Gotokuji temple – the home of the beckoning cat.

I’d always thought that the beckoning white cats that you can see here and there (very popular in Japanese restaurants in Stockholm) were a modern gimmick. It turns out that the cat has centuries of history. According to legend, a lord was out hunting, when a cat beckoned him towards a temple. The lord entered the temple just before a thunderstorm started. Gotokuji temple became the spiritual home of Manekineko, the lucky cat.

I’ve learned to tell temples and shrines apart now. A temple is buddhist, and has a gate building. A shrine is for the shinto religion, and has a torii gate. Also, as a visiting tourist, entrance to a shrine is almost always free of charge, while temples often charge a small entrance fee.

This temple building with sculptures of the twelve animals of the zodiac on its frieze has a manekineko cat.

Further inside the temple grounds, there were shelves and tables holding hundreds and hundreds of manekineko figurines that people had donated in order to bring good luck to someone or some venture.

The figurines were cute, but also kind of spooky in their absolute uniformity and with their straight-on stare.

I am away on a two-week vacation together with Ingrid. I had very definite plans to keep blogging, brought my computer and everything. Somehow we’ve ended up having such long days that all we do when we get back to our hotel room is collapse on the bed. I guess I will end up with another giant blogging backlog after all.

Our day started with the same challenge as yesterday: where to eat our convenience store breakfast. There was a park on the map, very close to us. Surely a park will have a bench, we thought. Nope. We ended up eating our egg sandwiches and rice balls on a concrete edge. And it was cold. We will need a better plan for our future breakfasts.

In the morning we visited Ota Memorial Museum of Art, which hosts a large collection of woodblock prints. They rotate which works from their collection are on display at any time. Right now, the theme was “Ojisan” or “uncle”, meaning “middle-aged man”.

Many of the exhibited prints were from famous series, like “The fifty-three stations of the Tokaido” etc.
The “uncles” were never the focal point of any of the works, but they were everywhere. Walking, sunning themselves, carrying things, smoking a pipe.

Unfortunately photography was not allowed inside the museum – not even in the foyer. The only exception was the museum shop, which had a wonderful range of tenugui, printed cotton towels. I bought several, even though I have no idea what I will do with them.

For lunch – udon noodles at – Udon Iroha. The restaurant actually offered paper aprons to guests, which I said no to. Maybe I was cheating when I sometimes bit off the longest noodles, but nobody was watching.

After lunch we spent a few hours browsing various kinds of shops in Harajuku. The vintage clothes shops were impressively organized and curated. A metre of short, plaid skirts; two metres of corduroy shirts. Kimonos, yukatas, haori jackets in all colours.

Ingrid had a list of shops with toys and pop culture doodads to visit. I discovered yet again that Tokyo does not like people just hanging around. There was never any place to sit when I was waiting for her.

Right next to Shibuya is Meiji Jingu shrine, built to honor Emperor Meiji and his wife, Empress Shoken.

I liked the giant torii gate on the way through the park to the shrine. It looks like each pillar is a single tree trunk.

I read somewhere that, back when the shrine was being designed, there were intense debates about what the appropriate architectural style would be for a shrine erected for a deified emperor, since there was no real precedent.

Emperor Meiji apparently wrote 100,000 poems during this life. I presume that these are some of them. I do wish someone had spent at least a little time on some English-language signage. Perhaps even a few translations of the poems?

Close to the temple itself, there was the Emperor’s garden. Even though its more spectacular parts (like the iris garden) are nothing to look at in late winter, I appreciated its design, with winding paths and bonsai trees.

Tokyo at night looked exactly as colourful and neon-bright as movies had made me expect.

For our first restaurant meal in Tokyo, we went for conveyor belt sushi at Sushiro. Ingrid could probably live on just sushi for a week, and while I’m not quite that enamoured with it, I do love eating good sushi.

