Sunday, May 15, 2005

After battling jet lag to a draw last night, we get up a bit later than yesterday and get the day started a little more slowly. Our plan for today is to visit Asakusa, and it's main attraction Sensoji temple, which just about the biggest and most impressive Buddhist temple in Tokyo.  And from what we've read, the neighborhood is a little less of the super modern megalopolis, and a little more of the old Tokyo -- although I'm not sure exactly what that means. Tokyo's lack of, well, antiquity is due to it's almost total destruction back in the Second World War. Basically, city of wooden buildings meets several waves of incendiary bombings, and nothing much is left but scorched earth, literally. So by "old Tokyo" I guess they mean the first wave of reconstruction after the war, and not the massive wave of rebuilding that took place in the eighties and nineties.  Anyhow, Asakusa is supposed to have this "old Tokyo" quality, plus a big temple with associated shopping arcade, containing everything from toy stores to traditional cookies and crackers, from ticky-tacky tourist trash to religious charms and icons. A little bit of traveling fair set permanently lining the 3/4 kilometer lane from the temple's first gate, to it's second, main gate.

Reaching the neighborhood without incident, we suddenly find ourselves being swept up in a human tide. It's Sunday, the one full weekend day that most Japanese workers have, and they like to do things like visit temples with attached shopping arcades, so the place is mobbed in the way that only places in Japan can be mobbed. A sea of people. A great crowd that is completely non-plussed at being in the midst of a great crowd. For them this is just a normal Sunday morning. And a bit of this feeling rubs off on us, since we don't seem to be as put off by this crowd as we would expect. We gamely mingle in with the rest, first stopping to check out the impressing Kaminarimon, or Thunder Gate at the head of Nakamise (literally "Between the Shops") Dori, the pedestrian street leading to the temple grounds.

In the center of the gate is a huge lantern with the characters reading "Thunder Gate"right out in front. To either side are guardian deities -- cribbed from Hindu mythology around the time the Lotus Sutra was being put together. Which are pretty impressive, but also, because of the double layer of chicken wire in the front of their alcoves -- presumably to keep birds from nesting behind their ears -- pretty unphotographable.  I heave a sigh or two and we amble through the crowd into Nakamise Dori.

Now I lived in Japan for a year, and I'm used to the mixture of commercialism and sacredness that these temple approaches can have. They're something like permanent versions of the weekly markets held in the squares in front of European cathedrals. The people are here already, and they need goods and services, so what's the harm in providing them, along with a little fun and frivolity?  But there was one thing on this street that I was completely unprepared for. It struck me dumb with bemused amusement, or vice versa. It was that much of a surprise to me. Yes my friends, I was caught off guard by the shop selling, among other things, canine kimonos, complete with obi and geisha wig. I didn't know whether to be horrified, scandalized, or just laugh 'till I cried. Being in a pretty good mood. I decided on the latter, and took a few pictures, lest anyone doubt my veracity on this matter.

Passing by a several more mundane shops, we finally come to the main temple grounds. Now this temple's importance to the city of Tokyo goes way back. It's supposedly one of the first temples established in the area, and this came about when a pair of brothers, fishing in the Sumida river, just a stone's throw from the current location of the temple, caught a beautiful statue of the Bodhisattva Kannon in their net. This was taken as a sign of divine favor and great things, and the statue was enshrined -- never again to be revealed to mortal eyes, by the way -- as the guardian of the then small town of Edo, which would, much later become the metropolis of Tokyo.  So this is Tokyo's oldest and most revered temple. But like everything else in the city, it burned to the ground in the war. So this is a post-war reconstruction of the temple, and something just seemed to be missing. Maybe it's my familiarity with the truly old and elegant temples of Kyoto, or maybe some of the Kansai bias against Tokyoites rubbed off on me when I lived in Kyoto prefecture, but this temple seems like is was built more to impress others than express itself, if you get my meaning.

The main gate is huge and really impressive, and the Pagoda at one side of the grounds is the tallest in Japan. The main hall is impressive. And the monks chanting sutras and keeping time on a big taiko drum do create a certain sense of awe and reverence, but something just doesn't seem right to me. At first I think it might be the crowd, but I've been to other temples with crowds this big. Maybe it's just that lack of "antiquity" that seems a trademark of Tokyo that give me this feeling. It's not that I don't like this temple, it's just it doesn't speak to me on a level beyond it's architecture and artwork.

We wander around the area for a while, and decide to head back to the hotel in the mid afternoon, since we need to pack out bags and get them on their way to Kyoto. Yep they're going on ahead of us all on their own. Japan's home-grown equivalent of Fed-Ex, Kuro-neko Takkyubin, also has a service that ships luggage from one hotel to another overnight, keyed to the owners reservation. This is truly great, especially since Japan's trains, and especially subways really aren't designed for easy portage of heavy bags.  So placing our bags in the watchful care of the bell captain, we head back up to catch day eight of the Sumo tournament, with some snacks and instant ramen, and a beer from the mini bar, this has been a great day. We close it with another try at pizza, this time getting into Spacca Napoli with no wait, and discover, to our delight, that this place has got real, honest to goodness, Neapolitan pizza pretty darned right. Well fed, and pretty well rested, we retire for the night, hoping this time to whip jet lag for good.