go figure. So, anyway, the streets were packed and there were hawkers standing around handing out tissue packs all along the main area of Ikebukuro. I made Pattie take one, and I did too. I really like Ikebukuro...I could definitely live there.
We got our weekly
One Piece fix tonight. It was a new episode and I didn't know where they were in the story (its not the same as the manga right now,) but I got to hear Nico Robin, which was cool.
Next time:
Worshipping at the feet of Fuji-san
Tokyo Journal 2003: Day 9
It's Saturday morning - you know what that means, right? Yes, cartoons! We
started off with
Doremi, then had
Digimon Frontier and the first
Season 2 Digimon Movie.
In stark contrast to yesterday, today was bright and sunny. We decided to start with
Harajuku, just because it was furthest away. And because I felt it would be a nice day to walk nowhere in particular.
Harajuku is like Tokyo's version of St. Mark's Place; the uber-trendy area, where all the suburban teens come to pose for animal crackers and show how hip they are. We walked around leisurely for a while until we were ready to leave. There were
enormous crowds, but mostly for the
Meiji shrine, which was on the other side of the train tracks. There were a few punklings here and there, but few
fruits, only one
Goth-Loli and no bands. We saw more kimono; some were lovely and some were definitely not.
We had a little trouble getting out of Harajuku, because one track was closed off. So
we switched at Shibuya, went back to Takadanobaba (the place of Takada's horse) then
on the Tozai line to Nakano.
TV has got a great suspense/mystery show on right now - a sort of live action 1940's Detective Conan, complete with adorable boy detective in short pants. I stopped to watch because it starred one of the actors from a drama series called Oyaji which I liked, and then a girl
screamed, so we were both watching. All the actors go running into the room to find the girl unconscious and a note from the bad guy. Pattie said, "Zorro left his calling card." Now, later on in the show, it looks like the bad guy is *actually* Zorro! Beat Takeshi plays the criminal, which makes this the sixth out of seven days that he's been on some show or other.Anyway, at Nakano, we headed right over to the Broadway arcade, where we stopped for
sushi at a rotating sushi bar. I enjoyed it thoroughly, but Pattie got a stomach ache. We walked through all the floors, and spent not nearly enough time at all the bits that make up *the* used anime/manga store of Japan,
Mandarake. Mandarake is more like a conglomeration of shops, than a shop itself. I bought a
Devilman Lady pencil board and Pattie bought me a deck of Sailor Moon cards for one card...a magnificent picture of Haruka and Michiru got up regardless. It's my wallpaper on my desktop at home. :-)
One of the stores sold used manga - the phone book sized ones, the magazines, not the
tankubon volumes. It was whacked out; some of those were 15 years old and they were
never meant to last that long.
By then we were beat, so we came back to the hotel for a rest. We'll watch the end
of this mystery show, then take a quick walk in Shinjuku, then come back later.
We walked for about an hour in
Shinjuku (which is very easy to get lost in, and an hour can get you basically around the block there.) the night was cold and clear and Shinjuku was very colorful and sparkly, like gems.
Tokyo is a very vertical city. Whereas in NYC the shops are all, or mostly, at street
level, with business offices and apartments above, Tokyo businesses climb the buildings, so the neon signs also climb. Every building has signs going up the sides, proclaiming all the restaurants and clubs on the 1st-10
th floors. As a result, you're not very likely to just wander accidentally and come across something interesting - unless you can read the signs, or have a clue where you are headed. Otherwise, it's just overwhelming and dazzling.
For instance, if you're looking for the
Nichoume, Tokyo's gay and lesbian district (which we weren't) you'd really have to *know* how to find it and when you did, you'd need a map to find any specific place to go. Not all that unlike the Village (Greenwich Village, NYC's gay and lesbian district...well, one of them, anyway,) I suppose. If you don't know what bar you're looking for, you could wander past perfectly average delis and gift stores forever.
