Asakusa’s door shutters

Posted on December 9, 2016 by Ginger

In Japan, as in many places around the world, shop owners secure their shops with roll-down metal shutters when they go home at night. In the morning, they roll the shutters up, bring out whatever signs or wares they place on the street near their door, and open for business.

In Asakusa, many of these metal shutters are painted with wonderful pictures–so full of Japanese life and vitality. Sometimes the picture gives a clue to what kind of shop is sleeping behind it; and sometimes not–though the writing probably takes care of that function in many cases. Here are some shutters that we saw as we walked the streets in the morning, when the shops were just starting to open.

Here’s a particularly detailed and complicated one:

I’ve saved my favorite for last–that trompe-l’oeil fabric over the entry just makes me smile!

The streets of Asakusa

Posted on November 19, 2016 by Ginger

As a “shitamachi” (or low city) district of Tokyo, Asakusa has numerous charming pedestrian streets. For example, this is the street leading to the Sensoji shrine. It is lined with shops selling wares to tourists and to devotees.

The entry to this street is emphasized by a fine gate.

There are streets with a covered arcades — interesting both by day and by night.

And, of course, there are just plain pleasant pedestrian streets!

Lining the streets, whether pedestrian or not, are, of course, buildings. Some of these buildings are heart-meltingly attractive.

Others, not so much–though these, too, sometimes have a certain charm.

One feature of even the most ordinary buildings is a certain tendency to decoration–wonderful, very Japanese decoration.

A dragon!

Samurai!

Finally, we found one especially fortuitous combination of all these things–pedestrian street, building, and decoration.

Asakusa — the temple area

Posted on October 31, 2016 by Ginger

We didn’t discover the interesting area around the temple until the second time we went there, and had more time to wander.

There were, to begin with, several statues of Buddha (or perhaps of Bodhisattvas).

A short digression is perhaps in order here. Dan and I are illiterate in Japanese, and we have gained a whole new–and sympathetic–understanding of the dilemmas that must face functionally illiterate people in our own country. We were certainly able to get around fine in Japan. Most public transportation have signs in English as well as Japanese; and people were also wonderfully friendly and willing to help. We also understood where we were and what we were seeing, at least in broad terms. But the details on explanatory signs (and most menus!) were too much for us. So I present here the beauty, or cuteness, of what we saw–and the Japanese are very, very good at both beauty and cuteness–but no details. Just as we experienced it.

And now on to the Buddhas. Or Bodhisattvas.

Finally, my favorite. I actually don’t know who this little guy is, or anything about him. I just know: you gotta love him!

There was a small but lovely landscaped area, with a stream running through it.

The stream had myriads of red-and-white fish in it.

And the fish were hungry.

There were also numerous other objects of mystery.

One small shrine I do know about (because they were kind enough to post its story in English as well as Japanese). Once upon a time, it seems, in the early eighteenth century, a housewife, digging in her garden, discovered buried there a jar full of gold coins. She worried that she and her husband would rely too heavily on those coins and become lazy and lose what they had. So she buried the coins again, and with this mindset, she and her husband worked hard and became very wealthy. They placed a statue of the Bodhisattva Jizo on the spot where they buried the coins. Today, this shrine is built over those coins.

It contains the statue of the Bodhisattva (and several other statues of him, too). People come here to pray for success in their business enterprises.

Asakusa — the Sensoji Temple

Posted on October 30, 2016 by Ginger

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.

The roof tiles of the main hall, rebuilt in its original style after its destruction in World War II, are made of titanium.

I like this statue and the dragons on his fountain:

Also, there are a number of lions.

Decorative details include warriors and imaginative beasts.

More on other parts of the temple area in the next post.

Hard at work in Shirakawago

Posted on October 9, 2016 by Ginger

A person can’t visit Shirakawa-go for long without wondering what’s involved in maintaining those steep, thickly thatched roofs. The answer is: teamwork! Many hands make light work; the job takes only a few days when everyone pitches in. Here are two photographs, one much older than the other, of roof replacement on two of the largest houses.

