As time passes I'm finding that I miss Japan more and more. That's a first for me because while I've found myself missing destinations (Seattle) before, this is the first time that I've truly missed an international destination. London was great and I could easily live there. Likewise Paris. I would be willing to kill someone and assume their identity to live in Edinburgh. But Tokyo is another monster entirely.
The impediment, though, to dreamy little dreams of expat life, which is like thug life but with more paperwork, is the language barrier. That's quite a hill to surmount, as most everyone finds out who attempts to learn Japanese. Hell, the Portuguese traders who first encountered the Japanese and their language centuries ago declared Japanese to be a "demon of a language."
They are correct. Upon our return to the US, one of my partner's coworkers who grew up in and attended university in Japan informed us that one of our meager trove of Japanese words was in fact a vulgar insult. There we'd been thinking that
konichiwa meant
hello, but the coworker was only too happy to inform us that it only means hello in a ridiculously narrow frame of usage. Something like only when used to address someone between the ages of thirty and thirty-three, in their own home, while standing on one foot during periods of intermittent rain, and only when the humidity is more than twenty percent but less than forty percent. In all other contexts it's an obscenity.
Japanese is full of little landmine words like that, she assured us, plus words whose meanings change entirely with the slightest change of stress on a syllable. You can mean to say, "Do you have any Grey Poupon?" and end up saying "You licked a dog's asshole," simply by not stressing an
ah sound adequately.
Or some such. Perhaps she was full of shit. Who knows? However, we were also assured by an expat we met over there to just not bother. His exact words, in fact were: "Don't bother. You won't understand it. They don't even understand it. Nobody understands it." He also explained that to even hope to understand the average newspaper, one would need to have memorized upwards of 2,000 characters.
Very disheartening.
Anyway, let's continue the tour!
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I don't remember why, but our first destination of the day was a neighborhood called Kagurazaka. We were only supposed to pass through en route to somewhere else but when my partner spied a conveyor belt sushi place, we had to hang around for an hour waiting for it to open. He had wanted to eat sushi off a conveyor belt ever since we got over there and by Christ, he was going to eat sushi off a conveyor belt.
It was somewhere back in this warren of narrow alleys that the kimono shop incident occurred. We were walking along when we saw a shop with a lovely bolt of cloth displayed in the window. We went in, thinking some of the cloth would make a nice souvenir decoration. Somewhere in the process of pantomiming our desire to purchase a meter of the cloth from the prim old lady who ran the shop, we learned that one, it was a kimono shop so as men we probably weren't supposed to even be in there, and two, it was one of those traditional shops where you're supposed to take your shoes off.
We figured out that last part as we were paying. However, to stave off the scorching humiliation of the whole thing, I try to look at it as a successful transaction. We wanted the cloth, and it looks fantastic hanging on the wall. She got paid for the cloth and she got an amusing story to tell her friends about those two American baboons who barged in wanting a meter of kimono cloth -- and living in a resort city, I know how much those who endure tourists love to talk about the dumb ones when they have occasion to gather.
Consider it my gift to you, kimono shop lady.
When pondering the mystery of Tokyo's appeal, I do know that things like this are part of that appeal. Tens of millions of people crammed into the megalopolis, and
still they crave the touch and sight and sound of nature. They work to fit the natural world in, in every possible way, including this microscopic garden on someone's equally microscopic patio.
We had to wait our turn to take a picture of these lovely orchids. A group of Japanese ladies were there first and they weren't moving until every last damned one of them was happy with her shot of the flowers.
Another crammed-in garden there among the buildings. I had to stick my camera up over a wall to get a shot of this.
St. Francis Xavier Catholic Church.
Does this look like Tokyo to you? Like seriously?
This is the Cathedral of the Holy Resurrection.
The Kanda Shrine.
Unfortunately, there was no way to save this photo other than to take the cheap way out and make it black and white.
Sumo! Sumo in the subway!
Truth be told, the Edo-Tokyo Museum wasn't as large or involved as I was hoping, but it was interesting all the same. I recommend the demonstration of 18th Century kabuki theater special effects.
Sickly sumo?
Unfortunately, I don't remember the name of this temple. Not a clue.
I really wish I could remember the name of this temple because Prairie Style architecture in Tokyo is the
shit.
This shopping street outside the Senso-ji Temple turned out to be a boon for souvenir shopping. We had to miss my stepbrother's wedding because we were in Tokyo, and we were even able to find a decent wedding gift for he and his wife here.
Note: This final photo is an example of what's known as
foreshadowing.
Linear Mode