While we were wandering aimlessly, we came across a really neat little shrine, called
the
Hanazono
Jinja (Garden Shrine.) It was all festive and packed with people waiting to pray! The line was almost a block long...mostly yuppie-types, which really surprised me. I mean, you just don't get that vibe off of fashion/status-conscious 20-somethings. Since most Japanese aren't really religious, it was amazing how busy the shrines and temples were. I guess it's just like Xmas and Easter or Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. (Satou-san, our bus tour guide, had joked that most Japanese were Shinto in life, Buddhist in death and Christian on Christmas.) We didn't join the line - we had prayed to a lot of gods by then and we felt pretty covered. But the bells were gorgeous and if it hadn't been so cold, I might have wanted to ring them.
We were flagging by then, so we opted for dinner in - again.
TV tonight is boring. We have a choice of home movies of Princess Aiko, or some
comedian's show, which is only moderately funny - even the live audience is unimpressed. (At the Fuji TV building, everyone taught Pattie to make this noise and gesture, that this comedian always does. We watched for over an hour, but he never did it. We flipped.)
Here's something you don't see every day - a bunch o'guys in Edo Period dress
playing what can only be called hacky-sack.Next time:
Trip to the Mall
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Tokyo Journal 2003: Day 8
Today dawned ugly and grey. By the time we got out, it was snowing lightly. The weather report calls for cold, grey and rain. In the end, it was snow - a fair amount, too!
Originally, the plan was for Shinjuku and Harajuku, but it was just too yucky, so we
decided to stay local. I decided that it was a good day to go to
Seeraa Myu (remember, the live-action Sailor Moon Musical? Geez, you've got a short memory) despite Pattie's protests. LOL She did want to go shopping for more doujinshi, so we decided to do both.
We went immediately to the Seeraa Myu at the
Sunshine 60 theater. It was a melee' of parents and their brainwashed children - tons of 4- & 5-year old girls, many dressed up as Senshi. They were unbearably adorable. A few lone creepy salarymen, complete with trenchcoats and briefcases, and one or two obvious adult fanboys.
Now, let me be clear...the one experience I had previously had of Sera Myu was a video tape that was so awful in every conceivable way that I have vowed to never watch it again. It was a Sailor Moon Super-S type story and it sucked utterly. The music was lame, the dancing was rancid and the plot was a snooze. When the Amazoness Trio is the best part of the show, you just *know* it's not good. Anyway, I've always assumed that all Sera Myu sucked. And since the Utena live-action musical was even *worse,* I kind of just lumped them all in the "cold day in hell" category. So, I basically expected to be dying of hysterical laughter that had to be suppressed throughout.
To my utter shock, I actually enjoyed it. Quite thoroughly, in fact. The Myu actresses were pretty good, the story was a "S" story, so I had all my favorite things, including tons of Outers. The story had very credible Witches 5 - the job of making their costumes wearble by actual real human people was pretty amazing. The actors that played Kaolinite and the Professor wer really good - even the comic relief was actually *gasp!* funny. That never happens. The lighting effects were genuinely excellent, the music and dancing not horrific and Uranus and Neptune even had a "moment" or two. Sharing it all with 1000 munchkins and a handful of fanboys was the icing on the cake. The small, confused child next to me was appalled that I knew the words to
La Soldier.
There is a perfect Yuriko clone on TV - but he's a guy! If he kept his
mouth shut...he was with a woman with long, dark haired mermaid and I thought, wow, Yuriko and Midori are on TV!American football in Nippon - the
Rice Bowl was played today. The Rice Bowl, can you believe it?
Anyway, I spent the second half of the show, hysterical at the antics of the bored,
fidgety children (and Pattie) around me. I had no idea the show would be so long, so we didn't have food or drinks like everyone around us. There was a dorky fanboy a few
rows ahead of us who took notes through the whole show. I said it had to be for his fan site/blog - you just knew it was. Like I should talk... lol
When we left, I actually bought a program and found that the actress who plays Uranus
is a whole lot hunkier without the wig. There's a picture of her in rehearsal,
holding her space sword and she looks kind of hot. LOL I appreciated the fact that during their inevitable death scene, Uranus had to leap across the stage to die next to Neptune. I could actually see being a fan of this, if it was this decent most of the time. I guess my video was just an aberration.
