Tokyo Diaries Day 6

Todays adventure was to Yanaka. Yanaka is one of the best preserved older districts of Tokyo, that survived the earthquake in 1923 and the bombings in 1945, relatively unscathed. Yanaka has very narrow streets (only one car at a time in one direction with barely enough room for pedestrians at times). We decided over coffee this morning at Starbucks (there are no Gloria Jeans here as yet), that we would do the walking tour outlined in our Eyewitness travel book.

So book in hand, we got off at Yanaka station and off we went up the hill to our first stop the Suwa Shrine. This shrine was founded in 1322 and is home to the deity which protects the Yanaka district. It has two statues of lions at the front.

It is very strange seeing shrines and temples in the middle of a city - looking out at the railroad tracks and love hotels:


A little further along another temple, this one is the Yofuku-ji Temple:

Walking along the road a bit further, we hung a left on to a larger street. Walking past some local shops (which had these strange lettuce looking plants in pots), before we arrived at the Kyoo-Ji Temple. There were bullet holes in the wooden gates that serve as the entrance to the temple, from some ancient battle:


Down a stair case from the main street, to a narrow shopping street called the Yanaka Ginza. We found lots of interesting little shops here. Dave bought some sweet biscuits (which taste like golden syrup) from a little shop (pictured below), we purchased a couple of souveneirs from another shop, but my favourite was the tea shop, which sold little tea cups and tea leaves. They served complimentary green tea everytime you walked in the shop:


Next stop was the Yanake Cemetery. I thought it a little strange to walk through a cemetery, but this one had walking paths all the way through it (it even had a children's playground and public toilets). It was almost Gothic in Style, a lot of older memorials here (not too many recent ones).


Sights like these made the cemetery very eerie:

And then there were cherry blossom trees in flower, so beautiful in such a sombre place:

Adjoining the Cemetery was another temple, the Tenno-Ji Temple, the main feature a statue of the great Budha of Yanake, cast in bronze in 1691. The gardens in this temple were immaculate - we loved the little toparied tree Dave is standing in front of, wonder whether we could grow one at home?




After getting a little confused with the directions in the book, some nice young ladies showed us how to get to our next destination - they are very friendly here, although they do not speak much english at all. We finally found the next temple - the Daien-Ji Temple, which has two adjoining halls, one buddhist and one Shinto.

Across the road from the Daien-Ji temple, was one of the oldest paper-art shops in Tokyo the Isetatsu, I had a nice little shop in here:

As we are wandering around local streets with residental homes (of all different types), we passed these two "stacked" cars - we couldn't resist taking a picture. We have never seen anything like this:

Okay, so by this time Dave has ssen enough temples, so we head for the nearest railway station, and catch three trains (we had to change platforms and lines - we are truly masters of the Tokyo subway) to a district called Akihabara - the Electric City. We only stopped to look at one electronics store (as they are all eight stories high and have mainly the same stuff in them). This one had a particularly large toy/games section on the top floor. There are lots of smaller sized toys, and a lot of toys themed around Anime characters for both boys and girls. Models of Anime characters actually took up an entire section of about six rows. the other popular thing was the toys you get out of the vending machines in the egg shapred containers. There were several rows of these- amounting to a couple of hundred machines carrying different themed toys.



After returning to the Ginza, Dave did a bit of shopping at a five story toy shop, while I had a bit of a rest (the feet are really really sore). We headed out for our next culinary experience the Curry Soup. We went to a place downstairs called the Spice Pierrot on the main street in the Ginza. They served us the soup, and provided huge bibs. Dave had the White curry soup with cheese, tomato and bacon, and I had the Red Curry Soup with seafood and black beans. Each soup is served with vegetables in them, a boiled egg and potato. Rice is servied on the side, which you can eat with your soup. It was delicious.