Asakusa, Homework and More Taiko!

"and the meek shall inherit the Earth"

Our last day, and so much to do! We essentially ran errands in the morning, reserving seats on the train back to Narita, checking in, blogging (fun, but still an errand!), lots of walking from place to place. We did take some time out to stop in the Sensouji area of Asakusa, where the kaminarimon (Lightning Gate) and Sensouji, the large temple in central Asakusa, are located.

River walk along the Sumidagawa

Some wonderful mini-taiko on display. They cost as much as a real taiko.

We stopped at the drum museum again, not to look around, but to pick up some tickets to another taiko performance for this evening that kind of fell in our lap, but more on that in a minute. Before hitting the temple proper, we needed lunch, and finally got to try Ichiran, a ramen restaurant chain that is....unique. See, you never actually see the restaurant staff. You buy a meal ticket for what you want (the choices are ramen, ramen and ramen side dishes), then sit in a personal booth and fill out your ramen preferences on a provided sheet of paper. Some disembodied hands swoop in, take your paper and ticket, and return a few minutes later with your piping hot, custom bowl of ramen. There is a water dispenser in your booth, and a bell to ring if you need anything. Kind of weird and kind of cool at the same time. The ramen is very good, if a little pricey, and is tonkotsu ramen, from Kyuushu, meaning it is a pork-based broth, not fish-based.

Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain...

Your own personal booth

and your ramen appears!

This branch is on level B2 of a building in Shimbashi. The stairs are wide enough for one person, the store has about 15 seats.

After lunch, we headed to Sensouji temple proper for a look around. Things were a little different.

These large, 1 ton metal decorations weren't here last year...

The temple was full of tourists on a Monday afternoon.

Those large sandal-thingies weren't there last year, either.

I only could stay a little while, as I had a lot of homework due, like tonight, for one of my certification classes. I haven't been able to really sit down and work on any of it until now aaaaand I have a 3 page paper due today. And about 6 other assignments of varying length. So I left Sumi at the temple to shop (a dangerous thing when the shops are full of cute little trinkets and very good sweets) and headed back to the hotel and got to work for several hours.

I took a break at about 6 to head down to the Taito-ku Lifelong Learning Pavillion, which is also the central library and contains a large theater on the second floor where, as it turns out, some legends of taiko were performing. We didn't know this. We just saw on the advertisement in the drum museum that there was a show tonight. The show was by Taro Kobayashi, Makoto Yamamoto and Seiichi Tanaka and the San Francisco Taiko Dojo. Tanaka-sensei is known as the father of American Taiko, having brought taiko to the US in the 60's and at age 71 is still performing energetically and teaching some of the best modern taiko players. As it turns out, he and Taro Kobayashi will be giving workshops at the 2014 World Taiko Gathering this July that we are attending, and we're signed up for one of Kobayashi-sensei's workshops. We had no idea.

The show was spectacular. Nothing like we had seen before, and in an auditorium that seated about 200, filled with the oddest collection of people you could imagine. Older people, families, small groups of teenagers, the odd gaijin or two, like us. It truly felt like the guy that owned the music shop down the street in a small town was putting on a show with his students and all the locals came to watch, except the "shop" was drum store that made items for the emperor and the "students" were world-famous musicians. Obviously, we couldn't take pictures or anything, but the 2.5 hour concert just flew by, ending with a 20+ minute version of Tanaka's "Tsunami" where all the musicians joined to create a thunderous finale.

The calm before the storm...

After the amazing show, we were starving, and I still had homework to do. We walked back to Asakusa and ate at one of the only open places on a Tuesday night that wasn't a bar or an Indian restaurant, a place called Miami Garden. Nothing Miami or Garden about it. It was mediocre, expensive faux-western food, but we were starving, they were open and they took a credit card (didn't want to blow the rest of our cash on dinner).

Back at the ranch, I frantically worked on my homework while Sumi packed up what little we had left. It's currently 3AM, we have to be up at 5:30. I've finished everything I can do without being home, all the blogs are posted, and I'm going to try for a little bit of sleep before the exhausting trip home tomorrow.

Takarazuka and Taiko in Kobe

"I'm old enough not to cafe too much

About what you think of me
But I'm young enough to remember the future
And the way things ought to be"

Slowly getting up and moving this morning, Suzuki-san had not only cleaned everything up from the mess that was the big dinner last night, but had gotten up and prepared breakfast before we had even started moving.

I never eat this well. Ever.

