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Published: August 21st 2017
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Tennoji Temple building
Lovely bent old tree... Very tired and headachey at the moment. It's possible I'll go to bed before writing this tonight, but I'll put up the photos to keep you interested, how's that?
Well, that didn't work. I transferred the photos across, but they wouldn't upload, then the whole website was 'not responding' so I just went to bed anyway. Sorry about that, folks.
But here we are now, trying again. Yesterday was a really nice day, with a destination I've been looking forward to since before we arrived. The area is called Yanaka, and it's known as Tokyo Old Town. Although it is on the loop formed by the Yamanote railway line (the one that goes around the central city) it has been left behind by most developers, and its houses and shops are determinedly low-rise and human-scale. There are loads of shrines and temples, and a huge cemetery, and the shops are mostly individually-owned, rather than branches of chains.
We left home at 10, and got there at 11.15. Following an old tradition, we left the station by the wrong exit, and spent the first five minutes trying to orient ourselves to the wrong map, but then we went back
and started again. (And found it was an optical illusion perpetrated by the station that led you automatically to the east exit without letting you even see that there was a west exit.)
Immediately next to the station is the first temple, Tennoji, with an old Buddha and several lovely buildings. The Japanese temples are very modest compared to the Vietnamese Buddhist tradition, being natural wood and with far less gold leaf. From the gates of Tennoji, you emerge into the cemetery, which covers several hectares, and has the graves of several shoguns (although we didn't go looking for them, we just walked through.) It's a place that makes you think of Ozymandias - "Look on my works, ye mighty, and weep" (I think) - because there are so many big, magnificent gravestones that are now totally forgotten, weather-worn, and neglected. But it's still used - there are also a lot of new stones with fresh flowers and incense ash which are terribly poignant.
[And THAT'S as far as I got this morning trying to get something out to you before we went out. As you will have noticed by now, it didn't work. So. Now. On with
Yanaka Ginza
Shopkeeper cleaning. Note the cat figurine on the roof. the show...]
We came out onto an ordinary residential street, with plenty of modern but understated houses, and a few old ones, and more than its fair share of shrines. Just before the next main-ish road was a little alley that was possibly the back door of some businesses, but certainly the front of some others, but being Sunday a few of them were closed. But very olde-worlde and picturesque.
On the main road we consulted the map again, trying to find ourselves, but this time it was the travellers' dream: we couldn't find the right spot on the map because we were looking
too far away! We were virtually at our destination already! We hadn't seen it because it was down a bit of a slope, but a few steps on and we knew we were on the money. The first stall we came to had some things worth buying as presents, and as we paid the lady she told us to wait a bit while she ran and fetched something, and when she came back, she gave us two bottles of frozen home-made iced tea. I don't know why - there was no sign saying "Free
Akira Set Lunch
This is what a Michelin-recommended meal looks like. iced tea with every item sold," but, well, thank you, Mrs Lady.
We carried on down the street to the "Yanaka Ginza" street, a pedestrian zone with lots of lovely little boutique shops, galleries, and especially rice cracker shops. There are also, I have to admit, the odd 7-11 and even a 100-Yen (= Dollar) Store, but overall it was great. Cats is also a flavour there, for some reason. Several shops specialised in cat-themed goods, and there were several cat figurines on the overhanging roofs, just like in the Shambles in York.
At the bottom of the streets we turned left to start looking for somewhere to eat lunch. There had been several places to buy food, but not many to eat food at. It took us about 500m to come across a lunch place, by which we'd said that the next one we come to, we'll go into, no matter what it looks like. And boy, were we lucky. We weren't sure if it was open, and we couldn't see what they served, but it was one of those places with 10 seats around the counter with the chef working in behind.(Actually, it turned out there
was an upstairs too, to tell the truth.) Stephen noticed on the way in that they had some Michelin stickers outside too. We were in a Michelin restaurant! No stars, but mentioned in the guide for the past three years. We both had one of their set menus, and what do you know? They were fabulous. Mine came with a piece of stewed fish, which I had thought I might leave, but finished up wondering if it was polite to show appreciation by picking up the dish to drink the leftover sauce and fibres of fish flesh. (I decided it probably wasn't.) Each meal had 4 dishes that were mouthwatering, and although we didn't really need any more, we ordered another dish off the a la carte menu just so we could try some more. The restaurant didn't even give its name in English anywhere. I had to copy the kanji into Google Translate by hand to get its name. ("Akira," if you're ever in the neighbourhood.)
Now we headed back up Yanaka Ginza, to make sure we hadn't missed anything, and we found plenty to buy this time - some souvenirs for ourselves, more presents, a clothe. Back
at the top, we found a taxi to take us to our next stop, Nezu Shrine, a couple of km away. I saw a photo of this online, and recognised it as a place I have long wanted to see, but hadn't known where it was before. (However, there might actually be a few other places that also have the particular feature I like.) The shrine itself is just another shrine, if I may be so frank, but it has a long pathway of torii gates leading along the side of a hill, and is very picturesque. There were a few people around, being a Sunday, but the winding nature of the pathway meant that you could sometimes get pictures with nobody visible. The torii were much smaller than I had imagined, but still very pretty.
The taxi driver had told us how to get to the nearest station, so we walked in that general direction, stopping for a coffee along the way (with another random lady giving me another random present: 3 little business-card-sized pieces of pearlised, pastel-shaded embossed cardboard. I thanked her and asked what one did with them, and she suggested using them to write memos
on. Odd, but thank you too, Mrs Lady.)
And so we headed home. We bought dinner at the station supermarket again, watched some YouTube TV, and just after 9 left to go to the park over the road again, where the Summer Festival was finishing. But in fact, on the Sunday night, it apparently finished at 9. We were hoping there might have been a buildup to something like fireworks or a bonfire or something, but no. The dancing had finished, the stalls were closing and people were all leaving as we were coming in. Ah well, at least we saw it all the night before.
So we came back home and I tried to do this blog, starting with the pictures, but the computer was having none of it, so I went to bed. Again, apologies, but I felt better this morning, so I appreciate your understanding.
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