Japanese conveyor belt sushi is not like Swedish conveyor belt sushi. In both, there is a belt that snakes its way through the entire restaurant, and tables next to the belt, and the belt brings food to everyone.

In Stockholm and London, there is always food on the belt. You look at the food that glides past, and pick whatever you like. When you’re done, you count the empty plates and pay for each one. Usually they’re colour-coded for different price groups.

In Tokyo, it’s all individual and customized and computerized. There’s a tablet at each table with an incredibly long menu of sushi, sashimi, side orders, desserts etc. Tap and order, and a few minutes later, your plate arrives on the belt and stops in front of you.

We had counter seats (as opposed to a full table) which was about as glamorous as a fast food restaurant. It was a fast food restaurant, I guess.

But the choice of fish was incredible to my Swedish eyes, and the quality of it was great.

At first we ordered things we recognized and knew we would love. You can’t go wrong with seared salmon. Later I got more adventurous and tried a few more odd items out of pure curiosity. I ate this thing and I can’t even remember what it was.

From Senso-ji temple through the quiet streets of Asakusa, we came to Ueno.

Ueno park and its lotus lake were maybe not at their peak in January, but they were striking in their own way.

On a small island in the middle of a lake, there was a lovely temple. The city was right there in the distance, but here it was peaceful and quiet.

From the balcony of one temple there’s a view towards the next one, through a pine bough trained in a round shape. According to the internet, the bough is a recreation of a similar bough from a woodblock print from the Edo era.

The Kiyomizu Kannon-do temple had a very tempting gonggong that made my fingers itch.

Ueno park itself was somewhat underwhelming. It (and other parks we saw later) had a lot of concrete and bare ground, and not as much greenery as I would expect. It’s January, I know, but it didn’t look like there would be much grass here during summer either.

After Senso-ji, we walked back through the Asakusa district towards the nearest metro line. Through a picturesque but strangely empty shopping gallery, onwards to small residential streets. We stumbled upon a small shop selling vintage kimonos where we browsed around for a while. A lot of beautiful fabrics, but I resisted. Can’t start shopping at the first store we run into, when I don’t yet have a clue about general price levels, or what’s available.

Our first sight for the day is Senso-ji temple. Built in 645, it’s the oldest temple in Tokyo.

When we first got to the temple, I was confused. There was a temple gate (with a lot of tourists taking selfies) but beyond the template gate there was not a temple but a large shopping street. That turned out to be part of the temple complex somehow.

At the end of the shopping street, a second, very similar gate led to an area that was more like what I thought a temple would be like, with large lanterns and ornate roofs,

There were quite a lot of people here. Many seemed to be there for family or couples photos, dressed up in traditional kimonos.

Right next to the Buddhist temple, there was a Shinto shrine. Places of worship for two separate religions co-existing side by side, and the same visitors worshipping first at one and then at the other.

We did read up on the proper rituals for both, but I felt uncomfortable with the idea of going through the motions without believing in any of it, and just stayed respectfully to the side.

There was also a small, beautiful park, with a waterfall and a koi pond, as well as several small shrines and altars that we didn’t really understand much about, since the signage was all in Japanese only.

This being our first temple visit, I felt mostly clueless. Which bits are special about this one? Which ones are typical?

The few informational plaques that were in English – both here and later at other sites – had a bizarre focus on dates and measurements. This one is better than most in that it actually tells us the history of the object that we’re looking at, before it dives into precise measurements (217.9 cm in height, not 218!). But in general we soon gave up expecting any insight from info plaques, and their millimetre precision became a running joke between us.

We have landed in Tokyo. Early in the morning on a weekday, somewhat groggy with jet lag, and hungry. The first order of business was to get rid of our luggage (in a large locker at Tokyo station). The second was breakfast.

