Shichi Fukujin (七福神)
I spotted the Seven Lucky Gods being turned into something of a bike parking lot near the Horikiri Shobuen Station (堀切菖蒲園駅).
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Field of dreams for a lefty
AT&T Park in San Francisco has nothing on this place. There you have to hit the ball about 400 feet and clear a wall and rows of fans before you “splash down” in McCovey Cove.
At this baseball field, on the Arakawa River (荒川) in Tokyo, water is less than 250 feet away for a left-handed hitter. There are no walls or seats to clear. There were a couple of guys fishing in right field though.
Foot-loose in Tokyo
I recently picked up Foot-loose in Tokyo, not because I thought it would be useful (due to when it was written) but because I thought it would be fun to see what things were like along the Yamanote Line in the 1970s. The funny thing is many of the things the author, Jean Pearce, thought would quickly disappear are still here and many that were thought to be permanent fixtures are long gone.
The book is very interesting to read even though the contents are so dated. Perhaps the fact they are so dated makes it an even more enjoyable read. I read the whole book on the train (the Chuo Line, not the Yamanote Line) one day. The contents changed the way I think about many of the Yamanote Line stops.
The entry for Takadanobaba shows surprisingly few differences from the book’s era until today. Big Box, Omokage-bashi, Mizu Inari Jinja, Waseda University, Kansenen–all are the same today, decades later. One entry caught my eye, dealing with an ancient tree on a street I walk down nearly every day. I had no memory of seeing this ancient tree so I figured, as did the author, that the tree’s location had turned into a parking lot or apartment building in the ensuing years.
“You may see the tired remains of what was once a majestic old shiinoki (sweet acorn) tree which in other days was encircled by a Shinto rope to commemorate its venerable age, said to be more than 500 years…
Years ago there was a five-story pagoda here. It was destroyed during the wartime bombings; only the trees remain. The property is presently a parking lot, but once it belonged to a daimyo family.” (p. 114)
So I looked for the majestic old shiinoki and, in so doing, discovered that what was always there I had never before seen. Sure enough, it still fills the corner of a parking lot and probably goes completely unnoticed by the vast majority of people who pass. There is no sign (as there frequently is in Japan) commemorating its age or history. The Shinto rope (shimenawa) is back up and around its trunk however. A sake offering rests at its base.
Horikiri Shobuen (堀切菖蒲園)
As mentioned last time, June is iris (hanashobu) blooming month at Horikiri Shobuen. We arrived early on a Sunday morning but not nearly early enough to avoid the crowd.
The number of people with gigantic, expensive cameras taking pictures was ridiculous. I don’t understand why these cameras are so popular given the price, size, and weight. I’m pretty sure the pictures don’t come out 10 or 20 times better even though the cameras cost that much more than mine.
I can understand wanting a dSLR at a sporting event, but in most settings, they make no sense. One guy I was standing next to was firing off about 30 shots in a row each time he pointed his camera at a flower. He wasn’t changing the settings or his vantage point between photos. Why would someone want 30 digital pics of the exact same scene? There was no wind so it wasn’t like the flower was moving or somehow changing.
The same goes for tripods. There were loads and loads of tripods people were using to take pictures of flowers. Why? Tripods have their purpose. They can be useful for group photos when you don’t have an extra person with you who isn’t part of the group or for night photography, but you don’t need one to take a picture of a flower in the bright sunshine people!
Sorry for the mini rant.
Hiroshige’s take on the same scene a couple hundred years before in one of his “100 Famous Views of Edo” required no DSLR or tripod as far as I know.
Kanto Yamato Taiko (関東やまと太鼓)
My first visit to Katsushika-Ku (葛飾区) was not to 亀有公園前派出所, home of my favorite manga, but to the 葛飾菖蒲まつり on the Arakawa side of the district. In June the locals celebrate the blooming irises in Horikiri Shobuen (堀切菖蒲園) as they have been for hundreds of years, but more on the flowers in tomorrow’s entry.
Today’s photo and video are from the taiko performance that we witnessed.
Quintessential old-style Tokyo house
This kind of Tokyo home is becoming harder and harder to find. I suppose Tokyo was loaded with these kinds of structures after the war. Most are now long gone, although some neighborhoods still have some clusters. The one pictured above was all by its lonesome, wedged between a gasoline service station/car wash and a bar. The location isn’t down some back alley in a shitamachi as you may expect. This home is right on Meiji Dori between Ebisu and Hiroo Stations.