Back in Asakusa

 After shipping most of our stuff to the airport, we spent the morning in train stations getting to the shinkansen, then the 2.5 hour ride to take us further than our two weeks of cycling did back to Tokyo. In the train stations in Hanamaki we came across some cultural displays

A deer oni playing a drum

The Michinoku Deer Dance Festival (Shishiodori) is a traditional dance from the area where people dress up as...well, deer spirits, and dance and bang on drums. It happens in mid-June so we'll miss it by a few weeks, but it sounds kind of cool.

Hanamaki Mikoshi

Mikoshi, portable shrines carried by citizens of the region during parades in festival season, are common throughout Japan. Hanamaki has a world-record setting matsuri every September celebrating the founder of the city, Nobuchika Kita, where they have a 114 mikoshi parade. They also have floats and even people dressed up in those deer spirit outfits dancing. It looks like quite the party.

Arriving in Ueno, we stopped at Ichiran before the Friday night crows really got going for some ramen.

I mean, it's not curry but it's really good.

We got to experience a Friday night in the tourist part of Asakusa when we went to the store. It was pretty awful. While we know we are tourists and we know we are kind of snobby about the whole Japan experience, the utter lack of self-awareness that many of the foreign tourists have is pretty sad. Japan is suffering from it's own popularity and a weak yen right now. There are more tourists in Japan this month that there ever have been in the country. We saw none of that up north, away from the typical tourist spots. I was very clearly the only white guy in a 50 mile radius. I think we saw exactly 3 non-Japanese people after leaving Nikko until we got to Sendai, then none until Hanamaki. While I'm not thrilled at being a spectacle, it was far more preferable that dodging loud, clueless foreigners somehow unable to successfully check out at Don Quixote, a discount everything shop that sadly also is duty-free, which draws a certain kind of crowd. 

That said, it's great that this many people want to experience Japan. Being a weekend will be kind of a zoo, so we're going to try and avoid anything tourist-y for a few days. We had a great time in Tohoku, but it is nice to be back in Asakusa.

Sensouji