We were fortunate to see work being done on another roof, on a much smaller scale, while we were there.

One man is gathering the straw into bundles; a second is raking the loose straw together and also handing the bundles up to the men working on the roof. The men on the roof are alternately feeling the roof thatch to make sure it is tight and solid, stuffing straw into the roof wherever they can to make it tighter, and shaving the edges of the newly stuffed straw into a neat line.

The other work in progress, it being mid-September, was the rice harvest. Rice, it turns out, is growing in many fields, large and small, throughout the village. It is surprisingly beautiful.

Scarecrows!

In a larger field, we saw one farmer using a hand-operated harvesting machine. In others, people harvested entirely by hand.

The sheaves are protected from the rain in their beautiful rows.

Historic Shirakawago

Posted on October 8, 2016 by Ginger

Shirakawa-go is a small farming village located high in the mountains southeast of Kanazawa. It’s a UNESCO World Heritage site, with its traditional houses still intact and lived in.

The architectural style of steeply pitched roofs with their dense, thick layers of thatching, is known as gassho-zukuri (“prayer-hands construction”), and it’s effective in the winter, when the snowfall can be heavy.

Nothing much in this village has changed–except for the occasional car or truck, and a scattering of buildings with more modern roofs–and the busloads of tourists that arrive every day.

Signs are posted everywhere not to smoke. You can imagine the devastation a small spark might cause!

Though most of the houses are private, a few of the larger houses, as well as the monastery associated with the local shrine, allow entry. Some of the houses are quite large–to our amazement, five stories high under those steep roofs! There is room for a large extended family and for indoor industries, such as silk-worm cultivation. The interiors of the shrine and the houses are fascinating.

Oh . . . have I mentioned the village was full of tourists? There was a steady stream of us through the few open houses. We came to see the architecture, and we were glad we did. But even more interesting was the work being done by the residents of this living village. I’ll show some of that in the next post.

Unazuki Onsen

Posted on October 6, 2016 by Ginger

Before continuing with our next lesson in Japanese meals, I should take a moment to explain our travel. For we left Tokyo the next morning and traveled by the famous Japanese bullet train to Kurobe. Here, we were met by a car and driver sent by our hotel and whisked up into the mountains, a half-hour 20-kilometer scenic drive, to Unazuki Onsen. The Japanese word onsen means a hot spring, and indeed, steaming hot water flowed through the town.

The first thing we did was to check into our hotel, the Ryokan Enraku. A ryokan is the Japanese version of an inn, perhaps, or a B&B. This was our first of seven nights in a row in three different ryokans. They are traditional hostelries in an austere and timeless Japanese style–tatami mats on the floor, where shoes are not allowed. Slippers and robes to change into for comfort, and which are acceptable wear throughout the building. Not much furniture–just two chairs with no legs to sit on, and a low table to sit at while using such low chairs. Later, a comfortable futon on the floor for sleeping. A very personal welcome, with refreshments after your journey. Here we are, relaxing in our new digs.

Unlike the other ryokans we stayed in, this one had a balcony, and the balcony had a view of the mountain and a rushing river below. And . . . the balcony had Western-style furniture!

We had half-board at this ryokan, but before dinner we wanted to enjoy an actual Japanese onsen bath. The ryokan had, um, several of them (depending on how you count, somewhere between four and six). Occupying the first, second, and third floors, the baths are segregated by sex. There is an indoor bath for each sex on the second floor, and baths open to the outdoors on the first and third floors. Tonight, men are on the first floor and women on the third. In the morning, it will be reversed. It being early afternoon, we each have our respective baths to ourselves. We try to follow proper bath protocol but are grateful there’s no one watching in case we get something wrong. Let’s see: Undress and leave belongings in a locker. Shower before entering the bath, sitting on the little stool. Dump a bucket of water over your head to wash any dust or dirt off your hair. Rinse. Now, enter the bath. You may keep the small towel on top of your head, but leave the large towel behind. Wow, it’s HOT! But after a few seconds, amazingly good. Soak for as long as you want or can, then shower again. Use the large towel to dry off; then dress, and ooze back to your room.

