Tokyo Day 3
Today was the first official day of the OAT tour. I met my 15 co-travelers and our guide, Akiko. We started our whirlwind tour of Tokyo with a visit to the Imperial Palace grounds which are extensive and quite beautiful, although there is little to no shade and on a day like today,with temps near 100 degrees and humidity high, we were not anxious to stay outside long in the burning sun so it was a quick trip! From there we drove to the SensoJi Temple in the Akasuka section of the city. This is the Buddhist temple that is most famous in Tokyo and to which thousands of people flock every day. It was a mob scene, quite a different experience than my visit to Zojo-Ji yesterday. We visited the main prayer hall and then a smaller prayer hall that houses "guardian Buddhas." Japanese and Chinese Buddhists believe that every person has a "guardian Buddha" (kind of like a guardian angel!) that is determined by the year of your birth according to the Chinese zodiac sign for that year. My sign is the monkey so my guardian Buddha is Dainichi, known as the Cosmic Buddha and apparently the central Buddha image for the Shingon sect of Japanese Buddhism. The Senso-Ji Temple complex is bordered by two great gates and between them is a small but amazingly crowded long road of shops selling everything imaginable, including food, kimonos, kitsch, souvenirs, expensive stuff and cheap junk! The mobs going through that shopping area are amazing and in the heat is was quite an experience to walk down the street. Coming back I took a side street to avoid the crowds! There is also a Shinto Shrine in the complex so I stopped there before leaving.
After leaving the Senso-Ji Temple complex we drove to the Ginza district, which is the Fifth Avenue of Tokyo. We visited the Mitsukoshi department store, which is a Japanese Harrods! The food court in the basement is amazing with all kinds of Japanese delicacies, most of which we couldn't figure out what they were! I went up to the 11th floor where they have a number of restaurants and had a really delicious and interesting lunch (the name of which I can't remember!) It was two pancakes sandwiching a pile of noodles, veggies and pork, all cooked on a hot open grill with some mystery sauce mixed in with it all! At the last minute an egg is essentially scrambled on the top of one of the pancakes and the whole concoction is bathed in a dark, very tasty sauce. It was really delicious and I must say greatly challenged my chopstick skills! I loved it and I've never seen anything like it in Japanese restaurants in the States so it was fun to try something completely new. They serve it to you very hot off the grill and there is a hot grill right in front of you where they place it so that it stays hot while you are eating it. At the end of the meal they give you a cold wet towel, to cool down with! Nice touch, I must say!
After leaving the Ginza district, we went to the Yasukuni Jinja shrine, a fascinating Shinto shrine where the Japanese have enshrined (ritually according to Shinto beliefs and rituals) the souls of all their war dead going back centuries. There is a wonderful museum on the site which we got a whirlwind tour through guided by one of the Shinto priests at the Shrine. It was fascinating to hear the history of Japan's various wars, most particularly their participation in the WW2 from a Japanese perspective. The priest and our guide were extremely apologetic in advance, warning us that they would be giving the Japanese point of view and hoping we would not be offended. We tried to assure them that we realize that when you are talking war, the story will vary depending on who's telling it and we didn't take offense! The museum is really fascinating with amazing artifacts of Japanese military history going back hundreds of years. It is also sobering, as there are photographs of their war dead from the 20th century to the present time covering walls of several rooms, representing the souls that they have enshrined at the Yasukuni Shrine. Shintoism is an indigenous religion that worships local deities and they believe that they can summon the souls of all the war dead to reside at that shrine. The families of the war dead make pilgrimage to the shrine every year on the anniversary of the end of whichever war they lost soldiers in, which at this point means mostly relatives of those who died in WW2. In one room there are rows and rows of very fancy Japanese dolls dressed in traditional wedding attire. The priest explained that those dolls are given to the shrine by the families of the soldiers who died before being married (which was most of them since they were mostly teenage boys!) so that their souls could "marry" in the next life given that they were not able to in this one. We all told our guide that OAT needs to allow more time for that particular stop as it was truly fascinating and we felt we didn't really have time to savor it and see all the amazing exhibits they have there.
We are going out to dinner tonight, back in the Ginza district. I'm writing this on our afternoon break, knowing I'll be too tired when we get back from dinner! At that point I will also have to rearrange my packing as we leave tomorrow for Hakone and our big suitcases are being shipped on ahead of us to Kanazawa so I have to cull two days worth of clothes and necessities to put in my backpack for our two nights in Hakone. We'll be staying in a traditional ryokan, Japanese inn, sleeping on futons on the floor! Apparently there isn't room in the inn for our big luggage. There is internet wifi in the lobby at our inn in Hakone, but not in our rooms, so I expect to be able to post to the blog while we're there, but if for any reason I go silent, assume something wasn't up to snuff in the technology arena!
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