| Submitted by: Mark Leeper United States |
| Submission Date: 09 February 2005 |
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When you lock an umbrella in it frees up a tag with a number on it the same as the position. Each tag is different. You need to stick the tag back in to free up the umbrella.
Our last museum was not from that complex. The Shitamachi Museum was a memorial to the middle-class merchant neighborhood destroyed by the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923. On one floor they have a recreation of a merchant house, a shop house, and a coppersmith's workshop. The second floor is dedicated to Japanese popular culture. They have records, film memorabilia, toys and puzzles. They have a stand with four topological puzzles. It was the sort of thing where you have two blocks tied with cord and there are wooden beads on the cord and the question is whether you can get the beads on the same loop of cord. I seemed to be the only one who could solve the puzzles and I solved three of the four.
We walked back on a sort of market street that had all kinds of stalls selling watches, toys, fish (including an odd looking striped fish and squid). We also looked in on a Pachinko palace, but Evelyn thought it was too loud. Pachinko is like pinball played with hundreds of balls.
From there it was back to the room to work on the logs. We intended to go out for dinner at some point but between nodding off and log-writing we never managed it.
The weather forecast says the rain should end tomorrow sometime. I sure hope so, it put a damper on the whole day. There is something I don't understand going on with the radio. We get only one or two AM stations and no FM. Even the short-wave does not pick up anything. Talk about your fringe reception areas.
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10/09/96 Tokyo: The Palace and the Military: Japan and Honor
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We both woke up at about 5:30 this morning and decided to head out as early as we could for Tsukiji (pronounced skee-ji). This is supposed to be an early morning trip. It is the biggest fish market in the world by two or three times. It is supposed to be quite something to see. The catches come in, there are auctions of fish where the right fish can go for $30,000, there are fish restaurants, there are... Well I will be in a better position to say later, obviously. You have to give credit to a place where a even a fish market is of interest.
I am not sure what you have to give a people whose ads are in two different languages (shifting back and forth) and even their own language will have be written in two or three different alphabets because one is not enough. In their writing if they can write in Kanji they do. Kanji is pictograms from the Chinese and it is the most efficient way of writing. It also has advantages over phonetic writing since the word is really a picture of something like what it means. If you know Greek and Latin roots, you can do the same thing with English, but not many people really know the roots. For a phonetic alphabet there are two, one with the letters written with a lot of curves, that's hirigana, one with simplified letters, that catakana. If a word is not one of the core of commonly used words it is spelled out in catakana. There are only about forty or so such symbols and they are a consonant sound and a vowel. Godzilla is go-ji-ra. Vanilla is va-ni-ra. There is no L-sound which is why a popular password in the Pacific was lollapalooza. The Japanese have a hard time even hearing a difference between an R and an L sound.
I really like using the trains here. Or perhaps I just hate it in New York. Things are so well-labeled here. If you want to walk from one train line to another you just have to follow the color codes and the path marks are every few feet. Each different line each its own color that is easy to follow. Some trains even have a map of the line and when you are at a stop it lights up on the map and an arrow lights up showing which is the next stop coming up. The New York subway system has saved itself a lot of trouble in not making things clear and as a result hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people have been confused by the system. Some bargain.
We got to Tsukiji and the walking tour took us first to the local Buddhist temple. We saw it for a little while then went on to Tsukiji Market, having heard that it opens really early. We saw what could well be a large market and went there. It was a ghost town. We wandered around for a little while and could find almost no activity. OK somebody was cutting up a fish here and someone was cleaning up a counter there, but there was none of the famous action. Eventually we hooked up with some other tourists who were equally surprised. I went to a police box to ask what was going on. I was having some problems communicating. Luckily the other tourist spoke Japanese. Tsukiji was closed for a holiday. First of all the holiday was not the 9th but the 10th, national fitness and sports day, and Tsukiji had closed a day early. Probably because the markets would be closed and there would be nobody buying fish the next day. So our whole plan for the day had been thrown off. It never occurred to us that Tsukiji would close a day earlier for a holiday. Luck of Leeper strikes again. We had to quickly reformulate plans. Today would me a good day to see the Imperial Palace. We grabbed a train. On the way back I took pictures of a cigaret vending machine with the a big sign ad that said in English 'Today I'll smoke.' Either the people who put up this sign or I don't understand smokers. Perhaps it is just Japanese smokers.
