Life Archives - Page 27 of 948

The Imperial Palace offers a guided tour to the public; you can line up on the day of the tour and hope to get in, or you can apply for a place a month in advance and be sure of a spot. We took the second route, and today was our day; we showed up right on time and were ushered into the tour waiting room with no delay.

The official documentation says that the tour is conducted “mostly in Japanese”, but they broke us up into several language groups (Japanese, English, Spanish, and French for sure; probably others), each with a guide fluent in the appropriate language. We were also accompanied by several functionaries who were there to make sure nobody left the tour route.

The tour took us past several notable buildings, including the Imperial Palace itself, which is used for official events like State Dinners and the presentation of new ambassadors to Japan. The Emperor lives elsewhere on the grounds and was too busy to greet our tour today.

Pine Tree outside the Imperial Palace, representing virtue and long-life

The tour lasted about an hour, and then it was sayonara!

As long as we were at the Palace, we decided to visit the Museum of the Imperial Collections, containing treasures garnered by the Imperial Family over many generations. The museum is still being built, but they’ve opened up two rooms on an interim basis, with rotating exhibitions. The current one is “Artwork which Adorned the Early Modern Imperial Palaces”, and there was a lot of artwork on display. Here’s a small sample.

Utensils for the Incense Identifying Game

Cup for Hairdressing Water and Stand with Chrysanthemums

It was raining pretty hard by now, so we dashed into a subway station to look for lunch. Subway stations here are often connected to office buildings with many restaurants, and that was the case this time. We decided to try Marugo because the pictures on its menu looked good. It’s a yakiniku restaurant, which meant we were served thin slices of beef to cook on a barbecue at our table – it was fun, tasty, and pretty inexpensive.

We thought it would be a good idea to stay inside for a while, so we took the train to the Takashimaya flagship store and wandered through about one-third of the store. We visited the food halls ($100 melons, anyone?), the art gallery, bought a scarf and a postcard, and even dared to visit the Pokemon Center, which occupies most of a floor of the East Building of the store.

I’d heard a lot about a very different store, Don Quijote, so we made that our next stop. It’s loaded with a huge variety of merchandise, much of it pretty schlocky. There were tons of suitcases (apparently tourists often go there to buy a suitcase to bring home their purchases), electronics, toys, “adult toys”, candy, Halloween costumes, clothing, liquor, and much much more. I bought a bag of matcha Kit-Kats and we called it a day.

We had a slow start this morning waiting for the weather to settle down; eventually, we hopped on the JK train to Ueno Park, as suggested by our guide yesterday. The park is loaded with museums, shrines, greenery, and other attractions; I’d been there briefly in 2004, mostly to admire the cherry blossoms and the thousands of people enjoying them.

There were no cherry blossoms today, and the park was far emptier than it had been twenty years ago, but it was still a fine way to spend the day, beginning with a visit to the 45th Anniversary Spring Peony Exhibition in the Ueno Toshogu Peony Garden; the garden isn’t entirely taken up by peonies, but they certainly caught my eye!

I like the garden’s moment of Zen better than I do Jon Stewart’s version.

The garden exit put us into the grounds of the Toshogu Shrine.

We were ready for lunch, but made a few stops along the way, one at the statue of Imperial Prince Komatsunomiya Akihito, and the other in the Tokyo Bunka Kaikan recital hall.

There are many restaurants in and around the park; we eventually had a delicious lunch at a sushi restaurant in the Ueno3153 building. I couldn’t figure out the restaurant’s name; they gave me a business card, but both Google and Apple translate the name on the card to “I’m so happy”, which seems unlikely!

I’d found a blog post from Mad Hatters NYC offering suggestions for things to see in the park; we decided to use it as a guide for our wanderings. Its first suggestion was a visit to the statue of Takamori Saigo, a leader of the Meiji Restoration who disagreed with the route it was taking, tried to fight it, and eventually committed seppuku to avoid capture. He was the inspiration for the movie The Last Samurai (which I haven’t seen).

The next suggestion was Kiyomizu Kannon-do, which was built to mimic Kiyomizu-dera in Kyoto, which we’d visited a week-and-a-half ago. It was much smaller, but still enjoyable.

There were lots of performances going on in the park today under the umbrella title of “Heaven Artists“; we stopped to enjoy a couple of pantomime comedians playing a fatal game of tennis.

There were more shrines ahead – Hanazono Inari Shrine with its red torii gates and Gojo-ten Shrine, immediately adjacent to it.

We crossed the street to Shinobazu Pond; Shinobazu-no-ike Bentendo, dedicated to the goddess Benzaiten, is on an island in the pond; there’s also a temple there dedicated to Daikokuten, the god of fortune and wealth.

The last stop on the tour from the Mad Hatters was the Big Buddha, all that remains of a giant statue of Buddha which was partially melted down to make armaments during World War II.

But we weren’t finished – there was a President to visit: U. S. Grant. He and his wife had visited Japan after his term and had planted trees in the park at the invitation of the Meiji Emperor; those trees are still alive, and there’s a plaque honoring his visit.

We returned to the hotel on a nearly-empty Yamanote Line train (a true Golden Week miracle!) and rested for a bit before heading out for the last adventure of the day: laundry!

Doing laundry here was pretty easy once we found the laundromat – the washer has a built-in supply of detergent and there was only ohe cycle to choose from. The machines were fast and cheap, too – 40 minutes to wash, 24 minutes to dry, at a total cost of 800 yen (five bucks). And the place was quiet and had great wifi. What a way to end the day!