| Submitted by: Mark Leeper United States |
| Submission Date: 09 February 2005 |
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(Gojira is the real name of Godzilla, just in case you are asked.) Anyway those really crowded trains are in Shinjuku. We are a little ways north of all that in Toshima-ku. But we still get a piece of the same action. This train did not have the TVs with the ads, but it did have paper ads up. The ads are in Japanese with English mixed in when they mix English in with words like 'Netscape Navigator 3.0'. Hey I can read that and I even know what the product is.
We got off the train in Ueno station which is where visitors from Northern Japan come to the big city. This is where they have a concentration of museums, shrines, a zoo, and a park. They also have shopping centers, department stores, bars and restaurants. As we walked on to Ueno park we passed several restaurants with the plastic food out front. In America many restaurants show you photographs of the food on their menu, but in Japan they seem to feel that even more enticing are plastic models of their dishes. Restaurants spend a great deal of money on plastic models of their dishes. Well it does seem to entice customers and can be really artistically done. A photograph of the dish as they make it might be more accurate but the artistry in these plastic models is good enough that it actually makes people hungry.
We still have not seen the sun in this Land of the Rising Sun. We have a sort of miserable rainy day. It was raining when we got up and decided that we would do a day we had planned that was heavy on museum-going. That was the day in Ueno. (It rhymes with 'bueno', by the way.) I hope that we get some decent days of sunshine. There are precedents for us having entire vacations of rain. Our trip to Spain was like that. Rain every day. They had their worst flooding on 50 years. I am hoping that does not get repeated.
The first thing you see in Ueno Park is a statue of a samurai walking his dog. This is Saigo Takemori, born in 1827. He fought against the Shogun for the Imperial forces of the Meiji government helping to restore the Emperor. However when he found out the government wanted to curtail the powers of the military class and withdrew his right to wear a sword he changed his mind, fomented a revolt, fought the imperial forces. (P.S. For more on what was going on you can see the short biography of the Emperor Meiji in the October 13 entry.) He lost and committed Seppuku. He stands here looking rather jolly and plump with his dog. The dog remained loyal to Saigo in spite of Saigo giving him no political power at all from the very beginning. And they both share a statue here. And the military that fought loyal to the Shogun against Saigo in the early days, they have a shrine just behind his statue. So what lesson can we draw from all this? Perhaps just that the Japanese are a complex people. Perhaps they liked that period and wanted to commemorate everything they could from it, including the dog. Perhaps they like to commemorate loyalty. If that is the case perhaps Saigo is getting a free ride and they are commemorating the loyalty of the dog.
Following that we were obviously a little befuddled and saw some Shinto shrines, when we thought we were seeing the Toshogu Shrine. There were a set of shrines together in a little compound. We were there mostly looking for the shrine to Tokugowa Ieyasu. (That name is pronounced ee-ay-ya-su.) It looked like it might be there beyond a series a bright red Torii Gates. Every Shinto shrine has at least on Torii Gate, usually either black or red and it is the way to distinguish a Shinto Shrine from a Buddhist one. It has two round columns and two crossbeams. The symbolism is the mouth of the cave into which the Sun Goddess hid, hiding her light from the world. A rooster's crowing fooled her and brought her back out, saving the world from whatever horrible fate happens to worlds whose suns disappear into caves. I should remember who it was who convinced the rooster to crow but right here at the Kimi Ryokan I don't have my sources. How is that for gratitude? This guy probably saved my life and I don't even remember who it was.
We finally did find the Toshogu shrine to Tokugawa Ieyasu. If you don't know who he is, try yourself on George Washington. Ieyasu may have been the greatest name in Japanese History. The person was no slouch either. If you read or saw SHOGUN he was Toronaga. (James Clavell changed all the names but his plot was purest plagiarism from history. I was always a little bothered by his ridiculous plot device of having a Westerner in Toronaga's court as the Shogun's personal confident. How believable is that? Turns out Blackthorne was a real person, only his name was Will Able. But I digress.) Anyway Ieyasu was the third of three generals who unified Japan. They are Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu. Each took over the fight when the previous one died. Ieyasu won his final victory at the battle of Sekigahara--well, sort of.
On the way in I saw the biggest crow I think I have ever seen, 18 inches long I would guess. The shrine has statues, original armor, artwork, and mournful wailing music. There is a place for people to leave prayers on little wood plaques. The deal that is usually true, I believe, is that the local monks pray twice a month that the prayers on the plaques are fulfilled. Hence if you buy a plaque and write a prayer on it, it gets prayed for automatically twice a month, at least until the plaque is taken down. The Buddhists and Shintoists are very big on automated prayer. That is the idea behind prayer wheels.
One plaque that caught my eye was 'May Christ, Gautama, Mohammed, and the Sun Goddess sit beneath the cherry trees of Ueno one day and share a pot of tea.' It is a nice thought. Of course their followers may be tearing each other apart, but it would be nice to have a sort of religious Yalta.
Continuing on there was an incongruous totem pole. It was even more incongruous to have an elephant as one of the totems. It was supplied by the local Lions Club.
