Welcome to Japan! When we last left our intrepid heroine, she was awake at 3:30 in her ryokan room with a coughing fit, and decided she'd damn well better get up instead of just dying quietly on her own. Also, she was a little concerned that she was going to wake up all the other residents.
I had to sneak out of the ryokan, as--much like hostels--the doors are locked between 11 pm and 6 am, roughly, and the guidebooks said the fish market started at 4:30. (Later, the JJs and I compared guidebooks. Some books said 4:00 am, some said 5:00, some said the whole thing was OVER by 5:00, etc. Some said it wasn't open to the public. We got the impression that the rules changed often and there were terrible translation errors in any case.)
I walked by this gorgeous temple in my wanderings:
Tsukiji Honwanji Temple. Note the Indian styling; this is very unusual in Japan. The headquarters of the Jodo Shinshu Buddhists, and I have to admit I have no idea what this means. The inside of this temple is absolutely stunning, everything covered in gold leaf. This is possible because this structure is relatively new, built in 1932.
More about the temple. Note the difference in spelling between my pamphlet spelling and the Wikipedia article. This is very common in translation, and makes getting around all that much more difficult. ("Is this temple and that temple one and the same? ARGH!") Having seen a lot more temples after this, my bet is that the Wikipedia spelling is the newer and more correct version.
After this, I had to wander around for a few hours until the park opened, as I had started out freakishly early due to my disorientation.
A shogun's park, the Hama-rikyu Gardens. Built as a duck-hunting preserve in 1654, now belongs to Tokyo.
It's huge, much bigger than it looks in these few pictures. I have about a hundred of them in today's photo album.
Taking a break.
A new park! This is Kyu-Shiba-rikyu.
A waterless waterfall--built from rocks to suggest the presence of water. SO Japanese. It is called Karetaki.
Japan has this adorable tradition at its national parks: you take a slip of paper, designed for the park specifically, with a big circle in the middle, and you take a big park stamp and stamp your piece of paper. I have a duck one, from the duck park, and one with the statue from the Kyu-Shiba-Rikyu park. I was childishly happy about these stamps.
The Gate of the Zojoji Temple. (I think.) When it was built, all the lands beyond this gate belonged to the temple. A really good website is
here.I wonder what the old priests would say if they could see all these cars in what used to be temple grounds.
About this time, I had to take a break--and I got a welcome one. I went into a 7-11, successfully negotiated the purchase of a phone card--after I wasted three dollars at a pay phone--and called home. It was close to 80 degrees F in downtown Tokyo, and I had stripped down to my tank top and jeans and sat in that phone booth and called my mother, of course, and then the LT and the JJs. I think I ate something.
A great "typical Tokyo" shot, from the JR train on the way to Ginza.
The Apple Store in Ginza, Tokyo's high-end shopping district. And when I say High-End, I mean it.
A pair of cantaloupes...for $168.
About this time of day, my camera died, and it took me forever to figure out how to work outlet in my room--the switch has to be on, I learned--so I couldn't charge it and I didn't have an extra battery...yet.
Fortunately, I was about to get a boost. A family friend--who I had never met before--had agreed to meet me for dinner, and while I waited for him I took a nap, took a Japanese bath, and wrapped a present for his family. (The Japanese are very, very into gift-giving.) As the ryokan staffperson wouldn't let me go far from the desk with his scissors, I wrapped my present right there on the floor of the ryokan, making conversation with some other checking-in foreigners. (The Kimi Ryokan is FAMOUS overseas.)
Toshi, my family friend, showed up soon, and took me to a yakitori place back in Ginza, the name of which I sadly don't know. It was casual, famous, old, noisy, and packed, and I let Toshi order, obviously. He politely ignored my occasional coughing fits and my ragged, thrown-together outfit, with the wrong shoes, since I had worn my feet out walking in little ballet flats for 14 hours. I also learned that without a network, I couldn't use my cell-phone camera, either, so no pictures of the present or Toshi.
Want more pictures? Of COURSE you do! Let's try a new format:
Hmmm. That's kind of small.
Here's the bigger version.
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