There was a lot to be said for who the actresses who played the roles - they
clearly understood what people liked in each character, like the obsessive love all the Senshi have for their Princess, the fact that Uranus was overtly in love with Usagi and Neptune understood - Rei even had an argument with everyone where she declared that if it came down to Usagi or Chibi-Usa, she'd let the spore die.
All in all, it was fun. My bet is that all the adults there were fans and they were
busy indoctrinating their children.
We stopped back at the hotel for a potty break and then tried the sukiyaki place across the street - this was the only sucky meal we had the entire time. And there was a guy who was actively hostile, glaring at us and muttering every time we spoke. Since we were there first and we outnumbered the guy, we didn't worry, but it added to the suckariffic-ness of the meal. The staring thing just cracked us up. Pattie was getting a teeny bit freaked by it, but I couldn't care less. One couple at the train station practically got whiplash turning around to look at me when I spoke. We keep being puzzled though. We *know* Tokyo gets Western visitors and workers...where are all these people? We never see them, except as teeny dribbles, a single black man there, a lone Indian student there, two days later a European....
If we were in NYC and someone walked by speaking German or Nigerian, we'd hardly
blink. I might comment on Afrikaans or Navajo, because we don't hear that often, but
they people themselves would hardly be whiplash material. (In fact, as an experiment, we counted how many distinct foreign languages we heard when we were in the city last
Saturday...five. Just walking from the train station to a book store and back. Not
counting the multiple times we heards several of those languages. It's just not all that weird to hear French or german or Spanish in NYC...and if we had gone to a museum or landmark, I'm 100% positive, we'd have come across Japanese, as well.)
So, we walked back through the snow, which was now sticking and very picturesque, to
Animate. This had *finally* opened up after the holiday. It was 8 packed floors of anime and mnaga related goods. I should clarify, it had lots of stuff, but it was *packed* with people. The place was mobbed. I bought tons of
One Piece stuff, including the crew's Jolly Roger which now hangs in the bedroom. I bought so much that I got eight free stickers! Next was Rashinban Books where the hentai fanboys cluster and we didn't stay. I wandered off to get something to drink, and Pattie...here's a stretch, bought some more doujinshi.
I'd like to say that, at this point, as surreal as most of this trip has been
(Comiket, dancing monkeys...) sitting in a theater with 5-year olds watching Seraa Myu has been the most surreal of all.
Next Time: Where The Girls Are
Tokyo Journal 2003: Day 7
Jan. 2, 9:28 AMAlready this AM we’ve had an episode of Ojamajo Doremi and an episode of
Dragon Ball Z. Goku has a girly voice!4:00 PMWhat a great day!
We decided on doing
Tokyo Tower early, because the weather was nice right *now*, if you know what I mean. Plus, evening brings smoggy haze - mornings are usually better for sightseeing anyway. We knew that we were tempting fate by wanting to see the Tower, that clearly there'd be an alien or demon invasion, or my energy woukd be sucked away, or something else horrible, because, hey, after all I *do* watch anime, but we wanted to see it, dammit!
We, with some help offered by a random passing woman (who reacted favorably to
Pattie's blonde roundness, as all people seem to) we made our way to the southeast -
oddly referred to as Central Tokyo. We had a fairly long walk, because ultimately the
woman had been wrong, but we could see the Tower, so we knew where to head. On the way, we passed a little fox spirit shrine tucked in between buildings, so we stopped, prayed and left them shiny money to play with, or trade for dog biscuits or something.
As we got closer, we found yet another shrine/temple complex thing, with bunches of
little shrines and offering places. It was clearly a mixed bag, with a really elaborate shrine to one god of good fortune, and teeny little ones to others, including a Buddha for kids, who was surrounded by Mickey Mouse and Hello Kitty dolls.
