Tokyo Skytree & Senso-ji

Posted on March 23, 2025 by admin

I’ve been seeing ads recently for a fine-looking daypack (carryon pack, the ad calls), since the bots surely know that I just did such things as take airplanes to far-flung destinations, use a credit card overseas and bought the likes of an e-sim. The daypack’s array of pockets and their layout seem useful, too. Then there’s the price: $300. No.

As if to try to answer my immediate objection, soon a new ad for the same item appeared: “Why would you buy a $300 pack?” it asks. I don’t stick around for the answer. I have a fine daypack already. More than one, in fact, were pressed into service during the RTW ’25. One went on my back into the airplane, the other, empty, was waiting in the checked bag for light duty during the trip.

For all the years I spent in Japan, Tokyo didn’t represent much of that time. All together I spent maybe a week there, including a delightful visit in November 1993: young marrieds out on a long weekend. Wish I could remember the name of the minshuku where we stayed, somewhere in the sprawl of Tokyo. I close my eyes and I can see its tidy lobby, paper walls, delicate prints, narrow dark stairs, tatami underfoot. Our hosts were most hospitable, from a long line of inn keepers, I think. On the wall was a framed drawing of a banjo by Pete Seeger, along with his signature. Some decades earlier, he had stayed there.

This time we stayed in a guest room at the residence of Kyoko and her husband and two nearly grown children not far from the University of Tokyo, and had a pleasant visit. Good to see old friends, wherever they are. Yuriko and Kyoko go way back. Kyoko spent time in Texas, Corsicana specifically, and we traveled with her to Arizona in ’97. After Lilly was born, she came to Chicago to help out for several weeks.

One thing we missed in the early ’90s was Tokyo Skytree, rising 2,080 feet over Sumida Ward, and for good reason: the tower was completed only in 2012 as a TV tower and a tourist attraction. We arrived in the afternoon of February 14.

Who has the wherewithal to build such things in the early 21st century? In Japan, anyway, railroad companies do, in this case Tobu Railway Co. Ltd., a Kanto regional line that offers some sweet destinations, including the mountain resort of Nikko and the hot springs around Kinugawa Onsen, both of which I only know by reputation. Naturally, Japanese RR companies are never just that, and in this case while transport remains a core business, the conglomerate also includes entertainment venues, hotels, a commercial real estate and construction arm, and retail operations, especially department stores at major terminals.

Judging by my previous and recent experience at the department stores owned by regional RRs, the department store not only isn’t dying in Japan, it flourishes. They are serving a much more dense population, of course, and one that travels by train, but there’s also that matter of stocking goods people want to buy, including basements full of exceptionally good food. The stores’ bustle is something American department stores can only dream about in their dying reverie.

Up in the Tokyo Skytree bulb are a couple of tourist observation decks. The combo ticket, while expensive, isn’t outrageously more than just visiting the lower deck, so we opted for access to the deck at 350 meters and the narrower one at 450 meters, one after the other. It turned out to be easier to take good pictures from the lower level.

Busy, but not sardine-can busy.

Now those are some views, showing just how dense metro Tokyo is.

Below is the Sumida River, which wasn’t always so densely populated.

Night on the Sumida River – Kobayashi Kiyochika, 1881

“Night on the Sumida River” by Kobayashi Kiyochika, 1881

Three hundred fifty meters high? That’s well and good, but nothing as impressive as more than a thousand feet: 1,150, to be almost exact.

Window washers came by as we looked out at 350 meters. Hanging, as far as I could tell, by two wires attached to their car, and not their persons. They seemed pretty blasé about that, but anyone who felt otherwise (like me) would be in the wrong line of work.

On the other side of the river, and visible from the tower, is Senso-ji temple, in the Asakusa neighborhood. We still had some afternoon light after visiting Skytree, so we decided to go to the temple, a short train ride and a longer walk away. A long pedestrian street (Nakamise-dōri) goes through Asakusa to the temple grounds.

Hōzōmon gate.

The temple’s other gate is known as Kaminarimon, and if I’d known about its noteworthiness, we’d have backtracked a bit to see it. Apparently we entered the Nakamise-dōri at the middle, and so missed Kaminarimon (and it took me a while to figure that out just today). Ah, well.