Here’s a picture of an open-air onsen, possibly one of the first-floor onsens in our hotel. (It’s not mine; I didn’t take my camera there.)

Thoroughly clean and relaxed, we set out to see the town. The town wasn’t very big, so this didn’t take long. Here’s the friendly map posted at the small local train station.

The town was nestled in the mountains, and pretty.

A gushing, naturally hot fountain in the main square lifted steam into the cool air.

Fed by the natural hot springs, foot baths were everywhere! The first one, by a restaurant, took us by surprise, but the English in the sign is self explanatory.

Some of them were beautifully designed and well integrated with modern buildings.

But now it’s time for dinner, and even in a small town in the Japanese countryside, we find an elegance to match that in Tokyo, but without the big-city pretentiousness. Here is our menu:

This is not very helpful, and, like the previous night, for the most part, the appearance of the food does not give enough of a clue as to what it actually is. It is, however, very pretty, and beautifully presented.

At last we come to a course we can understand! And it’s as delicious as it looks!

The main problem with this dinner, like the previous night, is that we get very full very quickly, and there seems no polite way *not* to eat what’s in front of us. I regret, days afterwards, having to leave half of those crab legs.

The futon on the floor is very cozy and comfortable, but in the morning we are still full.

And it’s time for the Japanese breakfast! Here’s what’s waiting for us in the morning.

And this is the way it looks when additional food is brought in.

Folks, it’s at about this point that we realize we are not going to make it through the next two days of ryokan half-board we have signed up for in our next location. But what can we do!

Japanese food

Posted on October 4, 2016 by Ginger

Typically, when Dan or I first speak to someone who knows (or finds out) that we’ve just returned from Japan, their first question is:

“Did you love it?”

This is an easy question to answer:

“Yes!”

Surprisingly, the almost universal second question is:

“What did you think of the food?”

The answer to this question is much more complicated. First, from a visual design perspective alone, the food is stunningly beautiful. Beautifully made, beautifully arranged, and beautifully presented.

From a taste perspective, the food is not always as accessible. Much of this, I’m sure, is cultural. The Japanese eat many more kinds of things than Americans do. See, for example, the menu pages below, which were photographed in a restaurant window, notable in part because the names of the offered items were in some cases written in English, and in other cases diagrammed quite clearly.

I, for one, am not much interested in trying grilled tuna larynx or simmered tuna head. This doesn’t mean that they’re not good; it just means that we Americans have a cultural bias away from some of the things that the Japanese have learned to savor. Also, the Japanese appreciate subtleties of taste and texture to which we Americans have largely been unexposed. In other words, when it comes to Japanese food, we Americans have a decidedly uneducated palate. This is no doubt why the question about Japanese food invariably comes up so early in the conversation.

Dan and I had hoped that a trip to Japan might educate our palates as we were exposed to the real thing. Disappointingly, this didn’t quite happen.

On our fourth night in Tokyo, for example, we made a reservation at an elegant Japanese restaurant near our hotel for a kaiseki dinner. This is a formal dinner of many courses made of seasonally fresh ingredients prepared and served in the most time-honored and elegant Japanese tradition. Some care is taken to ensure that the menu is acceptable to the diners, and so, for example, the restaurant made sure that our dinner did not include the meat of any mammals, which Dan and I do not eat. We are shown to a private room, furnished in the Japanese manner with a low table and two chairs. Here is the menu of that dinner:

It looks like a wonderful culinary adventure! Not everything is clear, examining the menu–I mean, for example, “Narrowing morphism boiled conger of chrysanthemum turnip”–but we’re game to try! Here is what the table looks like when we sit down to eat.

Our lovely and gracious waitress removed the tops of the pottery dishes to reveal:

It’s not really clear what all of this is, exactly, but it’s certainly lovely. And we can determine, for example, that the green things are vegetables, almost certainly peppers, and that the light-colored squarish things are almost certainly fish. We’re not sure about the rest of it, but I especially like the <whatever it is> that looks like a turning-color autumn maple leaf. Anyhow, not being able to identify our food by sight turns out not to matter because almost none of it tastes or has the texture we expected from looking at it. Some of it is quite tasty. Some of it is decidedly, er, chewy.