After being thoroughly spoiled, we headed down to the station and hopped on a train to downtown Takarazuka where we stopped to visit the famous Takarazuka Music School, where the Takarazuka Revue has been performing for 100 years, and has quite the cult following in Japan. The Revue is an all-female troupe that performs Broadway-style productions of western musicals and other, homegrown plays and adaptations. They are known for their amazing song and dance ability, as well as the ability of their otokoyaku, women acting in men's roles. We stopped by the entrance hall, which looked more like a train station than a school.

Beautiful, almost art-deco style buildings

Entrance gate. It was a show day, and there was quite a crowd inside

There is a full salon and photo studio where one can get dressed up and made up like one of the actresses.
There were some example before-and-after photos, too

Holy make-up, Batman!

The longer we were there, the more Sumi wanted to see the show. Suzuki-san and I thankfully were able to talk her down. I have a feeling we'll be seeing a show next time we're in Kansai....

After dragging Sumi from the theater, we passed the backstage doors where some obsessive fans were waiting, some with impressive cameras, for their favorite Takarazuka stars to enter or leave. Beyond the school, down a beautiful tree-lined lane along the river, we came upon the Osamu Tezuka museum. 

The street sign reads Tezukaosamukinenkanmae.
Translation: In Front of the Osamu Tezuka museum.
How creative.

Who is Osamu Tezuka? By all accounts, he is the grandfather of Japanese manga and anime. I knew him from Astro Boy and The White Lion (aka Kimba the White Lion) and had heard of a few others, such as Black Jack and Princess Knight, but I had no idea how prolific and important he was in Japanese comic history. I won't bore y'all with the details, but it was something like walking through a Walt Disney museum.

Hi no Tori, the phoenix.

All of his characters had their hands and feet cemented in a walk of fame,
including Hi no Tori

I'm not messing with either of them...

Sumi, Black Jack, Suzuki-san

There was much more we could have seen in Takarazuka, but we had a date with some drums in Kobe., plus we were hungry. Suzuki-san knew of a nice Chinese restaurant near her old apartment, so we headed over for some Dim Sum before the "concert".

Various dumplings and shrimp rangoon. I couldn't eat the shrimp, but
it didn't matter. Everything I could eat was amazing, and there was plenty to eat

mini-ramen. It was a cup of ramen with a chicken base, scallions, bean sprouts, and a slice of roasted pork.

And then the desserts came. A whole plate of them.

And extra saabisu (service) from the chef. Melon puree and a
sweet almond and milk treat shaped like tofu. 

As good as the food was, I couldn't believe how good the desserts were. There is no Chinese restaurant of this caliber in Milwaukee, or probably Wisconsin. Simply amazing. This is why we don't lose weight when we come to Japan. No matter how many miles we bike, there is food like this.

Suzuki-san had managed to find a taiko performance by an award-winning high school club in downtown Kobe. So we headed down to see the show.

Downtown Kobe has a long park area along the bay.

These kids have an after school taiko club at their schools. It's common for Japanese high schoolers to be involved in clubs like these, and they can take up a lot of their time. These guys practice every day. Keep in mind, there's no teacher or director in charge (well, there is, but more for support and administrative help than anything else), this is done entirely by the students. There were three different groups, one of alumni (college students) and the other two, I believe, were two different high school groups. They were also teaching some foreigners taiko, and had them up for a song. The show was really fun and well done. Rather that describe it or show pictures, I'll post a bit of the show. They had drums of all types and sizes, cymbals, gongs, shinobue, koto and dancing. It was quite impressive.

After the show, we had to hurry to catch our train back to Tokyo. We said goodbye to Suzuki-san after such a short, but enjoyable visit, and headed back to Asakusa, where we arrived at 9:30, too tired to go out, but in need of food, as it had been over 8 hours since lunch. The hotel restaurant was an Indian restaurant called Doli on the ground floor, so we figured we'd stumble down there.

Sumi got the "Ladies Set". It was not Rasoi, but very good, in it's own right.
I had vegetables and rice. Didn't think a picture was warranted...

Full and tired, we headed back upstairs to sleep. Just one more day, with a lot to do before we leave.

Himeji and Home Cooking

"I turn my back to the wind

To catch my breath, before I start off again

Driven on without a moment to spend

To pass an evening with a drink and a friend"

Up and out this morning to catch a Shinkansen to Kansai! I reflected a little this morning at how the fantastic becomes mundane after a while. When we first came to Japan, we would take videos of the Shinkansen arriving and pictures of the trains and platforms. Now, we just walk to the station and get on board without much thought, and are whisked away over 360 miles in a little over three hours. 