There has been a Buddhist temple on the site since our 7th century, with the usual history of fires and rebuilding down the centuries, including the most recent cycle in the 20th century. The early 1945 air raids destroyed the temple, but rebuilding was complete by the 1970s. Said to be one of the most-visited religious sites in the world, the temple has the advantage in that regard of being square within the world’s most populous metro.

The temple is dedicated to Kannon, the bodhisattva of compassion, which might also help explain its popularity. Who doesn’t need some compassion sometimes? Kannon is popular when it comes temple dedications, with Shitennō-ji, Kiyomizu-dera and Sanjūsangen-dō also dedicated to Kannon, all in the Kansai region, and all of which I visited at one time or another.

The Main Hall.

No shortage of visitors.

Not a bad afternoon in Tokyo, visiting popular structures from the 21st and 7th centuries, respectively, and being fully alive in the present.

The Kamakura Daibutsu

Posted on March 17, 2025 by admin

Mere hours after I returned home on Friday evening, an intense burst of wind ’round midnight toppled the Wisconsin Buddha in my back yard, among other things, such as most of our back yard fence. Guess it’s better that I’m here to deal with the debris in the yard, calling our insurance company, etc.

Setting the Wisconsin Buddha upright was an easy part of cleaning up the back yard. Our little blue-green statue may serve as a reminder of the impermanence of things, but it hasn’t been completely destroyed by time. Yet.

You can also say the same for the much larger, much better known Kamakura Daibutsu, or the Big Buddha of Kamakura, a city on the edge of metro Tokyo-Yokohama. We visited on a cool and sunny, pleasant day in mid-February. It sure looks permanent, but you could say that’s illusion.

Something else to consider when you face a bronze of this heft: Does the size of a Buddha, or more exactly Buddharūpa (depictions of Buddha), matter when it comes to conveying Buddhist ideas?

I can’t call myself expert enough to answer that, but somehow I suspect not. When it comes to impermanence, my small Buddha would seem to have just as much to teach. Just not as many students.

The Big Buddha at Kamakura dates from a period in Japanese history known as the Kamakura period, which is all of our 13th century and more, and a time that, for a while anyway, this seaside town was the hub of government for the Japanese islands: an early shogunate, emerging from the winning side of a bloody war between clans, and in fact the moment in history when the samurai caste consolidated its power. How cool is that? We’re talking about a capital founded by samurai, for samurai.

Buddhist sects flowered under the new order, I think not coincidentally, and with enough vim to leave behind temples and memorials of all sorts in the region – such as the massive bronze Daibutsu. These days, it attracts tourists in numbers probably undreamed of by earlier centuries, when trickles of pilgrims or scholars or mystics came.

The seated Buddha, 43 feet or so to the top of his head, weighs about as much as seven and a half Mack trucks with trailers. It is an Amida Buddha that began as a large long-gone wooden statue, a structure much more impermanent than the bronze that came later (about AD 1252), its existence due to a vigorous new branch of Pure Land Buddhism in Japan in Kamakura times. Down the centuries since then, various halls built around the giant have burned down and been rebuilt (but ultimately not) and the statue itself has been damaged in earthquakes and floods and repaired and restored and listed as a special site, including part of a nomination as a World Heritage Site.

Nice peripheral details.

For ¥50 extra, about 50 cents, you can go inside. For a moment, I was giddy as a schoolboy. I get to go inside a giant, ancient Japanese statue?

The status shows its age – how susceptible it is to the passage of time – its impermanence – more in there.

Looking into the head of the Kamakura Daibutsu.

Outside again. How is it that the metal giant has such graceful lines?

It’s popular.

Having your photo made at a tourist site: near universal, isn’t it? It’s regarded as tinged with silliness, this custom. Some people think that, anyway.

No. Revel in it.

Around the World ’25

Posted on March 16, 2025 by admin

At times like this, in the funk that comes after a long trip, I ask myself, did I actually do that? An odd question, maybe, but long travels have that odd effect. Somehow such a trip seems less than real. Also more than real. Those are essential features of the intoxication of the road, and hangovers follow intoxication.