We eat it all, and our waitress, who speaks very little English (but in all fairness more than my Japanese), comes in to reveal the next course by removing the lids of the boxes in front of us.

This is very beautiful, but it’s about at this point that we entirely give up trying to map our meal to our menu or to identify any of it by sight. We set aside the things that don’t appear to be food, and we eat the rest of it. Some of it, we enjoy. Some of it, we are seriously wondering what it is, because we don’t want to mistakenly order it again anytime in the future.

It’s about now that Dan discovers the following mysterious object on our table:

We are beginning to feel a lot like the apes in the beginning of “2001: A Space Odyssey” scratching their heads in wonder as they examine the mysterious black monolith. When our waitress comes in next, we ask her about it. It turns out to be a call button for her. But, alas, the help we need with this dinner goes way beyond what her English can handle. On to the next course and the next!

We eat everything that we can and much more than we should. We are glad for the experience but a little bit uneasy about the dinner we will have the following night. We’ve ordered half-board at the ryokan (inn) where we will be staying, but we can’t believe we’ll ever be hungry again.

To be continued . . .

Service

Posted on September 23, 2016 by Ginger

Whether you’re staying at a new five-star luxury hotel like the Capitol Hotel Tokyu in the Akasaka district of Tokyo or a hundred-year-old traditional ryokan inn like the Ryokan Sumiyoshiya in Kanazawa, or any kind of hotel or inn in between, the one thing the Japanese excel at is service. Even the modest inn can put an American Ritz to shame.

Case in point: the concierge at the Capitol Hotel Tokyu called ahead to our next *three* ryokans to ensure we would know how to get from the train stations to their ryokans.

Case in point: At Ryokan Sumiyoshiya in Kanazawa, we asked where to buy stamps, and they *gave us* four stamps for our postcards. And mailed the postcards for us, too.

Case in point: When we went out for the day or for dinner, the owners of Ryokan Gion Sano in Kyoto insisted we take their umbrellas if it was raining. They always accompanied us out to the street and waved good-bye as we left. When we left by taxi for the train station on the last day, I turned around and looked out the rear window, and they were still there, standing by the street and waving until we turned the corner and were gone.

Case in point: When we arrived in Toba, we called our hotel, the Toba International Hotel, to find out where to catch the shuttle they run to the train station every half hour. We had just missed it, so they sent a special car to pick us up so that we wouldn’t have to wait. When they learned that their first shuttle of the morning on our last day would make for a very tight connection with our train, they offered to drive us in a car so that we wouldn’t worry.

Case in point: In an extremely light drizzle, we walked from the bus stop to our hotel in Hakone, the historic Fujiya Hotel, where we were greeted by a doorman who raced to hand us umbrellas–and opened them for us. Another doorman relieved us of our suitcases, carried them inside, and carefully wiped them off for us. After we checked in, not one, but two, people showed us to our room–one to explain everything to us, and another to bring our bags.

Taxi drivers wear suits and ties and white gloves. Taxis are immaculately clean.

Everyone smiles and bows and seems genuinely happy to be of assistance. We smile and bow too, and say, “Thank you” (our one word in Japanese), and are genuinely happy to be so thoughtfully taken care of. But they bow deeper and say, “Thank you very much!” And they seem to mean it.

And most amazingly, everyone appears to be paid a fair wage for their work, which is treated with dignity, from the person sweeping the train platform to the manager of a large hotel. And no one–not one person–expects or will accept a tip.

In the Ginza

Posted on September 22, 2016 by Ginger

Tokyo subways are wonderrful. We took them everywhere. With few exceptions <cough, cough, Shibuya>, the signs are clear, the stations well marked, and even which exits lead where are clearly indicated. And it’s always surprising, when you leave the station at a new destination, what it’s going to look like. It could be the rather daunting so-called “pedestrian scramble” at Shibuya, for example.