Week 6: NIKKO, SADNESS, YUKATAS

Eric Yu

Saturday

Woke up pretty late today. Today I was in the mood for a little wandering, so first I set out to drop by a shrine in Akiba that somehow I had never been to. The Kanda-myojin shrine is home to the deity of Akihabara and many other districts of Tokyo, but since it’s located right beside Akiba you know that that means…


The eta (wishing blocks) were full of anime drawings and anime-related wishes, and I think half the ones I read were praying for another season of Love Live, a pretty popular anime at the moment.

After some solid wandering my stomach naturally got hungry, so I decided to drop by a ramen place known for having a Sichuan style of cooking. This means that it’s spicy. The design of the restaurant is based on Japanese oni (demons) and jigoku (hell), so I knew things were going to get a little warm in here.


As if I hadn’t done enough walking today, the Tokyo National Museum was nearby, so I thought I’d drop by there too. It was a fun ride through Japanese history, and I got to see shiny swords (very important!!!1).


After walking around for days, I headed home to get some rest before the evening, because we, along with some buddies, were going out to watch the new One Piece movie! Hype. Since I walked so much today, I was super happy when I got to sit down with everybody in the movie theatre to watch One Piece Gold on its opening night!

Sunday

Somehow after we got home yesterday we decided to go to Nikko, a famous town 2 hours out from Tokyo. Known as the resting place of Tokugawa Ieyasu, the first Edo period shogun, and a myriad of other pretty, natural scenery, we decided (after lengthy discussion) that it was worth waking up at 6 AM to make the trip.

Following the river to get to the main temple, we decided to go a little off-road to spice up the adventure.

Maybe a little too off-road.

At any rate, after a while of walking through tall grass we ended up at the first main landmark, the Shinkyo Bridge, famous for its beauty. It did not disappoint:

Making our way into the temples, although some of the buildings were under renovation, we were nonetheless impressed with the resting places of several shoguns. Tokugawa Ieyasu’s mausoleum was especially gorgeous:

After the temples we set out to the west to visit Kegon falls, one of the Japan’s three most beautiful waterfalls. After a pretty long bus ride we got dropped off nearby the falls, but we wanted a better view so we took an elevator to the bottom of the falls for quality picture-taking opportunities:

Walking around some more, we ended up near a large lake, and noticed an interesting activity going on that we assumed to be speed-dating. But we were tired, so we plopped ourselves on a neighboring pier and did some meditation:

After doing some meditating, we headed back where we came from towards Tokyo. The last bus was still ways to go, so it was not nearly as creative as coming back from Mitake!

Monday:

Pooped from 2 long day-trips out of 2 weekends, we kind of just went home after class today. I decided not to bring up that this next weekend would probably be an interesting experience as well. We did stop by a cute pet shop to recharge some batteries though!

Tuesday:

Today Ting-san’s buddy from Todai came over to hang out with us, so we headed over to Shimokitazawa, the hipster-ville of Tokyo, to do some shopping. Since he lived in Shimokitazawa, he showed us some cool shops, including one that only sold stickers:

We finished up the visit with a long talk about the Japanese working environment over some delicious oyaji dinner.

Wednesday:

What’s that feeling when you get when you wake up at 6 AM and run like 2 hours in the morning to a ramen restaurant you’ve been looking forward to eating at for the past few weeks and then realizing that it’s not open?

Thursday:

Sadness. But it’s ok, I got some ramen today too.

Friday:

Matsuri time again! Today everybody got together and went to Kagurazaka after class ended to go check out the large matsuri happening over there. But before that, we needed to evolve — this meant putting on yukatas. Tying the sash took about 30 minutes of trying and failing before we asked the teacher to do it for us, but in the end everybody got to experience wearing Japanese traditional summer clothing. Thankfully it was summer clothing, because anything else and we would have melted at the matsuri. The matsuri was hot and crowded, which meant a lot of trying to control your own sweat outflow but realizing that it’s impossible and just becoming a sweaty beast.

But everybody made it out, and even better, with their sashes still on, so great success!

Except for Kevin, who kind of wasn’t wearing a yukata in the first place but still managed to evolve even further than the rest of us.

Now, back at home, I’m hard at work making preparations for this weekend’s special activity. I don’t think I’ve mentioned it yet, so it should be somewhat of a surprise in next week’s blog post. Please look forward to it, and thanks for staying with me!



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