Sunday, October 27
Our first full day took us from the extreme traditionalism of a Shinto shrine to the garish neon modernity of Ginza Crossing. And we loved every minute of it.
We had breakfast at our hotel, a buffet with plenty of choices. Our hotel, the Millennium Matsui Garden, doesn’t have a lot to recommend it besides the location–in the heart of Ginza and right at a metro station. It is a newish property, and the rooms are fine if rather small; a thin veneer of style seeks to hide its deficiencies, which include the lack of a lobby, a real bar, and a helpful staff.
The Tokyo subway certainly lives up to its billing: easy to navigate, fast, and with remarkable coverage of central Tokyo.
Our first stop was the Meiji-Jingu Shrine, a Shinto shrine built in 1920 to house the soul of the Emperor and Empress who brought the capital to Tokyo from Kyoto. The shrine seems much older, not merely because of the extreme traditionalism of its architecture, but especially because of the verdant, mature park in which the shrine sits. One approaches through Torii gates, the traditional sign for a Shinto shrine; literally bird abode, the Torii marks the passage from the profane to the sacred precinct.
As you approach the shrine, you purify your hands and mouth; it seems that at least some part of the Japanese obsession with hygiene derives from the Shinto injunctions regarding purification and defilement (obligatory disquisition on the Japanese toilet to follow).
The shrine itself consists of a huge entrance courtyard with a smaller sanctuary at the rear. The shrine is full of people yet doesn’t seem crowded; many of those present are families with women and children in traditional dress.
I was able to get this family portrait because the group asked Vladimir to take it for them and I piggybacked.
The shrine is a popular site for weddings; we saw at least five of them. The bride and groom are led in solemn procession by two priests and two “temple maidens.” The wedding itself consists of a Shinto liturgy and a ritual dance by one of the young women.
From the shrine we walked along another path in the park and then along Omotesande, the boulevard at the center of Tokyo’s “fashion town.” Tokyoites dress very formally; even the young are well turned out, some in rather classic style, some at fashion’s sharp edge.
The boulevard leads directly to a remarkable place, the Nezu Museum, a private collection of Asian art and antiquities. Housed in a gorgeous building and embraced by a spectacularly beautiful garden, this is one of the most moving museums we’ve ever visited.
The museum holds a vast collection, and the building is large enough to house a warren of galleries, but it is divided instead into just six large galleries. When we visited, two of these were given over to a special exhibit of birds and flowers in Asian art centered on a series of exquisite painted scrolls and panels from China, Japan, and Korea. Another gallery held just three large wooden polychrome statues of the boddhisatva of healing; these were some of the loveliest Buddhist art I’ve ever seen. In the upstairs galleries, the first held a series of Chinese cast bronze vessels from the thirteenth century B.C. The technology alone was mind blowing, but the beauty of the designs was staggering. The second displayed highlights from one of the largest sword collections in the world: finely worked bronze pommels and collars from the last 600 years. I never imagined that I could be interested in these, but the artistry involved was extraordinary: entire, finely detailed landscapes in a space 1/2 x 1 1/2”. The final gallery held the implements of the tea ceremony: water vessels, pots, cups, and carved wooden implements. Like all the galleries, these were chosen for the relevance to the autumn season. We had never been to a museum that so successfully focused the viewer on just a few objects. And what objects!
We took a cab back to Ginza and a siesta at the hotel.
We ventured out in the late afternoon to the Mitsukoshi department store, 11 floors of opulence that New York can’t begin to rival. The showpiece are the two bottom floors, a food display more than twice as big as that at KaDeWe in Berlin, the largest one we know. A huge space is given over to desserts, many of which are stunning and jewel like.
We gravitated to the meat section, to marvel at the marbling of the beef.
And the sushi and bento boxes are like nothing we’d seen before.
The concierge at our hotel had made a mess of our supposed dinner reservations, so we decided to simply eat at one of the two dozen restaurants on the top floors of the department store! Most of these were astonishingly expensive, so we embarrassed ourselves and ate at the most reasonable of the lot, which happened to be (mediocre) Chinese.
We capped the day with a stroll to the Ginza crossing, one of the nighttime sights for which Tokyo is justly famous.
Talk about La nuit américaine!
What a first day!