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.