An Escapade in Japan - Part 13

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Sensoji Temple, Tokyo

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My notes for 2nd March :

Take flight back to Mumbai. Will have to buy a separate ticket to Narita airport because JR pass is over.
Go ‘unreserved’ to save (1660+1660 Yen) because it is ‘point-to-point’.
Korean Air operates from Terminal 1 North Wing.
Taking the train (unreserved seat) to Narita is cheaper than airport bus.

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The 2nd March was bright and sunny, as predicted by the weather portals on the internet.

Not a single cloud in the sky! Oh, what a relief!

This was the sort of the day which would have been ideal to visit Fuji area. There was a likelihood that if we went up the Tokyo Tower or the tall Marunouchi building, we would be able to see Mount Fuji.

However, Mount Fuji is notoriously capricious. It still may not reveal itself to us.

Our flight was at 5:00 PM and so we had some time to do last-minute shopping and sightseeing. No wonder that we opted to go to Sensoji Temple and shop along the Nakamichi Street for kimonos, rather than go to Shinjuku or Shibuya departmental stores.

By yesterday’s experience, I had lost my fear of the Tokyo subways.

We went to Asakusa’s Sensoji temple for shopping. The shrine itself, nice though it is, did not interest us much.

Nakamichi Street, which leads to Sensoji temple is full of shops selling touristy stuff, including kimonos. We bought 3 kimonos there.

As we were returning, we saw that there was a crowd rubbernecking a huge clock on the Seiko building, which was playing music and displaying dancing dolls to the tune. It was exactly 12:00 PM.

I had read about ‘Rathouse-Glockenspiel’ at Munich, which shows the wedding of a duke in a puppet-show in the clockwork, but had narrowly missed seeing it. So, I cannot compare it to the Seiko’s show but I will say that I found this very interesting. It is quite comparable to the one at the Salar Jung museum in Hyderabad.

Here they show a religious ceremony in which Lord Sensoji is being carried in a palanquin. A procession of angels move their wings in rhythm to it in the left panel. Puppet fishermen land a big fish in the right panel.

We were lucky to be there at the right time.

We came back to Ningyocho, ate in a McDonald’s and then came back to the hotel. We already had checked out and kept the luggage in the lobby.

We had decided to take the Airport Limousine from T-CAT (Tokyo City Air Terminal) which was quite near our hotel rather than lug our luggage through the Tokyo station and take Narita Express, even though it would have cost us less.

Accordingly, we took the 1:30 PM Limousine to the Narita airport.

At Narita airport, Japanese police accosted us and said they were random-checking the passengers. They took down all our details, checked passports, visas, asked us the purpose of visit. They were polite but authoritative.

We were ‘clean’ of course, but wondered why they should zero in on us out of thousands of passengers. Then we realized that I was wearing salwar-kameez for the first time in 12 days because I was so fed up of wearing jeans and tops.

It may or may not be the reason, but I have decided to wear jeans and tops only while in a foreign country.

We boarded the flight for Mumbai and thought blissfully about warm weather, warm food, warm colors, real cuckoos singing in the mango trees instead of coming out of cuckoo clocks and emitting a mechanical sound, star-filled night sky and myriads of other things that characterize our Motherland.

Our thoughts must have run parallel because Avi asked me, “When is the Holi?”

“Soon.” I replied, visualizing the bright red Flame of the Forest tree (Palash) that would be in full bloom at the entrance to the Society.

“Do you know that this year the ladies of the Society are going to celebrate the ‘Chaitra Haldikunku’, because we missed celebrating the ‘Sankrant Haldikunku’,” I said, further enjoying the images that the thought brought up from the memory-vault -- the ladies dressed in bright, colorful, silk sarees, their lavish jewelry, the air redolent with the smell of jasmine in their hair, ‘ambedal’ and ‘panhe’, the sheen of silver on ‘attardani’, the cool, sweet feel of the scented water on skin when the spray from ‘gulabdani’ hits you.

My god, I was really homesick!

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Photos

Nakamichi Street
The Cherry trees are, of course, artificial.