Crossing the River(s)

By Scott--one moment I liked today was when we were in Tokyo Station much too early for our train (my neurotic fault). The station has loads of shops but most were strangely closed at 8:30 a.m., and we didn't know what to do with ourselves. There's no "hang out" area, so, pulling our luggage behind us we knocked around looking for a place to wait. In the meantime full-on torrents of workaday Tokyo-ites are streaming in from seven directions. And about four or five times we had to cross one of these rivers, single file. It was really a little daunting at first. About the third time at it we were giggling, but the sober faces in the black suits kept coming. Kathy noted how nobody was hanging around getting a coffee, shmoozing, etc. Everyone was making a serious beeline for work.

It's nice to have Koji and Nobuko as guides. In Takayama tonight Koji very nicely scouted out a little local soba restaurant, and we went early and got their only cozy tatami room.

Koji said something interesting about the Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo, where I went the other day. My history is a little sketchy here, but Yasukuni is the Shinto shrine that, at least during the 1930s and 40s, was the main spot honoring dead Japanese soldiers--and, indirectly or not so, the Japanese military as an institution. And here is where I get sketchier, but in the 1990s there was a separate smaller memorial set up for a group of military leaders who were classed by the US Army as war criminals but, for various reasons, were not tried in the Tokyo trials. It is a controversial place. Every year the Japanese prime minister makes a visit, and every year the Chinese and Koreans and others protest. Koji said that he lost two uncles in the war, and that he used to visit the shrine until the war criminal memorial was created, but now because of it he won't go to Yasukuni.

More on Takayama later.