dragon | G. S. Kenney Author

Most people are familiar with the image of St. George and the dragon. Here’s one, for example, in Budapest:

Pretty classic, right? Guy on a big horse slays a wicked-looking reptile with a long spear from a pretty safe distance. (Well, not so much for the horse, of course, but they have to put the man and the beast into the same statue, right? So there are space constraints.

There’s a classic St. George on the facade of Casa Amatller in Barcelona, too. (Casa Amatller, designed by the architect Josep Puig i Cadafalch in about 1900, is right next door to Gaudi’s somewhat more famous Casa Batllo.)

Despite the lack of a horse, it’s pretty easily recognizable. The guy’s on the top, and he has armor and a shield. And (if you look closely) the obligatory spear, with which he has skewered the beast through the head and the heart.

When it comes to St. George and the dragon, let us be clear, there is not much of a contest. The beast is ferocious, but we are given the surety that the brave-hearted (and well armored) man wins.

But the artist is playing with us, as it turns out. There are not just one but three St. Georges with their dragons on the facade of Casa Amatller.

This second St. George appears to be a parody. It shows a rather extreme version of the man-over-beast story. The man is a performer with a tambourine not a spear, and the beast has turned into a dancing bear. No harm to anyone here. Not a chance of nightmares. But look at what has become of the man. He makes a living with this defeated creature, but that’s all. If the beast isn’t much of a dragon, neither is the person much of a man.

The third St. George speaks to me deeply. Here, the man wears only a thin cloak, and he is wrestling with a beast that is his own size, maybe bigger. It’s not clear who will win. Look closely. If the man is strangling the dragon, the dragon also has his claws into the man, raking his arm. Leaving wounds that could be slow to heal.

This one, at least, is an even contest.

This one feels real to me, for we all struggle with our beasts. We all struggle to be more than beasts ourselves. Every psychologist will recognize this conflict. Every artist will see in it the creative process. Even Plato described the act of creation as “reason persuading necessity.”

For a long time, I placed this image of the creative struggle on the top of my home page, but it’s dark, and it’s difficult. It may capture you, and it may draw you in, but not in a way that will invite you and make you feel at home.

Please do come in. Please do feel at home in these pages. There is much of beauty and of joy here. But let’s just remember that it’s not a dancing bear lurking there in the dark corners–it’s a dragon.

Asakusa is considered an important “shitamachi” (that’s “low city” to you!) district of Tokyo. It does have its few high-rise and modern buildings, but many older streets and structures survive.

But more of that later.

First, an important lesson in pronouncing Japanese. This will be helpful to anyone (well, any American English speaker, anyway) contemplating a trip to Japan. An American acquaintance of mine who spent a lot of time in Japan explained Japanese pronunciation this way: “They speak really fast and run all their syllables together.” I did not find this to be true, though I did find myself nearly choking on my tongue when trying to repeat the names of places the way they were announced in trains and subways.

Those of you who, like me, speak American English as a native language probably imagine that the name of this district would be pronounced “AH-suh-KOO-sah.” But this would be terribly wrong. The closest I was able to get is “Ah-SOCK-sah.” (I think the “u” is just there to space out the “k” and the “s” a little.) In general, I found I could get closer to correct by placing a strong emphasis on the second syllable rather than the first and third. Thus, for example, “Ka-NAH-z-wah” is better than “KA-na-ZA-wah.” Just so you know.

We visited Asakusa twice–once early in our trip, late in the morning; and then again on our very last day, when we spent an evening there and then got an early start in the morning. The early start turns out to be important, as the district can be crowded with tourists.

The biggest tourist draw in Asakusa is the Buddhist Sensoji Temple. This temple is the oldest in Tokyo–originally built when Asakusa was just a fishing village in the seventh century–occupies a complex of numerous buildings, artifacts, and landscape features. The temple building and its ancillary structures are remarkable. I loved the large lanterns in the doorways.