We continued on to the Tokyo National Museum. We bought our ticket and went in. We started to go into an exhibit hall and were turned away. It seems that in Japan you don't just go to the halls that interest you. There is a specific route through the museum and everyone is supposed to follow it.
The special exhibit was 'Horyu-ji Treasures from Shotoku Taishi.' OK who was Taishi? As the Grolier Encyclopedia puts it: 'In the 6th century the centralized control of the Yamato court began to break down. At the end of the century, however, the regent Prince Shotoku Taishi reasserted court authority. He promulgated (604) a 17-article constitution based on the Chinese political theory of centralized imperial government, redefining the sovereign's position in Chinese terms.' Basically he was a reformer. His reforms lasted only until 645, but he is still remembered fondly. This exhibit are the treasures of his court. The exhibit had some English, mainly just a description of what each item was, plus one longer description per hall. But there was a lot more in Japanese. It certainly is better than what we do to foreign visitors to our country. How many museums do you see Japanese descriptions of the exhibits? They had more English than we would give Japanese, but still not as much as was needed. They showed calligraphy, they showed furniture and ink dishes. There was a lot of Buddhist materials since he was an ardent Buddhist. We saw Buddhist demon masks with enormous noses. The Japanese are fascinated with nose size, perhaps going back to these Buddhist influences. When Admiral Matthew Perry arrived the Japanese were fascinated with the size of Westerners' noses. Perry was depicted by Japanese artists as having a huge nose.
There is a lot of Buddhist art around the museum. We see Buddhas in standard positions, standing and sitting all over. There are Amidas, apparently here a sort of a Buddhist trinity. We saw screens, and more calligraphy. Not knowing Japanese well enough we really do not know what to appreciate in the calligraphy. In part this exhibit was a commemoration of an older exhibition in 1842 of Shotoku's treasures and they showed artifacts from the efforts to put on that exhibit.
From there we went on to other exhibits. At first I thought that the museum had a surprisingly small collection. Actually one of the books says that they have a huge collection, but only a small part is on display at any time. They keep rotating the stock so whenever you come you see a fair amount that you have not seen before. Another odd note, there are few banisters on stairs. There was another visitor who attracted my attention. She was wearing a very traditional kimono, was reading everything in great detail, and had a constant, enigmatic smile on her face. We ran into her several times. Hard to tell what was behind that smile but she seemed very intelligent.
Other articles included interesting quail-shaped incense burners, an articulated snake (it looks and acts like modern toy but looked fat more realistic. There were collections of armor and swords. I was fascinated by the netsuke. What is netsuke? Well Kimonos did not have pockets. People had to carry things so they had lacquer boxes, about the size and shape as Prince Albert cans of pipe tobacco. These boxes were suspended from the belts by cords. A toggle was put at the other end of the cord. Originally the toggle was plain and simple affair, but soon they started decorating them and then carving them. You get a set of very small and beautiful carvings, most only about an inch and a half high. Many are very beautiful. The subject can be anything. My favorite is a puppy looking in amazement at a fly that has landed on his haunches. Another I have seen is a demon head mask and inside you see a little smiling man inside. This museum had fewer than 40 on display. Among them were a devil face, one nice piece of monkeys, another had a demon howling. One was a kind of menagerie of rat, dragon, and puppy. The strangest had men seeing a toad on a small horse. Because you are probably getting bored I will just list some more of what interested me: -- landscape paintings -- turtle dragons -- more calligraphy--still hard to get much from -- lot of mirrors (Chinese and Japanese have the same mirror shapes, a disk with a lump at the center. At first I thought it looked like a shield, but it may be that the lump is a place to install on a stand?)
The Archeology Museum pots, swords, mirrors, bronze helmets, terra-cotta faces a LOT like Meso-American terra-cotta statues, stone carvings and engraved stones.
Lunch was at the museum restaurant. I had Katsuiyu (pork cutlet and fried egg over rice) and Evelyn had curried rice.
MUSEUM OF ASIAN ART Gandharan and Indian art, Syrian green glazed jar with surprisingly bright color, Chinese mirrors the same shape as the Japanese, fierce looking sculptures as Chinese tomb guardians.
On our way out of the museum we shared an elevator with a woman from Portugal. We asked how she was enjoying Japan. She said that she was finding it very strange and us being Americans we were probably finding even stranger. I thought it was an odd comment. I guess I am expecting some culture shock and I am not finding it as strange as I had hoped. But the trip is young. Americans like the belief that we humans are all basically similar. It is true. We all breathe oxygen. Go one step beyond that and we are probably as much different as we are alike. There is a real danger that we will jump to the conclusion that the Iraqis or the Chinese are really like us and completely misunderstand them. And that can be dangerous. We jump to the conclusion that they will do what we would do or think what we would think. It is a terrific simplifying assumption for those who are lazy that you understand someone else just by understanding yourself. Travel is a great way to remind yourself that other people think differently from you. It may be the only way. So I don't know if the Japanese are strange, but they sure are different.
Each building has umbrella check machines. It must rain a lot. It is sort of a mechanical equivalent of a check desk, much on the same principle as check box lockers. |
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| Copyright © - "Mark Leeper" |
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