Ponder this: Over roughly the last five weeks, starting on February 8, in a series of eight airplane flights, a small number of intercity train trips on either side of the Eurasian land mass (including one of the fastest trains in existence), a large number of subway, streetcar and even monorail rides, a few taxi rides, other car rides provided by friends and relatives and a hired driver, a bicycle rickshaw ride — and you haven’t lived and almost died (or at least felt that way) till you’ve taken such a conveyance in Delhi — climbing a lot of stairs and using a lot of escalators and elevators, and taking more than a few long walks, and many short walks, on sidewalks and cobblestone streets and railway station platforms, I went around the world in a westward direction, from metro Chicago to metro Chicago, by way of Japan, India, the United Arab Emirates, Germany and the Czech Republic.

All that effort for what? To see the world, of course. That and skip out of much of winter in northern Illinois.

How did I have the energy for this, here at the gates of old age? How are the logistics possible?

But it really isn’t that hard. This is the 21st century, and travel is mostly by machine, and part of a mass industry, so even old men firmly from the middle class can go. Retired and semiretired old men, who find themselves with more free time than in previous decades. Moreover, the logistics were the least of it: all you need in our time is a computer to set things up.

I’m convinced that the hard part, for many people, would be finding the will to go. Luckily I have a practically bottomless supply. My always-eager-to-go attitude toward seeing point A and then points B, C and so forth also meant I was completely persuaded that buzzing around the world was a good idea. Tired as I am now — and boy am I tired — I haven’t changed my mind, though I need to rest up a bit at the moment.

Japan: my first visit in 25+ years.

It felt familiar — I did live there for four years — but the passage of time also infused the place with a feeling of the unfamiliar as well, a strange combo sensation indeed.

India: A major lacuna in my travels, now just a little less so.

A friend who goes to India sometimes on business told me last fall, “India makes me tired.” I might not have been on business, but I ended up feeling the same way.

And yet — a phantasmagoria unlike anything I’ve seen, especially the teeming city streets. Teem was never more an apt verb, in my experience. Yuriko came as far as India with me, after we visited Japan and her family and friends there. Then she headed back eastward to Illinois.

I went on alone from India to the UAE.

In an even less familiar part of the world, a city of towers somehow rises on the edge of the Arabian desert. Just that is astonishing in its own way, but there is plenty else.

Then to Germany: An old friend I hadn’t seen in a long time, since about five golden weeks in my youth. A long, long time ago: the last time I was there, there were two Germanies and two Berlins and a Wall and the Stassi and Trabbis and a firm living memory of the cataclysm only 40 years earlier.

Berlin was the focus this time, where I joined my brother Jay for the visit. We’d been kicking around the idea of traveling there together for a while, and ultimately didn’t want to wait till either of us got any older. He had not made it to Berlin in ’72.

A major side trip from Berlin was to Prague. Not quite as old a friend, but old enough.

Yuriko and I visited in ’94, but it was new territory for Jay, another slice of the former Astro-Hungarian Empire to go with his early ’70s visit to Vienna.

Actually, when you visit a place you haven’t seen in 40 or 30 years, it’s like you’ve never been there. I had that sensation in both Berlin and Prague. The old memories are packed away, only loosely connected to their setting any more, which has changed partly beyond recognition anyway.

Now I’m back. Unlike Phileas Fogg, I didn’t return a day earlier than I thought I did (we have a stronger awareness of the International Date Line). But I did manage to miss the no one-likes-it spring transition to daylight savings time, just another little bonus of the trip.

Subtle Journal of Raw Coinage No. 66

Posted on February 25, 2024 by admin

More from the physical files: something I’d forgotten I’d participated in, The Subtle Journal of Raw Coinage, which Geof Huth used to publish. It’s on a slip of paper – one of 100 copies – that I received in 1993 while in Osaka, publication date February 28. Looks pretty good for paper that’s now over 30 years old.

The actual size of the slip is about 8.5 x 3.5 inches, and the back is blank. Geof sent me more than one. I gave a few away, but I still have perhaps three or four.

I also don’t remember exactly how I came to create the words. Geof must have asked me to contribute some words; asked by letter or postcard, since this was pre-email, and I never spoke to him over the phone in those days. Then I must have sat down one day, whipped up the neologisms, and then put them in the mail.

