Back to the doctor

Finally getting around to blogging again, per an email from my mom commenting on the fact that I hadn't written lately. Anyway, I made yet another visit to a doctor's clinic today, though for once it wasn't for me -- Lorraine's got a gnarly eyelid infection! She woke up this morning with her eye almost swollen shut. A friend from her aikido group came to her rescue and brought the both of us to a nearby clinic in Mitaka (I tagged along for the ride... it didn't end up being of any medical use to me, as the doctor was an opthamologist.) The clinic diagnosed Lorraine as having a mono morai (the Japanese word for "sty".) So Lor's been using eyedrops and ointment all day, waiting for the swelling to decrease. Always an adventure in Japan, apparently!

I dodged typhoon rain all day today and did a good bit of sightseeing in Tokyo. Tokyo is an amazing, crazy place... the guidebook is correct in its assertion that Tokyo is more a collection of cities than a city in and of itself. It's a huge metropolis, with different districts that each have a different flavor and community. I'll be exploring different districts on each day, so I chose Ueno and Ikebukuro today, given that the weather was warm but threatened rain.

Ueno is home to Tokyo's oldest park and its finest museums, sort of like Golden Gate Park in SF. It's also a bustling commercial district, home to the Ameyoko-cho, a former WWII black market area that's now populated by fish sellers and other sundry vendors... the Japan Tourist Bureau brochure notes that it's fun to "listen to the spiel" of the salespeople... not that I'd understand what they were hawking! But after my wonderful lunch of unagi donburi (baked/broiled eel on rice) it was fun to walk down the street and see what other tasty seafood was available.

I visited two museums in Ueno: the Shitamachi Museum, at the southern tip of Ueno Park, and the premiere Tokyo National Museum. The Shitamachi Museum is my idea of a good museum - community oriented, hands-on, and conveying a sense of social history. The museum has re-created scenes from the neighborhoods that used to exist in Ueno - the tenements, a candy/toy vendor's booth, a metalsmith's shop, and a geta/sandal maker. You can take off your shoes and enter their tatami mat rooms, and get acquainted with them through their material lives... the strings of colorful geta straps on display, the "heater" that warmed the smith's home, even geta that you can try on to walk around. On the second floor, I finally got to play pachinko with a reproduction of a children's pachinko set - nails tapped into a wooden board, with marbles instead of pachinko balls and a little bat to tap the marbles up into the board. There were also lots of photos on display that showed the Ueno district's neighborhoods and their inhabitants.

The Tokyo National Museum, on the other hand, was authoritatively educational, if somewhat sterile. Granted, it was a "best of the best" walk through Japanese art history, featuring many national treasures and "designated cultural properties". I saw Ainu crafts, samurai swords, armor, ukiyo-e woodblock prints, Zen Buddhist paintings, poetry, and kabuki and noh costumes... Japanese culture has a great diversity of art and craft production.

With the storm on the horizon, I headed out of Ueno and to Ikebukuro, which features Japan's largest department store, Tobu. It's not the fanciest nor the most expensive, but I got super tired walking around the nine long floors of clothing, household goods, toys, stationery/office supplies, and furniture... it has another several floors on top of these nine with house restaurants and eateries. Among the labels represented at Tobu are Prada, Gucci, and Tiffany, so it's amusing to think that this is just a mid-end department store.

Also paid a visit to the Japan Traditional Craft Center, housed in the same plaza as Tobu... marveled at the contemporary kimono, which ranged in priced from $1000-$50,000 for a kimono that was sewn of fabric so fine that it was almost translucent.

Send me your good weather vibes as the weather reports show rain this coming week... don't want the weather to spoil the few days of relatively good health that I have in Japan!