A stroll in the park

Wow, the things you can find just 5 minutes from school!

My school is the heart of "booktown", an area of Tokyo famous for its myriad second-hand bookshops. I walk past them every day, and they look fascinating. If the books were in English, I feel sure I would be too distracted to ever make it to school. On Friday, it was the annual booktown festival of books and the selling thereof. It seemed to be pretty much the same as what usually goes on (viz. selling books) but on a slightly larger scale, and with more bunting.


Wandering further afield, I found a great big lake. In the middle of the great big lake was a great big park. In the middle of the great big park was all kinds of weird stuff: concert hall, science museum, you name it.



Note the perfectly framed massive spider in this photo. Took me ages!

As I left the park, I noticed I was on yasukuni-dori. "Yasukuni," I mused to myself, "where have I heard that before?" As I'm sure the more media-aware amongst you (hello, Alice) can tell me, yasukuni jinja is the shrine that the Japanese Prime Minister keeps visiting relentlessly, much to the chagrin of the rest of the world. For the less media-aware, here's a quick rundown: it was built in the late 1800's, and honours every one of Japan's war dead since then. Unfortunately, this happens to include 13 war criminals, and various other Geneva-convention-legal but rather nasty characters. I thought I'd better go and see what all the fuss was about.

This is definitely the ugliest torii I've ever seen. It's made of metal and is all rusty and horrible. Also, look at the whole coachloads of people that have come to honour war criminals. It seems Koizumi is not alone.

After the nasty torii, I was glad to see this very impressive door. As some of you know, I'm a man who likes a good door, and this certainly fits the bill.


So here it is, in all its glory. In my humble opinion, it looks like every other shinto shrine I've ever seen. The thing about shinto shrines is that they hype it up with all those torii, and a big long beautiful path, but once you get there you discover it's just a big box housing an invisible spirit. Very anticlimactic.


After that, I went to school, then picked up Mai from the station. She came to visit for the weekend. More details in the next post....

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I strolled in the park,
Then visited a big shrine,
What a dull haiku.