The goal, as I vaguely remember, was to come up with words that could have some conventional meaning, but did not. Also, they had to evoke Japan somehow or other. I’m not sure whether the latter was my idea or not, but I believe I succeeded.

Japanease = Japan, ease (easy enough; easy days in Japan).

Tofun = tofu, fun. I knew about tofu long before living in Japan, since the food’s North American popularity had come of age in the 1980s. The very first time I heard of it, maybe, was at the New Guild Coop in Austin in the UT summer of ’81, where a health food enthusiast posted his verse in the communal kitchen:

Tofu/

is good/

for you.

Salarymaniac = Salaryman, maniac. Not too many actual maniacs among salarymen, I bet, but there must have been a few. We gaijin had a term for the vomit one would sometimes see on the sidewalks of Osaka, which looked like the result of a sudden projection straight down from a few feet up, if that. The sort of mess you’d expect from a salaryman who’d drank too much too fast with colleagues, and who managed to make it outside in time. The pattern somehow always included diced carrots. Anyway, that was a salaryman’s hanko.

Yenen = Yen, en. Yen is what we call the currency. En is what the Japanese call it.

Tokyosaka = Tokyo and Osaka, of course. The foreign press, at least in the those days, tended to be in Tokyo, and seemed not to get out of town much, so Tokyo = Japan in a lot of coverage, which was off-putting for those of us in Osaka. Or maybe I felt that way because I’ve long had an affinity for second cities.

So That’s Miffy

Posted on January 29, 2024 by admin

Another press release that isn’t for me came today. Actually, I get a fair number of those, but in this case I took a look. Its first two paragraphs were as follows:

Miffy, the internationally loved bunny created by Dutch artist Dick Bruna, enters the new season of fashion with an exciting update. Miffy is partnering for the first time with Dumbgood – the legendary pop-culture-inspired clothing brand. The new collection is available at Dumbgood/Miffy for Miffy fans located in the US.

Born of a beloved bedtime story tradition between Bruna and his son, Miffy has been a child-favorite character for 68 years for her positivity, adventurous nature, and innocence. Dumbgood blends 90s-2000s nostalgia and iconic pop culture brands to create apparel collections that feel new and relevant for today’s streetwear customer….

90s-2000s nostalgia? Really? No, let’s leave that aside. When Happy Days premiered 50 years ago this month, it was cast successfully as nostalgia, for no more than 20 years earlier.

I was pretty sure I’d never heard of Miffy, 68 years of positivity notwithstanding (or Dumbgood either, legend notwithstanding). Miffy didn’t happen to be in the mix when I was a child reader, or at any other time. But then I did an image search.

I do know Miffy, by sight anyway. I saw Miffy a lot in Japan. Miffy is very popular there. I showed the pictures to Yuriko, who knew the bunny instantly, and by name.

Somehow I never got around to thinking much about the character I’d seen in Japan, and until today would have assumed – had I simply been shown the pictures – that it was a Japanese character. But no, a Dutch artist created it, perhaps with a keen unconscious notion of what would be big in Japan. Odd the things you learn, even from misdirected press releases.

Northern Kentucky ’23

Posted on January 2, 2024 by admin

Among our collection of physical prints, most of them pre-2005 or so, is this image.

I’m standing in front of my in-laws’ house on January 1, 1994 (one feature of the camera was to imprint the date, but for whatever reason, it is wrong on this print). I spent most of winter break there. Much of the time I was in their kitchen, the warmest room in the house, where I read War and Peace. My in-laws considered this slightly peculiar, but not so much that I didn’t hear about it until much later.

Forward almost 30 years and we found ourselves in Louisville. We arrived late on Wednesday, actually past midnight on Thursday, late enough that the night clerk at our hotel was the only person around when we got there. He had been putting together a model figure from a kit before we arrived. Some pieces were arrayed on the desk near him, but he was mostly finished. Yuriko recognized it: an action hero from an anime, something I would have never recognized.

“I got it for Christmas,” the clerk, a large young man with a large beard and collection of pimples, told us when Yuriko mentioned that she recognized it. “He’s my favorite.”

“Helps pass the time on the night shift?” I said. He agreed that it did.

