Tokyo

   In Tokyo we stay in the fashionable Shibuya district, at the Tokyu Excel Hotel, a block away from the Shibuya train station, where we get our JR train tickets for all the pieces of our trip:  Tokyo to Takayama by way of Nagano.  Takayama to Nagano to Kyoto.  Kyoto to Himeji.  A day trip to Hiroshima.  Himeji to Osaka.  While KC works out all the tickets with the patient young clerk at JR, I stand outside the station, watching the office workers and schoolchildren pour in and out of the station and across the busy square in front.  The children in their school uniforms are as young as five and six – traveling alone in the big city.  I watch a boy no more than six as he slogs along alone, slaps his pass against the sensor at the turnstile, hikes the strap of his backpack up his shoulder, and heaves a sigh as he makes his way for the train.  Another long day at the office.

   The Meiji Shrine, in the middle of this city of 13 million people, is an oasis of woods and broad gravel paths and elegantly simple wooden buildings.  Mina, our cheerful tour guide, teaches us how to enter a Shinto shrine and to offer our prayers.  At a sheltered trough of cool water we take up one of the long-handled ladles and dip a cup of water, first rinsing our left hand, then our right.  Then we pour a bit of water into our left hand and slurp some into our mouth to rinse that, too.  Then we dip another cupful and raise it up to let the water spill down the long handle to make it ready for the next person to use.  Inside, at the front of the shrine itself, is a long box with slats across the opening at the top.  The girls each toss a coin in through the slats, bow twice, clap their hands twice to get the attention of the gods, hold their hands together as they offer a silent wish, then bow once more.  They don’t believe that this ritual will make their wish come true, but they also believe it will not work if they say their wish out loud. 

      The large wooden columns just in front of the coin box are pitted from the countless coins that are thrown toward the box on the important holidays, when the main square inside the shrine is jammed to capacity.  To the left of the box a Shinto priest sits in a small booth, waiting to sell a variety of charms.  On the right is a place where you can buy a small wooden shingle, on which you can write your missive to the gods, before hanging the shingle on a great peg board with all the others that have been left.  When the board gets full, the Shinto priests put all the shingles in a pile and burn them, releasing their messages to the sky.  The prayer offered most often here in these times is not to find love or have health or live a long and happy life.  It is to pass the university entrance exams.

   In the Asakura neighborhood of Tokyo we see the Hozo-Mon Gate and the Asakusa Kannon Temple, where you also can throw your coins in the box and buy charms from the local priests, but where, for 100 yen, you also can buy a fortune, which you receive buy picking up and shaking a metal box, and pulling out one of the wooden sticks inside, each of which has a number.  Then, at the wall of small, wooden drawers, you open the drawer with your number, and pick out the top sheet of paper, which has your fortune.  Mina, our cheerful tour guide, explains the process but discourages us from trying it because the percentage of negative fortunes is too high.  But she also explains that while you can take your good fortune with you, you also can leave a bad fortune behind.  Rachel confidently asserts that she wants to do it, and so she pops a hundred yen into the offering box, shakes the metal can, and pulls out her wooden stick.  Mina reads the number for us and points us, with a genuine nervousness, to the wooden drawer.  Rachel pulls out the sheet of paper, which contains the best of fortunes.  Mina is delighted.  We are, too.  And not surprised in the least.

   

   We visit the Imperial Palace, where the Emperor and his family live, and which used to be the castle of the Shoguns.  Like the Meiji Shrine, this is one of the major sites inExcept that you don’t really get to see the Imperial Palace.  You get to see the moat and the walls and the main gate, which are impressive.  The Palace itself remains hidden behind all of this and the trees.    

   The Tokyo fish market.  A daily adventure in commerce and controlled chaos.  Whole fish of every description.  Knives as long as samurai swords.  Raw eel, still bloody, set on skewers, ready to be grilled for someone’s lunch.  Men fill and pull decades-old wooden chests full of ice, while small motorcycles zip through the narrow aisles.  Two large starfish have been set aside on the ice, along with two bottles of soda.  Women sit in the interior shacks, working their phones and ledgers.  Men in dark suits come stand looking and pointing at some tuna.  Men in boots hose blood and scales from the wood and concrete.  Men on gas-powered carts speed in all directions, nimbly dodging each other and the tourists with their digital cameras, snapping away at all of this common exotica. 

   Exhilarated, nerves still jangling a bit, we retreat to the nearby market, where we sample little dried fish and buy a bag of sweet black beans and eat a lovely, cooling, soothing sushi lunch, and then walk past the three-stool stalls selling bowls of noodles, on our way back the Ginza.