Kanda Myojin (神田明神)

I recently read Marcus Jansen’s history of modern Japan and learned that Kanda used to be a mountain, but it was levelled by Ieyasu in order to provide the earth needed to infill Tokyo Bay to create the modern port. We’ve wandered around Kanda and Jimbocho a couple of times on previous visits to Tokyo, and in 2014 our Akihabara apartment was a short walk from Kanda Myojin. The hill that the shrine stands on is still pretty steep.

We visited the shrine on a sunny Sunday during Golden Week. Before we headed up the steps in the photo above, we watched two lads race each other to the top. We walked up after them, and I think we were more out of breath when we got to the top than they were!

Kanda Shrine started its existence in the Otemachi area of Tokyo. It was originally built in 730AD, but ended up in the path of Ieyasu’s planned expansion of Edo Castle. So, in 1603, the shrine was moved to the Kanda ward. It moved again 13 years later to the top of the hill where it still resides. The current structures on the site aren’t original. It suffered extensive fire damage in the aftermath of the Great Kanto Earthquake and was reconstructed in 1934.

I thought the shrine was beautiful, with its bright vermillion woodwork and its lion dogs, nestling on the hilltop amidst the urban sprawl.

 

The frieze pictured above is on the Zuishin Mon, the copper-roofed main gate to the shrine. It depicts a blue dragon and a black turtle-snake, which are two of the four Shijin (Taoist gods) alongside the red phoenix and white tiger.

The shrine is home to three kami – Daikokuten and Ebisu, who are both members of the 7 Lucky Gods crew and considered to be particularly lucky for business people, and Taira no Masakado, a Heian-era samurai who led a rebellion against the government in Kyoto and whose head was brought to Tokyo. Local residents in the Shibaraki area, the destination for Masakado’s head, respected his defiance so much that they enshrined him at Kanda Myojin.

There is an incredible statue of Ebisu at the shrine.

Instead of Ebisu being depicted in his usual form as a fisherman, this statue refers to Ebisu’s childhood. Ebisu was the son of the gods Izanagi and Izanami, who gave birth to the many islands that make up Japan. He was born without bones and, unable to walk, he was put into a boat of reeds and cast adrift on the sea. The statue shows Ebisu in his boat riding on the crest of a wave, surrounded by turtles and fish. He washed ashore in Hokkaido and was adopted by an Ainu fisherman. His bones grew and, aged three years old, he became a god. I didn’t know that story before I visited Kanda Myojin.

The shrine, perhaps because of its proximity to Akihabara, is also associated with IT and with manga. We saw a couple of lucky charms in sticker form on sale that you could affix to the back of your tech to ward off system failures, data loss and identity theft.

More spectacularly, though, the shrine is full of ema plaques decorated with manga.

In 2012, an anime/manga/idol project started, called Love Live! which is set around Akihabara and features Kanda Myojin as one of the key locations. It’s quite something to walk through the stands of ema and see the creativity of visitors to the shrine. Some of the ema are pre-printed, but the vast majority look hand drawn and coloured. It was one of my favourite things about the shrine.

My most favourite thing, though, was the miniature pony.

Because we love Parks and Recreation, we named this pony L’il Sebastian. It turns out she’s a girl pony called Akari, and she is the shrine’s sacred horse. She’s there to carry the gods if they want a trot out. I expect that Baby Ebisu is fine riding a miniature pony, but I’m concerned about Daikokuten. Let’s not even think about how the severed head of Taira no Masakado gets on the back of a miniature pony. Akari can’t be expected to carry him in a mikoshi, surely?

I bet she takes part in the Kanda Matsuri every May, though. We were in the wrong year for the big festival and also too early in the month. The big festival, which is one of the biggest shrine festivals in Japan, takes place in odd years, with a smaller festival in the even years. In the big festival, 100 mikoshi and 300 people parade through the streets of Tokyo, around Kanda, Nihonbashi, Otemachi, and Marunouchi.

I would love to see it. Maybe one day!

Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography and Sengakuji (泉岳寺)

In November this year, I went to a conference organised by one of the other museums in the group of museums I work for. It was all about preserving the visual record. One of the speakers was the curator of the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Keishi Mitsui, who spoke about a volunteer project to salvage and document photographs from Rikuzentakata, which were badly damaged in the 2011 tsunami.

I spoke to Mitsui-san after he gave his paper, and told him that I had been to his museum in 2012, where I had seen an exhibition about the British photographer Felice Beato. Turns out that Mitsui-san curated that exhibition. Small world!

So today I thought I would write about our visit to the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography and, because I wasn’t able to take any photographs at the museum, about the visit we made later the same day to Sengakuji.

The Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography is in Ebisu. We caught the train from Asakusa and, because we had set off late in the morning, bought some snacks at a combini near Ebisu station. We ate these in a paved public area close to Yebisu Garden Place. It was lovely to sit out in the sunshine, watching the world go by, eating onigiri.

Yebisu Garden Place is a shopping/dining/cultural complex built on the site of the original Yebisu Brewery and consists of the Museum of Yebisu Beer, the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, a 3-star Michelin restaurant and a bunch of other eating places and hotels.

Despite the range of attractions, we only had time to head for the photography museum, which is behind the main plaza. We bought a ticket that gave us entry to all three of the exhibitions on display at the time – a touring exhibition of Robert Doisneau’s photographs that are part of the J Paul Getty Collection, the aforementioned Felice Beato exhibition, and an exhibition of photography by the Japanese photographer Horino Masao.

We headed for the basement first, to see the Doisneau exhibition, which was a retrospective to commemorate the centenary of his birth. The images ranged from his very first photograph, through the 1930s and 1940s, including his famous images of wartime France, and ending with a selection of colour photographs taken in the 1980s. It was really interesting to see such a full range of his work and the playfulness in his images, because I am only really familiar with his black and white wartime photography.

Next we headed for the second floor and the Felice Beato exhibition. Beato was an important chronicler of the British Empire during the 19th century, particularly images of conflict, and the exhibition included images taken in India, Burma and the Middle East, as well as his famous photographs of Edo-era Japan. As well as having a significant influence on how war is photographed, Beato was one of the first Western photographers to systematically record images of Japan at the time it began to open up to the outside world again and into the early years of the Meiji Restoration. His panorama photographs, including an image of Yokohama and one of Tokyo (then called Edo) are incredibly precise – remarkable because they were taken in an era before panoramic cameras existed, and he positioned his tripod precisely to capture individual shots across a view, which he then joined together. As well as documenting the geography of Japan, Beato photographed local clothing and customs, and was responsible for popularising hand tinted photographs in Japan, using local artists to carry out the work. It was a stunning exhibition.

The last of the trio was the Horino Masao exhibition. I had never heard of him before, but learned that he was a modern, experimental photographer, active in the 1920s and 1930s. He saw photography as a way to capture form and social change, from the way the human body works to the construction of modern Japan. Most of his work appeared in photomontage magazines on particular themes, and there were copies of the publications alongside his photographic prints in the exhibition. He stopped taking photographs after the Second World War, because the images he had taken of Japanese-occupied Korea and Manchuria were used by the government for propaganda, and he became disillusioned.

I really enjoyed the visit and would recommend the museum to anyone who is interested in photography. The museum is currently closed until 2016, though, so don’t rush there just yet!

After looking round the museum, we headed back to Ebisu station and caught a train to Shinagawa for our next tourist adventure. My husband had read about the 47 Ronin in his book about Samurai history. Close to Shinagawa station is Sengakuji (泉岳寺), a Buddhist temple where the 47 Ronin are buried. The tale is a sad one. Asano Takumi was a samurai leader who quarrelled with his mentor Kira Yoshinaka. Following a fight at Edo Castle, during which he injured Kira Yoshinaka but didn’t kill him, Asano Takumi was ordered to commit ritual suicide (seppuku). His 47 men, led by Oishi Kuranosuke, vowed to avenge his death and killed Kira Yoshinaka in retaliation. This displeased the Shogun, who ordered that the 47 men be executed. Before his order could be carried out, however, the 47 committed seppuku.

