Continuing last weekends adventures (having been too busy this week catching up with sleep I missed on Saturday night…), by the time I met up with Tim and Michelle at the World Trade Centre I was already wilting in the ridiculous heat so the first thing to do was to stop off for a random juice – I got carrot having pointed randomly at the menu pretending I knew what I was doing. And it was surprisingly nice, despite liking carrots I never really got on with the juice – this must have been fresh or something.
We walked over from the station to the port to catch the river bus up to the temple. Having just about missed a boat we took a quick wander around, this is one of those great parts of the city that consists entirely of infrastructure, theres nothing here except things to help you get to other bits of the city – monorail, boat, freeway and train.
The time for the next boat came around after a little posing for photographs and being amused by kids chasing pigeons. They were trying to pretend the boat was some kind of tourist attraction, and I guess in some ways it was, but the views were mainly of barren industrial Tokyo and (what passes locally for) squalid flats. The experience was heightened somewhat by being faintly religious – the seats were arranged disturbingly like pews and there was an inscription over the ice-cream sellers head – “May peace prevail on Earth”.
After a few low bridges and paralleling a freeway for a mile or so we arrived at Asakusa, with its famous statue. Disembarking, I introduce Michelle to the concept of iced coffee, which is exactly what I needed, the sun was not getting any cooler and I wasn’t looking forward to having to battle with Tokyo shoppers again. We headed up to the temple entrance, through the market toward the temple itself. The market is long and string and aimed at tourists with cheap tat being sold at high prices, but hey we’re on holiday, right? There was quite a lot of distraction caused by the fan and parasol stalls but worse was the scary cat stall, which had a whole array of ceramic lucky money cats all waving one paw just slightly out of time. Sinister. Oh, and there was a nine year old kid wearing a Tshirt celebrating self-cutting, which seemed like an odd sort of a Tshirt for anyone to buy, let alone for your son…
The market gave way to the temple courtyard, with a pagoda on the left and the temple ahead. This place seems to have lost its spirituality, or maybe it isn’t aligned with my expectations. Its all American tourists with large camera lenses and plenty of Japanese tourists too, I can’t imagine many locals come here – theres plenty of smaller temples and shrines around, you don’t need to battle the outsiders. The main ritual appeared to be throwing some money into a big grid at the centre of the temple, and making a prayer while you do this. This is no less distasteful than the cathedrals of Britain – nice to see, but I won’t be going out of my way to see other temples like this. Or perhaps I shouldn’t expect to distill the whole of shintoism and buddism into a single tourist experience.
We escaped the tourist trap to move on to Harajuku market, stopping to catch some food before braving LaForet and Takeshita Street. Again this was something of a random selection taken from the ‘hamburger’ section of the menu of a local ‘steakhouse’ (we avoided the Harvester…can’t think why). We got cream on our baked potatoes which was kinda nice, but would have been better if it was soured cream or cheese. The conversation descended into how you (I) should pay attention to whats going on in the news – my argument being that I hadn’t for the last few years and felt much better for it. I should know better than to get into these kinds of discussions with philosophy teachers by now, shouldn’t I? They can bring out my hipocracy in about three questions and make my namby pamby liberal politics lose its self consistency. No matter, I like these arguments even if I don’t ‘win’ them.
Back on the shopping trail we hit LaForet, which, thankfully, was not as frantic as it was when I visited a couple of weeks ago. We moved on to the main market street where we found ‘Richards’, a shop with too many umlauts for its own good – Spinal Tap would have been proud – and too many ties with safety pins and zips in them, punk gone very very wrong. I was impressed with the three quarter length pink leopard print fake fur coat, not sure its quite me but it did stand out rather in a shop full of black.
We rounded off the day with a final coffee before Tim and Michelle headed back to their hotel, well, I had the greenest drink in the world – a melon soda which was really quite infeasibly green.
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