Sunday, January 19, 2020

back to tokyo


     Flying in early we hit the rush hour on the metro to Ginza and it seems very familiar: jammed in tight, silent, eyes locked on phones where space permits: but different too: uniformity of black suits and black hair create a monocultural image very different from our dear old lumbering Underground.
     Dumping our bags at the hotel, with six hours to kill we wander the streets of Ginza and find our way to the forecourt of the Imperial Palace. School trips all around. Here a party of white track suited kids run riot; while a boys' school in smart midshipman style uniforms stand stiffly as they listen to their teacher: the class system as strong here as back home. The eastern gardens of the palace are open to the public (though partly cut off as the remnants of the recent enthronement of the new emperor are dismantled). Built within the massive stone walls of the old Edo castle, they are a good introduction to the Japanese love of landscape gardening, miniature visions of wild nature.
     It's testimony to how much we loved our first visit to Japan that we are back so soon. We grab some lunch in a traditional tonkatsu restaurant embedded in a department store; luscious fried pork and giant prawn in breadcrumbs, with lots of accompaniments: the local comfort food.
     Next day, with weather much better than predicted, we visit Asakusa, a very grand palace built at the turn of the 20th century in French Empire style for the crown prince, and now a government guest house, all enormous gilded halls and crystal chandeliers. From there we walked through the Aoyama district, with its huge cemetery: the granite grave markers stand stark in the winter sunlight, rhyming with the narrow square tower blocks of the city beyond. This brings us to the jewel-like Nezu museum, a light and airy modernist building, designed by Kenzo Kuma and completed in 2009 set in a steeply sloping strolling garden featuring those same eight views and a very modern tea house where we had lunch. The museum houses a collection of oriental statues and scroll paintings, the best of them inspirationally spare in technique – a few deft brush strokes and a whole bamboo plant appears. This spareness is reflected in the building and in Japanese interiors generally, which of course has a huge influence on interior design around the world today, but here is in a tradition going way back to the simple timber houses and tatami rooms across the country. Our hotel room at the Millennium Mitsui also reflected this. A compact but perfectly formed room where every detail had been worked out, down to the smallest. (There was also a toilet that opened up and whined every time you went past, like an eager puppy that wants to play, and which had 12 buttons to operate and an A4 size list of instructions!)
     We continued to the National Garden at Shinjuku, Japan's Kew, another beautiful example of the tradition recently feautured in Monty Don's series on Japanese landscape design. By then we had had enough (walking over ten miles in the day) and finished the day with a siesta and a visit to the Belgian beer bar near the hotel that we had found the previous day. Alate middle aged man sat at the bar with a plate of salad and three small glasses of different Belgian beers, which he porceed to sniff and sample like a wine connoisseur. Slowly, slowly, sip after sip, for a full two hours before the salad and the drinks were gone. Not a word to anyone: absolute focus on the task in hand. Then a quick phone call – to the wife saying he'd been held up to at the office? – and he was off.
     The third day was all drizzle and sleet, but we still managed some major walking starting at Ueno Park, where we visited the le Corbusier designed Museum of Western Art. This has a very comprehensive collection from the early Renaissance through to modernists. Then throught he park to the Yanaka district: small streets and houses, many temples, and the main shopping street, Yanaka Ginza, where we had lunch in a local cafe. Then we hopped on the tram that runs through the northern suburbs to Shinjuku, people watching as the locals came and went, mostly on local journeys of a few stops. Old ladies bent double with shopping trolleys; Saturday dads with lively nippers that smiled shyly at us foreigners; track suited youths sharing an instagram video.
     An early morning vignette. A very old security guard, well into his seventies, in hi-vis uniform with a red baton (a common phenomenon here) stands outside the entrance to a car park. It's a job creation kind of job: he just waits until a car emerges from the garage and waves the baton around ineffectually to stop the traffic. A young girl, in a smart school uniform, probably no more than eight and on her own, approaches: a secret smile on her face as she sees the guard. She catches his eye and stops facing him. He smiles and bows very respectfully to her. She bows even more deeply, then is on her way. A little ritual that has perhaps developed over many weeks as she walks to school, a little moment to brighten the day for both of them.

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