Statue of Oishi Kuranosuke

For such a violent episode, the temple is a remarkably tranquil and serene place, with an impressive entrance gate, a group of cherry trees and then the graves on the hillside alongside the temple.

There are also two museum buildings that provide context to the story, but we arrived too late in the day to have a look around them properly, managing only to peep inside the building that contains weapons, letters and other items connected to the story. The curator on duty was literally closing up as we arrived.

Asano Takumi’s grave is separate to those of his 47 men. Outside the museum buildings you can also see the stone on which he committed seppuku. The graves of the 47 Ronin are in a separate area. I didn’t feel it was right to take photographs of the graves. It is a sobering sight, 47 grave markers, all with incense sticks burning in front of them. Visitors can buy incense from one of the museum buildings and make their own offering at the graves if they wish.

As we looked around, we overheard another visitor in conversation with the curator. The visitor really couldn’t get his head around the fact that the 47 men had chosen to commit suicide, rather than try to negotiate with the Shogun. The curator was trying his hardest to explain the concept behind ritual suicide in Japanese culture, but to no avail.

Our visit to Sengakuji was a reflective end to the last day of our holiday in 2012. I’m glad that we went. Even if we hadn’t been interested in the story of Asano Takumi and his 47 Ronin, it was a peaceful place to spend time in the evening sunshine, a place to pause and reflect, tucked away from the bustle of the metropolis.

Machiya Living/Maiko Spotting around Miyagawacho

こんにちは！戻ってきました。忙しかったです。すみません！

I’ve had a lot on my plate lately, with studying and work, so I haven’t had much time to update this blog. I do apologise! But now I’m back, and I have plenty to write about following the trip my husband and I took in April this year.

We stayed in another machiya, this time close to Higashiyama, just off Gojo-dori. It was a very quiet, residential neighbourhood. We had walked through it before, on our way to find the Hill of Ears (Mimizuka/耳塚) and Toyokuni Shrine (Toyokuni-jinja/豊国神社), so we knew that it was an area where older people live.

Silver Zone

I found the machiya on the Home Away site, as I had the house we stayed in last year. This one was called Ojizoya and is managed by the Windows to Japan company. The name comes from the fact that there is a small shrine to Ojizo in the alleyway.

From the website, it looked ideal – really convenient for Higashiyama, Ninenzaka, Sannenzaka, Kiyomizudera and Gion, and with good transport links. Booking was easy and the staff were helpful. We’d originally asked to rent another of their houses, but when they found out that we like to cook for ourselves while on holiday, they suggested this house as it has a full kitchen and is more suited to self-catering.

We flew to Kansai International via Amsterdam on KLM this time, and took the express train to Kyoto. We were early, so hung around Kyoto Station for a while, where we saw an impressive Lego model of the station.

 

Then we took a taxi to the machiya because our cases were heavy and we didn’t want the hassle of trying to lift them on and off a bus! I handed the taxi driver the map in Japanese provided by Windows to Japan and said in my best Japanese “この住所までおねがいします”. He made a performance of studying the map and then took us east of the station through quite heavy traffic, muttering and consulting the map as he drove. It was a very similar experience to taking a taxi in the UK!

We arrived safely, though, and the house was lovely. My husband had the usual trouble with the low doorways and I don’t think he was as enamoured of the house as I was as a result, but I thought it was charming.

 

Best of all, though, was that we were a short walk from one of the three hanamachi (花街) or Flower Towns of Kyoto, Miyagawa-cho (宮川町). Miyagawa-cho is a quieter area than Gion, not as packed with tourists, tucked away as it is beside the Kamo River. In our three previous visits to Japan, we had never seen a Maiko or a Geiko while walking around Gion. We had seen plenty of people dressed up as Maiko, but not the real deal. This visit, things were different.

On our first full day, we headed over to Higashiyama to see Kiyomizudera with the cherry blossoms out. On our way up Gojozaka (the pottery slope), I spied a couple of Maiko visiting a temple across the road from a shop we were in.

It was Kyo Odori time, with the Maiko of the different hanamachi performing a series of dances in their local theatres. Because we were only a stroll away from Miyagawa-cho, we decided that we would go to watch one of the Odori performances. First we needed to find the Miyagawa-cho Kaburenjo theatre, so we took a walk through the area, heading south from Shijo-dori.