Finding breakfast wasn’t hard. There are convenience stores absolutely everywhere. Finding a place to eat that breakfast was harder. You aren’t allowed to eat and drink while walking in the streets; it’s considered disorderly. There are also almost no benches anywhere. Benches encourage people to sit and hang around, especially young people, and that is kind of considered to be “loitering”. I think they generally just don’t want people to hang around in public places. You can use streets and parks to go from A to B, but keep your socializing and living out of the public eye. Such a contrast to many European towns and cities that go out of their way to liven up their public spaces, with benches and greenery etc, to encourage people to hang around.

We did find a pocket park consisting of about three bushes, a few metres of artificial turf, and a bench where we could sit and eat.

After that we just wandered around to get a general feeling for the city.

A lot of it is very tall and modern.

Then you turn off the main streets and wander into the smaller ones, and the atmosphere changes abruptly. Small concrete houses, little back alleys with potted plants.

A lot of the smaller streets are completely without sidewalks. Which doesn’t mean that they’re not for pedestrians. There’s this little strip of asphalt on one side, demarcated by a painted line, that is sort of reserved for pedestrians. But not really. You just have to co-exist with cars, bicycles etc. It mostly works out. It helps that there isn’t that much traffic on these back streets.

The building lots are often small. In Stockholm an inner-city building can be tens of metres in each direction; here they’re sometimes smaller than an average Swedish single-family house.

We saw so much every day, and I took so many photos, that I’ve broken up each day into multiple posts. After our general wandering on this day, we walked to Senso-ji temple and the surrounding Asakusa district, and then onwards to Ueno, all of which get their own posts.

Jet lag caught up with us around four or five in the afternoon. We picked up our luggage and started making our way towards our apartment in Ikebukuro.

Wherever we walked, there were shrines and temples everywhere. Outside of the central business and shopping districts, I think there’s a shrine almost in every city block. Some smaller, some larger.

Everything is slightly alien. I feel displaced. The streets are not like streets usually are; the familiar vegetables at the grocery shop are interspersed with strange ones. None of the signs are readable; none of the prices are relatable.

Tokyo is located by the sea and has some waterways flowing through it. In the places where we ended up, they were hardly noticeable, and mostly we forgot the sea was even there.

We’re on our way to Japan! I am so excited.

This is a bit of a dream trip for Ingrid and myself. We’ve both wanted to see Japan for years, but it has never seemed feasible. Mostly because of the cost, but also because of school etc.

Now Ingrid is old enough to earn her own money, and has been working and saving up all autumn (in addition to what she had been able to set aside from her job at the cafe). She had been thinking of doing a long Interrail vacation in Europe, but then found out just how advantageous the SEK/JPY exchange rate is right now and changed her plans. Initially she was going to do this on her own, but when I asked if I could join her, she said yes, so we’re going together.

We’re at very different stages of our lives, but in surprisingly similar financial situations – on a tight budget – so our preferences and priorities line up very well. Cheap flights, and the cheapest accommodation that gives us clean beds and a private bathroom. Two-week group trips to Japan start at about 45,000 SEK per person, and that’s without most meals; we expect our total cost per person, including meals and shopping, to come in at half of that at most. That’s less than I’ve paid for a one-week guided ski tour.

Ingrid has done all the heavy lifting in terms of planning: flights, dates, hotels, overall itinerary. Going on a custom vacation without having to do the majority (if not all) of the planning is a luxury I’ve not experienced in many years. That’s another thing that has made this previously impossible trip possible: Ingrid being between jobs and having ample time for planning and research.

This will be amazing.

More potential inspiration for the possible underground-themed embroidery project.

The Hötorget station is probably the one I’ve used most, in the last decade or so. Tretton37 had their office there, and then their next office as well, and so did Urb-it. The Stockholm concert hall is there. Active Solution is one stop to the east, but if I have any errands to run after work then those often take me to Hötorget.

This station doesn’t have any art on the walls that I’ve noticed. It’s one of the oldest stations, from the 1950s, before the city decided to start decorating them. It’s like a blue-tiled bathroom, very utilitarian. It only got its own art in the late 1990s – a light sculpture in the ceiling.