Japan day 2

April 2 - Japanese breakfast served by a lovely young lady in kimono. I recognized rice, beans and fish but not much else. It looked beautiful (yes, there is a photo!) - lots of little dishes with vegetables and other interesting looking things (one turned out to be seaweed), miso soup, green tea. It was quite an experience. The waitress (I’m sure that’s not what you call her but it’s all I know) recognized neophytes when she saw them, so kindly brought us written instructions on how to handle the dried seaweed - you dip it in soy sauce, then pick it up with your chopsticks and drop it into your rice bowl where you try and make it into a covering for a scoop of rice and then, as the instructions told us, “pick up and have it”!! I was the only female in the restaurant, everyone else (except John) was in a black business suit and white shirt. I loved the little notice on the tables - it looked like a No Smoking sign, but instead of the cigarette inside the red circle with the slash, there was a cell phone!!!! Most civilized. After breakfast we headed out into a very cold blustery, showery day. Just down the road was the Zojoji Temple which sounded promising, so off we went. There was a service going on (again, not sure of the terminology here) so we couldn’t go inside, but we wandered round the back and found a beautiful formal garden with lots of cherry trees in blossom! Since this was the reason we decided to finish our trip in Japan, I was thrilled to see that we had timed our arrival well to see the blossoms. Part of the garden was obviously dedicated to the departed, each one shown as an identical little stone figure of a person about 18” high, all of them with little knitted red scull caps on, some of them with ruffled red collars. Each little person had their own windmill (one of those little plastic ones I had as a child that you hold in your hand and it rotates in the wind). We weren’t sure of the significance of the windmills, but there were rows and rows of the little people with them and it was quite a sight. The we hopped on the train again (already getting blasé about which one to get on but we had a bit of a “moment” trying to pay for our tickets at a machine!) to head out to the Kodokan which is the Mecca of Judo. John was very keen that I visit the place that he and Jim had gone to a few years ago for the World Masters Judo Competition, so we went and had lunch and saw where all the action had been. John also bought up half the gift shop - not sure where we are going to put all the new loot as we are already over weight! We both decided that we have had our fill of museums for about the next 10 years so we opted to go to a beautiful garden near our hotel, the Hama-rikyu Gardens. It turned out that there were lots of lovely cherry trees in blossom, and all kinds of interesting shaped trees, ponds and even a field of daffodils, so I felt quite at home (thinking of England, not Canada). We were interested to see a sign that said that since the Hama-rikyu Garden is a public place, cherry blossom parties are not allowed. I later read in a tourist publication that these parties can get quite exciting! Apparently, large companies send out their lowly office boys early in the day to stake out a good place under blossoming trees. They lay out blankets and wait out the day until the big bosses arrive, complete with picnics and lots and lots of sake. It’s quite the thing to get thoroughly skunked at one of these parties - I’m sure it makes sense to someone somewhere! There was a traditional tea room in the gardens, so we went in for a cup of tea and a “Japanese confection”. We had to take our shoes off and sit on the floor, and they kindly gave us written instructions on how to eat the confection (which looked like a marzipan flower) and drink the tea (as I said to John, “I can’t quite put my finger on the taste”). The confection was OK, but I couldn’t finish my tea. The instructions had told me to try and finish “all the foam” - it really did look (and taste) rather like warm pond water, kind of thick and sickly. John gamely finished his off, but I had to leave some - just couldn’t quite make it. We went out to a sushi bar for supper (the one that John found last night). It was tiny by Canadian restaurant standards, but much bigger than some of the really tiny little holes-in-the wall that we passed on the way - some of them seating max. 8 people! And they were ALL full. The men who make the sushi stand in the middle of a circular bar and they load up a moving conveyor belt with little plates and you just take what you like the look of. Some things I definitely recognized (things with suckers on!) and some I didn’t. It was all good, but when you’ve had rice for breakfast, rice for lunch and then rice for supper, I was beginning to long for some variation! The sushi bar was certainly an experience though! On the way John took me into a pachinko parlour. Pachinko is a kind of pinball machine where you win little silver balls that you can exchange for cigarettes, food or other prizes. It’s incredibly popular here - we passed many parlours, all full. The one we went into was incredibly loud (they must need audiologists here in vast numbers!) and almost everyone was smoking, so we didn’t stay long. (Smoking is not allowed on the trains, but is not universally banned. When we had lunch today at the Kodokan, we were sitting next to a table of 4 young people who lit up at every opportunity. And we had hoped to go to a bar in our hotel tonight, but it was very smoky so we declined.) The other side of that coin is the number of people in the streets who wear surgical masks - hard to put a percentage on it, but enough that I am already used to it. Tokyo has certainly made me sneeze, but I’m not sure if it’s the spring blossom (welcome back hay fever) or pollution.