Tokyo Four

We had noticed that there was an art fair in Tokyo in the International Forum, and we all wanted to go see it.  The idea is very similar to other international art fairs like the Armory Show in NewYork; a large number of galleries have small exhibits featuring their artists.   What was immediately noticeable was the absence of the smell on money floating in the air that you sense in New York.  No important looking people on cell phones; but mostly people coming to look at the art.   And most of the art being things that New York critics might sneer at.   We all found things we liked; the stuff that intrigued me the most were those works that invoked various traditional Japanese art techniques, and made something new out of them.   After our trip the day before, I was amused to see this piece created out of scrap wood:

We walked around the Tokyo forum a bit afterwards, because it is such an amazing building.  The roof was having some kind of problems, with a protective sheet covering it.

After a very tasty lunch at a tempura restaurant in yet another high end shopping mall, we went for a walk in the area surrounding the Imperial Palace.

View of the Tokyo Station (modeled on the Amsterdam train station) from inside a French restaurant in the shopping mall.

The area around the Imperial Palace is wide open and beautifully planted.   You can't actually see the Palace itself, but the fortification walls and moats are quite impressive.

There was also this architectural oddity from the 1960's, a music hall built to honor the Empress.

After that, we went back to the Shinjuku area to visit one of our favorite Tokyo stores, Tokyu Hands, which is sort of a combination hardware store, craft store, stationery store, and whatever else you might think of.   It features every possible permutation of whatever you might need or might never have thought of in a typical display of Japanese inventiveness and thoroughness.

The Shinjuku area also has numerous skyscrapers of all kinds.

Then it was back to Nakano for dinner.   I mentioned earlier that Nakano has many restaurants.  We ate there almost every night, and the meals were always very good, and very reasonable in cost.   It was sometimes an adventure, especially if we were in a restaurant where virtually no English was spoken, and the only food descriptions we had were in pictures.   Sometimes you were never quite sure what you were going to get.  But it was always good, and the quality of the fish was extraordinary.

It was a pleasure to walk around at night, with narrow pedestrian streets and lively crowds.

 Whenever you look up, you see the ubiquitous electric wires which are found in every small Tokyo neighborhood; nothing is buried here.

Restaurants and bars:

This is one of the restaurants we ate in.

 We didn't go in here:

Other enterprises:

The local pachinko parlor:

The ubiquitous you-know-who:

Places like Nakano are part of what makes Tokyo special.  It's like a little village in the middle of the huge metropolis, five minutes train ride away from  Shinjuku Station, the busiest train station in the world.

Tokyo Three

On our third day, we took a day trip to an area outside of Tokyo called Hakone.  It's a mountainous area near Mt. Fuji.  The pretext for the trip was a visit to the small town of Hatajuku, where they make a very special kind of wood mosaic work called Yosegi Zaiku.  Because the area abounds in a wide variety of trees with different colored woods, the craftsman who work there are able to create beautifully colored patterned wood objects out of the natural colors of the wood.   I collect these things, and the others very nicely came along on my quest.   The trip is a fascinating one, and involves a number of modes of transportation.   We started on the "Romance Car" special train to Hakone Yumoto, and from there we took a small bus up a very windy mountain road to Hatajuku.  (I was reminded of the Swiss Postal buses, which do similar things.)   After Hatajuku, we took another bus to a small town on the shores of Lake Ashi, where we boarded a pirate ship (!) for a trip on the beautiful mountain lake which features views of Mt. Fuji.

I have to say that Mt. Fuji is a truly awesome sight; it towers over the adjacent landscape, and has a nearly perfect shape.

And the end of the lake, we left the pirate ship and boarded our next mode of transportation, an aerial cable car.  This cable car takes you over the mountains to an area called Owakudani ("Great Boiling Valley"), which features volcanic activity, including steam and sulphur vents.  In fact, the area is so active currently that access is closed, and part of the cable car is shut down.  You are allowed to go nearby, but you have to stay inside and given emergency breathing masks.

And some practical advice:

So we went back down the cable car part way, with a last view of Mt. Fuji, and boarded a bus to meet up with our next mode of transportation, a cable controlled rail car which took us on the steep descent to the mountain town of Gora.

