A Temple to Call My Own

I did what I promised what I would not do: leave this blog post for months without writing it.  So I apologize for that.

Tokyo!  It is definitely not what I was expecting.  Despite the fact that it is the biggest metropolitan area in the world (30 million), it is one of the most calm, peaceful cities that I have visited, perhaps second only to Geneva.

You hear horror stories about the Tokyo metro, about how it is ridiculously crowded, and that there are people whose job it is to push you in.  While it is quite crowded during rush hour, it is pretty much on par with Hong Kong or Shanghai subway trains during rush hour.  During non rush hour, we were usually able to sit down, something that was somewhat rare on Hong Kong and Shanghai lines.  And in Hong Kong was the only place where we had to wait multiple trains before we could get on because there were so many people.

The people in Tokyo are really nice.  I mean, ridiculously nice.  I had some issues booking our hostel (I mistyped my email), so they found me on facebook and sent a message saying “were you the one who wanted to book with us?”  If you are ever looking for a hostel in Tokyo, that is probably the best, cheapest, least sketchy, place there is.  Except their breakfast is a rip off.  It is basically $3 for unlimited toast and vegetable soup.

We stayed at Sakura Hostel in the Asakusa area, which was relatively centrally located in Tokyo. I say relatively, because really you cannot go many places in Tokyo without taking a half an hour subway ride, no matter where you are located in the city.  We were about a five minute walk away from a station.  To get to said station, the most direct route was to walk through Sensō-ji, Tokyo’s oldest and most significant temple (Wikipedia’s words, not mine).  Though a Buddhist shrine, it also has Shinto elements and plays host every year to a major Shinto festival (yay Eastern Asian universalism!).   We got to know the temple grounds quite well, as we were there multiple times each day. The alternative was to walk around the site, which tripled our walking time (a mistake we made the first night while lugging suitcases). It became our little temple, where we could watch other eager tourists snap pictures while we would just casually walk through (we spent our first full day being those tourist, fear not).

The second day we woke up at 3 in the morning to get to the fish market at 5 am in order to watch the Tuna auction at 6am.  Early in the morning, fishermen bring in their catch of tuna, 2 to 3 feet long, and restaurant owners come and inspect them. Then the fish are auctioned off to the highest bidder.  After watching this, we returned to our hostel and slept (more than we intended).  We returned to the fish market for a sushi lunch, and thoroughly amused one of the women working there with our various reactions to different kinds of sushi.  Eel was the most controversial in our group, with me loving it and Cassie hating it.  Heather, who at the beginning of the trip said she hated seafood, enjoyed it a lot too.  It just goes to show that you should have good seafood before you decide that you don’t like it.

That afternoon we went up to the top of the Metropolitan Government Building of Tokyo to get a good view of the city.  It is free to go up, as long as you are ok with walking through very official looking government buildings in jeans and t-shirts, getting lost, and then having a friendly business women tell you that you are in the wrong building.  Oops.

Up at the top there were some nice maps telling you what you were looking at, a very expensive café, and a very nice tour guide woman who started talking to David and pointed out to all of us a few more sites that were not on the map.  Had this been India, I would have been very suspicious of her motives.  Heck, I was still a little on edge.  I don’t know if that is cynicism or being smart.

That evening, more to say that we had done it than anything else, we went up in the Tokyo Skytree ($30 total, which is a bit ridiculous).  The view was actually really amazing.  Unlike at the government building, there were no other tall buildings in the way of the view.  We ate dinner in the sky tree (surprisingly cheap – as cheap as anything on the street).  We lost Heather briefly.  I asked a staff member if she had seen a girl with red hair, and she jokingly pointed to a cartoon character on the brochure (yes, it was for sure a joke).  Later, when we passed her again, she felt obligated to apologize.  Conscientiousness to an extreme.

Honestly, the next two days kind of blur together, so I am just going to list the highlights.  We went to the Meiji Shrine, a giant park in the middle of Tokyo in honor of Emperor Meiji, who in the 19^th century modernized Japan in such a way as to save it from being colonized and exploited like much of Eastern Asia.  Walking through the park makes it impossible to feel like you are in a city, more like being in a forest.  Or maybe an arboretum, as it had better paths than a forest would.  In the center is a giant shrine to the Emperor (a temple like building that you are not allowed to enter). 

We visited the Yasukuni Shrine, originally established by Emperor Meiji to commemorate those who had died in Meiji Restoration and other “duty to your country” sort of things.  It has since expanded, and now has a very nice war museum.  I mentioned before that the Korean War museum was biased.  This blew Korea out of the water.  They had justifications for their colonization of Korea (they were basically a Chinese colony already) and for declaring war on the US in WWII (It wasn’t our fault!).  It conveniently left out uncomfortable truths like the poor treatment of Naijing during the Japanese occupation of China.  But at least they had some really cool WWII airplanes!

We also walked through the imperial palace gardens.  The imperial palace is still being lived in, so you really can’t walk through it.  We walked through Harajuku, a district known for its outrageous “fashion” and little boutiques.  I think Heather and I appreciated this significantly more than David and Cassie.  It was also on and off raining, forcing people indoors.  We walked through several other parks (parks seemed to be surprisingly prominent).  We went to a Japanese style tea ceremony.  The place was a relatively new section of a nearby museum, and in order to get their name out they offered to do tea ceremonies for relatively cheap.  Afterwards we went to the museum, which had a special exhibit about clothes from an ethnic group in Northern Japan (I’m sorry that I don’t remember it).

It became a running joke that David was always the last one up.  One morning, we told him that we were leaving half an hour earlier than we intended on leaving.  He wasn’t very happy about that.

On our final full day, we took a bus trip out to Mt. Fuji!  The sky was amazingly clear, and we could see the entire mountain.  That does not always happen!  On the trip, we met a guy from Australia, who had been to Fuji once before, but could barely anything because of the fog.  The one sad thing was that because there had been snowfall the day before, we could only go as high up the mountain as the first station (on good days the bus can drive half way up the mountain, in July and August you can climb to the top).  The day was nice, and the views were amazing.  I think I took more pictures that day than I had in the rest of Japan combined.  After going a little ways up the mountain, we had a picnic lunch, then took a boat across nearby Lake Ashi and took a cable car up Mount Komagatake (relatively speaking it was more of a hill).  We took the bus back through some amazing countryside.  When we got back to Tokyo, the bus driver offered to take us a little closer to our hostel (again, this is Japan, it isn’t sketchy).  When we got off the bus, our tour guide gave each of us four an origami Mt. Fuji! We found a sushi place for dinner.

The next morning we were up and out early to catch our plane.  The plane flight back was fairly uneventful.  When we landed in Chicago it was snowing so much that our flight was canceled (and good thing too, as we wouldn’t have made our flight anyways).  So for five hours we camped out in the Chicago airport, marveled at the fact that everyone spoke English, and slept.  Then we were home, and that was that.