On Monday, Tom woke up early and went to a famous fish market in Tokyo. There, people can watch restaurant owners bid on the fish that the fishing boats brought in fresh that morning; sometimes the sea creatures are even still breathing! Unfortunately, Tom wasn't there at 4:30 when that happens so he milled around the area and saw the last few hours of the fish market business.
Then we met up with the Kusanagi family. For those of you that don't know, I taught two of the Kusanagi children, Yutaka and Yurika, when I worked at BU. Their parents, Aki and Maki, lived in the Boston area for 9 years while Aki was at MIT, and returned to Japan three years ago. It was so nice to see them and Kyoka, who was born when I was teaching Yutaka. Yutaka is 10 now, Yurika (which is Japanese for Lily, not what Archimedes shouted in a bath tub) is 8, and Kyoka is 6. They looked so big, but still very much like the Kusanagi children I remember. We reminisced about Yutaka's favorite game when he was three - Kompai! - and how Yurika took almost a whole year before she was comfortable using English, and then suddenly started speaking it in complete sentences. They even remembered some of the songs we used to sing in preschool! When they returned to Japan, the Kusanagis had lived outside of Kyoto until a few months ago, when they moved to the Tokyo area. The children hadn't been to too many places in Tokyo yet, so we were all tourists this day! Aki set up an itinerary for us to visit Asakusa, take a river cruise, and go to the Hamarikyu Gardens.
We all got on the train and went to Asakusa. It is an older section of Tokyo with the Sensoji Shrine, a beautiful Shinto temple said to have been built around 600 a.d. Shinto is the Japanese national religion and it's a little hard to understand or explain. It was originally a form of ancestor worship, but as Aki said, it has incorporated a lot of Bhuddist traditions into it. Basically it had no god, no covenant the people follow, and no universally accepted practices. At the shrine, the children each received a fortune ( like with a fortune cookie, but no cookie), and we all did some souvenir shopping in the stalls around the shrine. Next, we had an authentic Japanese lunch of udon and soba noodles, which we slurped as loud as we could, as is the Japanese custom.
Then we hopped on the river cruise and and found out that Tokyo's river has some unusual bridges. Every single one was a different style, and we passed under at least thirteen! The river cruise ended at the Hamarikyu Garden, which was really lovely. It had originally been built for Ieyasu Tokugawa (I think) as a place to go duck hunting with horses and trained hawks (you don't want the ducks to have an unfair advantage, you know). There were several nice ponds in the garden and even a big field of flowers. I'm not sure what kind they were. Mom, maybe you can identify them?
Then we all headed to Tokyo station where we said goodbye. It was so nice to see the Kusanagis again and see the children getting so big! Then Tom and I headed for a place called Shabuya (Go ahead, say it out loud and with emphasis! It's pretty fun). Shabuya Crossing is a famous intersection in Tokyo where several major roads come together and it's fun to people watch as the cars stop and tons of people pour into the crosswalks. When we went it was pouring, so we got to see it from the second floor of a Starbucks, and it looked really pretty with all of the umbrellas. Then we went to Shinjuku, where the Tokyo Municipal Government building has an observation deck on the 45th floor. It was still raining a little so the pictures didn't come out well, but it was really nice to see Tokyo lit up at night. Then we headed off to bed, so we could get up at 4:30 a.m. for our day trip to Kyoto! (The exclamation point is for Kyoto, not 4:30 a.m., but Tom has to get back to his regular school year sleep schedule somehow, so oh well.)
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