Otherwise it was a standard check-in process, but the momentary interaction made the experience more memorable. The property was part of a behemoth hospitality outfit, and if the company had any imagination (such companies seldom do), it would instruct its clerks to have some kind of conversation-piece project at hand that would engage more curious patrons. You know, to build the brand by associating a mildly memorable and pleasant experience with the place one stays.

Maybe that isn’t such a good idea. Such a company could be counted on to mandate their clerks detail in reports the interactions thus generated – fill up that spreadsheet, tick those boxes, remember that documenting the process is as important as the results – and press them to meet some sort of quota of being memorable to their customers.

Thursday was the first of three full days in northern Kentucky, returning on New Year’s Eve. Rather than venture somewhere by plane this year — with last year’s dud in mind — we opted for a drive. As long as no blizzard was forecast, we’d be good to go. Head somewhere to the south. We focused on Louisville because it occurred to me in November that I hadn’t spent much time there in more than 30 years, since my visits to attend the Kentucky Derby in the late ’80s, and Yuriko had never spent any time there.

Since then, I’d also heard it on good authority, namely from someone who used to live there, that Louisville is a city of distinctly interesting neighborhoods, perhaps more than you’d expect from a metro its size (1.3 million). Something like Nashville, though that metro is larger. In fact some similarities with Nashville are fairly close, such the downtown street grid that, away from downtown, soon devolves into as non-grid as a pattern of streets can be, wandering this way and that at odd angles through hilly territory, and changing names without warning.

We first encountered Crescent Hill, a well-to-do neighborhood east of downtown, stopping for a few minutes to look in a few of the shops of Frankfort Avenue. I’ve read that the area was formerly known as Beargrass, after a nearby creek. A name the area should have kept, if you asked me.

Included are the sorts of places well-to-do neighborhoods support, such as Urban Kitty Consignment Boutique, Wheelhouse Art, Era Salon, Eggs Over Frankfort, Carmichael’s Bookstore and Margaret’s Fine Consignments. Temps were maybe 10 degrees warmer than at home, so not bad for a short stroll.

The imposing Crescent Hill Baptist Church is on Frankfort Ave. Closed.

The local library was open, so we went in.

Inside was a table with books for sale, and I picked up a paperback for $1 entitled The Taste of Conquest: The Rise and Fall of the Three Great Cities of Spice by Michael Krondl (2008). The cities in question are Venice, Lisbon, and Amsterdam. I started reading that night and it’s good. He brings up a few interesting points right away, such as that the hoary old explanation about the medieval use of spices, namely that they covered up rot, is nonsense.

“But what if the meat were rancid?” Krondl asks rhetorically. “Would not a shower of pepper and cloves make rotten meat palatable? Well, perhaps to a starved peasant who could leave no scrap unused, but not to society’s elite. If you could afford fancy, exotic seasonings, you could certainly afford fresh meat.”

From Crescent Hill it’s a short pop over to the Louisville Water Tower, including a short drive on Zorn Avenue, which instantly became my favorite street name in Louisville.

For a bit of water infrastructure, it’s impressive, rising 185 feet over the banks of the Ohio River and dating from 1860. And still in use. It’s also being renovated, so we couldn’t get that close.

In its own way, the nearby smokestack – I took it to be a smokestack – is just as impressive.

Note the iron ladder rising up the side of the stack. Note also that its bottom section is missing. Removed, I bet, after one too many moron teenage boys decided to take a climb, sometimes resulting in a sudden and shattering loss of their youthful health and vim.

More Manhole Covers

Posted on November 16, 2023 by admin

Almost warm today, except in the house, where I maintain temps at a skinflinty 68° F. in the colder months. It wasn’t warm enough outside to raise the inside temps, and it was so windy I decided not to built the possible last back-yard fire of the year. Maybe tomorrow.

One thing leads to another online, and from Hello Kitty I eventually made my way to the Atlas Obscura article on Japanese manhole covers.

“In Japan, many manhole covers are works of urban art — elaborate, curious, distinctive, even colorful,” AO notes. “They have become a tourist destination unto themselves, and attract a legion of dedicated manhole enthusiasts who travel the country to visit some of the thousands of unique designs.”