The line at the Tower wasn't too long, by which I mean it was really long, but
didn't yet run outside the waiting area. We decided just to go up to the Main
Observation Deck, which was actually two stories. It was cool - they had the usual signs telling what you were looking at. Fuji-san was very clear, which made Pattie happy. We were, as usual, the only foreigners there, which surprised us, because there isn't a day of the year where you won't run into foreign tourists at the Empire State Building. The line for the Upper Deck was way too long, or we might have done that too - it was up another 100 meters. We were at 150 meters at this point. Tokyo has lots of little clusters of high buildings. Nothing like NYC's dense conglomeration of skyscrapers.
From the observation deck we found that there was a large temple/shrine complex right
across the street, so we headed there after taking in the floor filled with little booths of ticky-tacky crap. It was such crap we couldn't even find anything bad enough to buy as a souvenir for friends. (Mostly because we couldn't figure out how to carry the 3' tall fiber optic Tokyo Tower/clock thingy home.)
On the way to the shrine, we bought an imo (sweet potato) from a street vendor. They
have a distinctive call they use to hawk their wares, but of course, this is the 21
st century...he had his recorded and playing from speakers on the truck. The imo was really good - I love sweet potatoes in any form.
The temple/shrine complex was called the Zenjo-ji; it was the Tokugawa family shrine.
The first Tokugawa Shogun, Ieyasu, had it moved here from further away to "protect" the southeast of the city. Ieyasu is the Shogun in almost all samurai stories we see, as well as being the model for Torinaga, the Shogun in James Clavell's
Shogun. He was an interesting example of extreme micro-management. He set up laws that regulated everything from when people could change their winter for summer clothes, what colors they could wear and even what names they could take - and we're not just talking court etiquette here. These laws applied to everyone, and were different for every class, trade and region. He made rules for *everything.* Kind of
creepy, really. Everything he did affected Japanese culture for the next 400 years and still has repercussions today.
The Temple was really nice. It's a big tourist attraction and at New Years was
pretty was pretty hopping. Lots of music, and stands and even a performing monkey -
which was actually pretty dull, as it just walked back and forth, but hey, how often do *you* see a performing monkey?
We bought O-mamori, good luck charms, and ate soba noodles for long life and listened
to the monks play instruments and chant at the Temple, walked the grounds, made friends with a child (the only child the entire time we were there who smiled at us and didn't hide. She even said, "Hi!" and "Bye!" and waved at us when we left.) The grounds were beautiful and festive. There were hundreds of little statues decorated with crocheted bibs and hats in red, which we guessed were for children, and we later learned we were right. I tried to strike the gong over the temple door, but didn't put enough oomph to it and got a kind of "buh" noise. We also watched the priests bring out the charms and arrows and papers and stuff that people wanted to burn. There were even purses which, assumably, had failed to become filled with money last year...or maybe they just hated the purse. Or the boyfriend who gave it to them. Who knows?
After we had savored all the joys the Zenjo-ji had to offer, we decided to go back to
Asakusa to the Senso-ji, with about a million other people. Pattie wanted to see the
shrine to Tanuki (a sort of a badger spirit) but it appeared to be closed, so we just
enjoyed the crush of people (and I do mean *crush* the placed was mobbed, as it
traditionally is this time of year.) We got stares every time we spoke, as usual. We were the only gaijin, as usual, until we were leaving when we passed two Spanish women, one of whom was in kimono, which was interesting. There were quite a few women in kimono there, and a few men, too. We were both glad that some women still bother getting dressed up.
The crush of people on the Nakamise-dori - the road that leads from the Kanarimon
Gate to the temple - was really amazing. It was one of those crowds that if you left your feet, it would keep carrying you along. We threaded our way through the crush, to the amusement of everyone around us, mostly just surfing the humanity. Eventually we went back to the hotel. We opted for dinner in, because we were so tired, as usual.
On TV right now is a Japanese Beatlemania with one guy - the one playing George
- who keeps singing in Japanese.Next time:Me, Myu and 1000 four-year olds