Our first stop is the castle "town" of Himeji. Himeji is now a full-fledged city, but started as a town surrounding the castle. Getting off the train, we stowed our stuff in a locker and headed towards the castle, taking in the sights along the way. It was a Saturday, so the station and park were very lively.

The city mascot Shiromaruhime, which literally translates to
"White, round princess", was at the station, posing for pictures

Sculptures and recreations of details of the castle line the wide,
2km walk to the castle.

There was a grand opening, of sorts, this weekend on the way to the castle park. The Japanese love their historical dramas, especially centered around the Toyotomi and Tokugawa era (late 1500's through the early 1600's). There has been a long-running series called the Taiga doramas (Big River Dramas) on NHK that are year-long dramas centered around some part of Japanese history. They are melodramatic and, in my opinion, awful. That said, there is a lot of history contained in them, and they are very popular. This year's Taiga is Gunshi Kanbei, and centers around Kuroda Kanbei, chief strategist of the Toyotomi, who was from Himeji. So what do you do when a famous person from your city is the focus of an NHK drama? Why, you put up a Kuroda Kanbei Drama Museum! And how do you celebrate the opening of said museum? Why, by bringing in an Idol Squad to perform and pose for the otaku!

Teenage girls in mini-kimonos and lots of very large cameras to capture them
acting cute and flirty onstage

 I will say, the Idol girls really do work hard. They were performing for hours out in the rather warm sun and managed to actually look happy about it. The were performing before we arrived and continued, off and on, the entire time we were at the castle.

This is the most we saw of the museum, a small building just outside the castle park area.
We didn't know anything about the TV show so it would have been
wasted on us.

After a brief stop for some ice cream (it was sunny and warm again), we headed to the castle, which we could see as soon as we exited the station 2k ago

Unfortunately under construction, Himeji is the largest castle we've ever seen in Japan

Himeji is located inside a large park that is on the site of the original castle town. Various layers of walls and gates surround first the park, then the inner section of the park, then the castle itself. It is also one of the only castles to be largely original, just renovated, rather than reconstructed, as it avoided being demolished both during the Meiji Restoration and WWII. 

Outer gate details. The gold trim of the decorations is still brightly polished.

 We stopped and paid our respects to the current occupants of the castle grounds

It's kind of like being back home....we're outnumbered.

The only long-haired cat we saw having a conversation with another cat.

As we approached the inner wall leading to the castle, we saw some promotional video rehearsal featuring a bunch of employees from some company, some soccer players (World Cup!) and Shiromaruhime. All I can say is, this would NEVER happen in the US.

As we approached, we started getting a better appreciation for the size of Himeji.

Under construction until March '15, we couldn't see the inside of the castle itself

But the outer buildings and grounds were open.

Long walls with arrow holes. The holes alternate between square, circle and triangle.
Aesthetics? Strategy?

Along the west side of the castle is a long, sprawling building that follows the castle wall, that once
housed the ladies-in-waiting for the lords and ladies of Himeji, as well as some storage and defense rooms.

Two large, heavy doors on either side of the living quarters to protect all the ladies from
the evil, lustful men.

This is as close as we could get to the main castle. We'll be back when it reopens!

Next to the castle, on top of where the samurai had their living quarters, was the nishi-oyashiki-ato, a series of nine different Edo period gardens. 

Entrance gate to the garden grounds

Running water is a key to any Edo garden...

...to fill the koi pond...

...so important people can gaze at oversized goldfish

This pond is so large, there are two waterfalls that fill it

There are over 250 koi in this pond alone

Reconstruction of samurai quarters

An amazing amount and variety of dragonflies were present

in colors I've never seen.

A heron disapproving of our presence

Himeji really is a day-long excursion, with the gardens, the park, the outer buildings and, when available, the castle. We plan to return, maybe next year, and spend a day seeing the entire castle. Even the truncated tour we took today was really quite impressive. 

Back at the station, we gathered our stuff and headed to Takarazuka to meet up with Suzuki-san! She met us at the station and a with a short walk through hair salon-infested streets, we arrived at her new apartment (well, new to us. She's been there a few years, now). After settling it, she was a tireless host, serving us delicious tomato, basil and mozzarella appetizers while she cooked a wonderful meal, with more food than even we could eat!

Kanpai!

Potato soup, salad, pork croquets, corn and paella(not pictured) and amazing cheesecake for dessert!

 We spent a long time eating and catching up. Once we could eat no more, Suzuki-san laid out some futons in the spare bedroom and we had the best night of sleep the entire trip, with good company, filled with a great, home-cooked meal and a comfortable bed.