This seems to be a thing that has happened in the about 30 years since I lived there, so I’d never heard of it. At least, the article puts the origin of the covers as a local initiative in 1985, and it probably took a while to become a mass phenomenon.

“Typically, ‘local manholes’ or ‘design manholes’ feature elements special to a particular location: a town emblem, landmark, event, or official bird or flower,” the article says. “While there is some logic to the placement of the covers… [some] appear to have been placed without rhyme or reason.”

The last image in the article, depicting Osaka Castle, would hew to its place even without the kanji for Fukushima Ward, Osaka – it has the miotsukushi.

That’s something to look for, should I make it back to Japan. In the meantime, I sometimes look down at manhole covers in other places. Such as in Ireland and Spain, and in San Antonio more recently. Here’s one weathered by many decades, probably.

At least the lettering is barely visible. A much newer cover reminds us to protect the downstream fish.

East Jordan Iron Works are headquartered in Michigan, and the company these days is known by the less specific moniker, EJ Group. No substance to that name, if you asked me.

Simple, but with a certain style.

Not a manhole cover, but sharing a similar shape, and displaying an intricate design, at Lake Plaza in Elmendorf Lake Park in San Antonio.

Best visibility would be with a drone, looks like, but the edge-on view isn’t bad.

Hello Kitty at 50

Posted on November 15, 2023 by admin

Yet another press release that isn’t in my professional bailiwick appeared in my flooded in box the other day, except maybe you could call Hello Kitty, in some cases, part of experiential retail. Anyway, the cover letter for the release begins (all sic):

Happy Anniversary Hello Kitty!

The loveable character from SANRIO® has inspired generations with her message of friendship, kindness and inclusivity for 50 years. In celebration of this milestone, fans old and new will be introduced to several new digital and virtual opportunities to engage with Hello Kitty online, including an AR (Augmented Reality) app, short animations on TikTok, monthly promotions in My Hello Kitty Cafe on Roblox and a presence in the digital world of Zepeto. Hello Kitty is also receiving the Cultural Ambassador Award from the Japan Society of Northern California, recognizing her as an international symbol of peace and friendship.

For me, Hello Kitty falls into that category of distinctly Japanese creations, along with the likes of pachinko, most manga and tea ceremony, that flutter off in the distance, visible in passing, but which has never has excited much interest. Just a matter of personal taste. As Sanrio would tell you – is trying to tell the world – the curious anodyne feline does excite interest among many.

Also, I had to look up Roblox and Zepeto, which are an online gaming platform and an app to create avatars, respectively. I don’t expect to interact with them in any way. Sounds like something from the golden age of pulp SF: Zepeto of the planet Roblox, terror of the galaxy.

A Few Japanese Woodblock Prints

Posted on November 12, 2023 by admin

About six years ago, when we went an exhibit of early Soviet art at the Art Institute, we also took a look at some Japanese woodblock prints, which were in one of the East Asian galleries. Not Edo-era prints, which I think are better known, but early Showa works.

Such as “Spring Night at Ginza” (1934) by Kasamatsu Shiro.

“Bell Tower in Okayama” (1947) by Kawase Hasui.

“Ginza at Night” (1945 reprint of 1929 design) by Kawakami Sumio.

“Bar Bacchus in Ginza” (1929) by Oda Kazuma, which is actually a color lithograph.

Those two especially would make good postcards.

Taishō-Era Beer

Posted on February 12, 2023 by admin

Back to the vault of my old correspondence again, for a postcard I mailed from Japan nearly 29 years ago. I picked up a set of cards at the Sapporo Brewery in Sapporo, Hokkaido on our trip there in the fall of ’93. One reason to visit the brewery — the main one, as it happened — was dinner at the beer garden, for its splendid Mongolian barbecue.

The cards were reproductions of old advertising posters for that brand of beer.

A Taishō-era (大正) poster, in this case. In particular, Taishō 13, or as most of the rest of the world would call it, 1924.

As an era, Taishō didn’t last much longer, expiring in 1926 with the sickly emperor Yoshihito, who became known as Taishō posthumously. Taishō Democracy, such as it was, didn’t last much longer either, since like Weimar Germany, it had never really taken root, and the Depression laid the groundwork for its demise.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Japan