First we passed a really old looking wooden building, and then we found a shrine dedicated to Ebisu, the god of fishermen.

 

It was a peaceful shrine, with a display of bonsai trees as well. Local residents came in and out to make their prayers, and the atmosphere was very tranquil. Until the sound of drumming reached our ears, coming from the Kaburenjo theatre. Then we heard Japanese flutes and voices singing, so we knew we were close. We headed around the block, passing a curious street corner and a sign warning against allowing your pets to foul the street (oddly it shows cats being instructed by a dog – a bit like former smokers taking the moral high ground with those who continue to smoke, perhaps…?)

 

We turned the corner again, walked down a short alley that was home to a rabbit café and an Okiya with a lantern bearing the symbol of Miyagawa-cho, and then emerged close to the theatre.

 

It was the end of the final performance of the day, and when I made my way against the flow of departing guests to ask the staff how to buy tickets, I was given literature and shown where the booking office was at the foot of the steps. I needed to return the next day to buy tickets there. As I walked back down the steps to my waiting husband, a couple of Maiko who had been performing in the Odori arrived outside their Okiya with their House Mother. One of them was introduced to some acquaintances of the House Mother, so I had the chance to quickly take some photographs of them. They were beautiful.

 

 

From putting these pictures up on Flickr I discovered that these were Maiko Korin (小凛) in peach and Maiko Miena (美恵菜) in yellow.

We returned to watch the Kyo Odori a couple of days later. It was amazing. We paid for the tea ceremony as well, and joined a queue of people who slowly made their way into a room on an upper floor of the theatre. We were seated towards the front of the room on a bench with a low table in front of us, along with another couple, and had the perfect view of the two Maiko who were responsible for making the matcha tea and distributing it to honoured guests along with the accompanying mochi. Those of us who weren’t honoured guests were served by older Geisha. The tea was deliciously bitter and the mochi very light. When we had finished, a Geisha came back to our table and carefully wrapped our plates in paper, then handed them to us as a souvenir. When I looked at the plates later, they have Kyo Odori painted on the underside.

After the performance, we took photographs of each other on the steps. Here is my husband, with a small crowd of other departing guests:

 

We went out for a meal afterwards, and walked home past the theatre again in the dark, taking photographs of the lanterns outside the tea houses.

Our luck was in again as we went past the theatre – two Maiko emerged from an Okiya and headed off to work. My “sumimasen” fell on deaf ears. They moved away from me incredibly quickly on those high geta, but I managed to get a photograph that wasn’t too blurred!

 

On our last day in Kyoto we took another walk around Miyagawa-cho and found a tiny torii gate resting against the fence of another wooden building.

 

It’s details like this that I love about Japan. I also love things like the next photo…

 

Maiko Betty Boo tucked away above the rarified calm of Miyagawa-cho!

Once again, we were lucky enough to encounter more Maiko going about their business. One in particular impressed me with her haughty demeanour and ability to really move atop her geta, the likes of which I have never seen before, in terms of height!

Maiko Koyoshi (小よし)

 

Maiko Fukucho (ふく兆)

And then, just as we were leaving, having seen a Maiko get into a taxi but not drive off, this young lady came rushing up, all smiles and apologies for keeping her sister waiting.

Maiko Fukumari (ふく真莉)

I feel very privileged to have seen these young women going about their daily business. I hope I wasn’t too intrusive in taking photographs of them. I’m sure they know that they are a big draw for tourists in Kyoto, but I was conscious of the fact that they are people, too. They have chosen to enter into a traditional career and have duties and obligations as part of their work, so I can understand that it might be frustrating for them to be stopped or photographed every time they step out of the Okiya to go to work. A tricky line to walk, I’d imagine. The women I saw on this holiday were nothing but gracious, though. As is to be expected!

I loved staying where we stayed this year and can wholeheartedly recommend it for being convenient for the tourist spots, while still being far enough away to feel that you’re really coming ‘home’ after a day’s sight-seeing.