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Houzuki festival
Who knew buying a plant could be such a festive event? We walked down to the Bunkyo-ku Asagao and Houzuki Festival at Konyaku-Enma shrine to get a Chinese lantern plant (houzuki) and were greeted by a dozen festival staff. They were so friendly and quite surprised when Tod conversed in Japanese. Houzuki are old-fashioned summer…
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Matsuri dressup
8:45 pm. Two girls heading off for an ice cream from the Family Mart after the asagao festival at Denzuin.
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Underground
I’ve been reading Underground by Haruki Murakami. It’s a work of non-fiction about the 1995 Tokyo Sarin Attack. Murakami interviewed people who were vicitms and members of the cult that perpetrated the attack and compiled them into a very compelling read. The attacks occurred well before I came to Japan and I never really learned…
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Collectible plates
I’m going to tell you a secret. Those saccharine little collectible plates you’ve been giving your mom every year on Mother’s Day? They may not be worth much. Last night at Hakunincho Yataimura, a food court featuring really decent Asian cuisine in Okubo, we asked for extra dishes. What did they bring? A dozen “Cherished…
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Linguistic Deductions
Linguistic Deductions “Remain Heart is a funny name for a restaurant,” I said as we approached this sign at Iidabashi station. “Maybe they meant remain heartful,” Tod suggested. In katakana English, heartful seems to mean ‘loving and caring.’ “Maybe. But why is the picture a brain with a heart in it?” “That’s not a brain.…
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The flow of holidays
After four years, I am converted to the flow of Japanese holidays and seasons. In my imagination, summer is indigo and white, with kingyo, morning glories, glass chimes, cool somen noodles, and mosquito coils in pig-shaped pottery jars. (Check out Hide Itoh’s excellent collection of summer icons at pixture.com) There are two holiday traditions in…
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Yakatabune
Yakatabune! Dining on Tokyo Bay. Floating parties on ships like these are a summer tradition dating back centuries. Poetry readings and courtly music have been replaced by karaoke, but the spirit is the same. It was fun to dress up in yukata.
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Typhoon Chataan
Typhoon Chataan blew through yesterday (so much for too little rain) and by 2:30 this morning, it was extraordinarily windy. We battened down the hatches and went to sleep. This morning the sky is bright and clear except for an appalling haze of pollution around the horizon.
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It’s stopped raining
It’s stopped raining. Yesterday’s weather was hot and humid–typical Tokyo summer. We’re due to have thundersorms over the next couple of days, but that’s not a typical rainy season all-day drizzle. Looks like tsuuyu is over. If so, that was a very short rainy season. Farmers rely on a long tsuuyu to keep the rice…
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Naming hills
Tokyo has a lot of hills with names. Streets generally don’t have names, but the hills do: Andozaka, Tomisaka, Dangozaka. A few of them are well-known for their neighborhoods or train stations–Kagurazaka, Nogizaka, Akasaka–and there are plenty that loan their names to busy intersections, but many are only etched onto historical signs dotting the local…
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