Gora is a spa town (the whole area is filled with hot springs).  We wandered around the town a bit, and saw a beautifully planted park.

Then we boarded an old fashioned mountain railway, which went through many small towns and switchbacks, before arriving back at the main line at Hakone Yumoto.  On the train, Vera and Lynn engaged a group of school girls in practicing English and Japanese.   And then back to the "romance car" for the trip back to Tokyo, and a late night dinner in Nagano.   It was quite a trip for one day.

Tokyo Two

Our second day in Tokyo we went to Ueno, which features a broad open park area and a cluster of Tokyo's major museums.  Our destination was the Tokyo National Museum, which has a comprehensive collection of all kinds of Japanese art.   The museum is delightfully old fashioned, with 1930's Art Deco decoration and a air of mustiness.   I'm not sure what this telephone was doing here.

The museum covers all of Japanese art, from 12th century Buddhist paintings on silk to the present.  

This is from the 12th century:

Normally, I am not a fan of armor and swords etc., but seeing some of the swords in person made me think about how they were actually used as weapons.  A frightening thought.

And some intimidating helmets:

And what you can do with wild boar hair:

After the museum, we went wandering in the adjacent neighborhood of Yanaka, which was left largely untouched by the 1923 earthquake and the WWII bombings, both of which destroyed large parts of Tokyo.  The neighborhood is mostly low rise buildings, some old and run down:

and some are stylishly new:

The area abounds with Buddhist temples (and cemeteries); the cemeteries often feature impossibly old and twisted trees, often propped up with wooden supports.

In the evening, we went for total contrast with a visit to the Kabukicho area near Shinjuku, which is Tokyo at its most garish, with neon signs and all kinds of entertainments of a dubious nature.   It's called Tokyo's "red light" district, and that it is.  But it lately has become a bit cleaned up; there are even high-rise hotels in the middle of it, replacing some of the low-rise tawdriness.   And there is a Toho cinema multiplex, with their most famous star peaking over the top of the building:

A few of the sights:

One of the ubiquitous plastic models of food in front of restaurants:

This was a placed called "Robot Restaurant"; I think there was a robot floor show.

This place won the prize for the most over-the-top decoration:

It's some sort of mixture of Times Square, Las Vegas, and Coney Island, all done in a very Japanese way.   Unforgettable.

Tokyo!

We are on a trip to Tokyo and Kyoto, travelling with our friends Greg and Lynn.   This is actually my fifth trip to Tokyo in the last 11 years; all my previous trips predate this blog.   As you might infer from the frequency of my trips, I love the city of Tokyo.   So much so, that in my four previous trips, I have never gone outside of Tokyo and the immediate vicinity.   We are staying in a neighborhood called Nakano in an rented apartment.
It's really almost impossible to describe Tokyo in a few paragraphs.   It is an astonishing city, like no other in the world that I know of.  What is most impressive is the sheer size of the city and  the multitude of contrasts within it.  There are neighborhoods with narrow little streets and two to three story houses and Buddhist temples, and there are neighborhoods with nothing but giant glitzy skyscrapers and high end shopping malls.  The city is constantly in motion, served by an extensive subway and train system.  There are always crowds of people going somewhere.  Yet people are unfailingly friendly and polite.   It is the most futuristic city in the world, while at the same time clinging to the many ancient patterns of living.

We have been going to different areas of the city each day.  Our first day started at Asakusa, an area featuring a lot of temples and a feeling of old Tokyo.
The path to the main temple:

A small restaurant:

There are gardens and ponds

Old and new architecture

From there we went to the Ginza area, home of high end shopping and flamboyant retail architecture.
We visited a basement food hall, which featured every kind of gourmet food from all over the world, in displays which cried out to be photographed.  But no photos were allowed.   It was an an astonishing display of conspicuous consumption.   And then there are buildings like these.

This building looks curved  but it actually has a flat surface.

Pearl shop

And the stunning Tokyo International Forum:

After that, it was back to our home neighborhood, where there are one thousand nine hundred restaurants listed on trip advisor.    The food is wonderful, to say the least, although the process of ordering can be complicated when the staff doesn't speak English, and we don't speak Japanese.   But even if you don't get what you thought you were going to get, it is usually very good.