We came out on the streets near the palace. As we walked I saw an awning that said Toho Twin Towers. I wondered if it was the film company. Toho is the major Japanese studio. They are best known for some of the best samurai films as well as the major monster films. As we walked on I looked across the street and there was a statue of Godzilla. I told Evelyn that I wanted to cross the street without telling her why. Yes, sure enough at least two feet high, there was a statue of what Americans chose as one of the two most famous Japanese people. The other was Yoko Ono. I forget which came in first. Godzilla deserves it more. I believe GOJIRA was the first Japanese film to actually make an impact on the international market. In typical Japanese fashion they imitated something made elsewhere and in some ways did not do as well with it and in many ways did it better. They were imitating the film THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS and turned it into a serious and important allegory. I think it was Joseph E. Levine, but someone saw it and decided it could do well in the US with some deletions and cutting in an American actor. The new cut, re-titled GODZILLA, KING OF THE MONSTERS was a cut below the original GOJIRA but still had some of the impact. One or two of the sequels were fun, but they never tried to be intelligent films.
The statue was in front of a movie theater, probably one associated with Toho. I was a little surprised movies cost more than $16 American. That is a pretty high price.
We continued on to the Palace. In a city as cramped as Tokyo I was a bit surprised at how much land was given over to the palace and grounds. It is a huge tract of land right in the middle of city. You get there and you can only see the palace somewhat obliquely. The immediate grounds are marked with a cable that has a sign that says 'Off Limits'. It is interesting that they use the military wording rather than the more common 'No Trespassing.' Perhaps that is an artifact of the American Military Occupation which outside of Okinawa was not much of an occupation.
The castle looks nice, but it is so hard to see by the people who give it its power. On the other hand people can just walk right into The White House. That seems kind of funny too.
We walked around the palace grounds, there were one or two nice photographs, but in general not much to see. I stopped to see some ducks and swans in the mote and it turned out to be where the loyal staff were feeding carp. These were pretty big carp, at least a foot long. There were black and red carp. The red carp are more commonly called goldfish. I think most people don't realize that a goldfish is a carp.
We got to the East gardens of the Imperial Palace just beyond where the fish were feeding and found that it too was closed. It claimed to be closed only on Mondays and Fridays and even then it was open on national holidays, but here it was closed. Another couple was similarly disappointed. I they said the national holiday was tomorrow and the sign said it would be open on all national holidays. A guard came out. 'Closed?' 'Yes.' 'Why?' 'We open at 9.' I was 8:49. That's right, we were here very early.
Near the entrance we went in there is a tiny museum housing a few pieces of the art collection, one small room from Emperor Showa's private collection, donated to the country on his death. Most people will not know that there was an Emperor Showa. Apparently Emperors change their name when they take office. For some reason most people knew the Emperor Showa by his birth name, Hirohito. Maybe that was because by the time most people knew of him, most of us in the West did not want to grant him any respect. On the other hand the Emperor Heisei is getting the same treatment of being known by his birth-name of Akihito. The museum is one small room with a writing desk, a screen with calligraphy, some scrolls, a painting or two. You can see it in about 15 minutes.
Following that we continued into the park through a canyon with 20 foot walls of set stone. We climbed a hill that took us over the walls of the castle and gave an impressive view of the city. Evelyn pointed out what a dull-looking city Tokyo was. Most cities show a sort of personality, the sum total of the architects who built there. New York has a lot of interesting buildings, Chicago has even more. San Francisco has some creative buildings, the most characteristic of which is the TransAmerica Building. Tokyo has little of similar interest. The buildings are almost all fairly boxy and functional. None are ugly, but only about one in 100 is really attractive or interesting. They just are. Most large buildings are technically rectangular prisms. (An exception is West Shinjuku, but it is only one small area.) The city went through a major earthquake in 1923 and then was partially destroyed by the war. Then they were rebuilt quickly and functionally but not interestingly. There is some character of old Edo but it is hard to find.
The far end of this park is the Tokugawa castle remnant, what remains of Ieyasu's Castle. Today it just looks like a mound with stone sides. There were a few lines of explanation in Japanese.
Our next stop on our walking tour was a museum of Japanese Modern Art. We asked ourselves if this would teach us anything about Japan and decided that it was not the attraction we were looking for. It didn't help that there was a painting on their poster and there was nothing particularly Japanese about it.
So we started for Yusukuni Jinja shrine but decide to look for a place to eat, having not eaten for 20 hours. We had intended to have dinner the night before after we got back to the room but an exhausted and jet-lagged Evelyn had fallen asleep. We had intended to eat at Tsukiji, but everything was closed. We had looked around in the area where we saw Toho and there was not much there either. Now Evelyn who had something in her stomach from a soda she had bought at Tsukiji was suggesting another site before we eat and I got a little utsy. I don't think I said anything nasty, but I did think it. (OK, if Jimmy Carter can admit to committing lust in his heart, I can admit to making nasty comments in my heart.) We looked for someplace to eat. There wasn't much, a takeout sushi, but didn't want to stand on a street eating. A few places that had small pieces of food. It looked very frustrating. |
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