Spring day in Tokyo

cherry tree in full bloom

Tokyo is in full bloom, filled with cherry blossoms, brilliant white gardenias, azaleas just beginning to show their full glory and even a little sunshine.  Tomorrow will be different when we go to Nikko, about 2 hours away, to see one of Japan's most important Shinto shrines in the chill and rain.

cherry blossoms

But, today, Sunday, we drove easily through the streets and walked the shopping streets jammed with shoppers, like 5th Avenue at Christmastime. 

fish guarding stone wall of Imperial Palace

Our first visit was to the East Garden of the Imperial Palace, bursting with flowers, beautifully maintained and filled with people enjoying the spring weather, changing tomorrow to another dose of winter.  The Imperial Palace was once the Shogun's castle, complete with huge walls of stone roaming for 10 miles around the compound and a large moat.  Today, it is much smaller, but still impressive.  The Emperor and Empress live in a palace hidden inside the grounds. 

Nearby live the Crown Prince and his very unhappy wife (a Harvard and Oxford-trained former diplomat) who is practically imprisoned inside another large, walled compound.   When she married the Crown Prince, he promised her that she could act as the royal family diplomat, but the court bureaucracy nixed that, telling her that her only job was to produce a male heir.  Sadly for her, their only child is a girl who will be legally unable to assume the throne.  What a dismal testimonial to the tyranny of tradition in Japan.

Japan is a Buddhist and Shinto country in almost equal measure.  Most Buddhists practice Buddhism and Shintoism at the same time.  Shinto is an animist religion.  Japanese regularly visit the Shinto shrines to pay their respects to animist gods and make their wishes for special favors in life.  They also belong to Buddhist temples (shrines are where gods live and temples are where monks live, work and pray).  Only about 2 million Japanese are Christians despite centuries of proselytizing by Christian missionaries.

bridal procession at Meiji shrine

On Sundays, brides and grooms make the Shinto shrines a key part of their wedding day.  We watched several couples walking through the shrines attended by Shinto priests.

After a lovely Japanese kansei lunch, all beautifully prepared and displayed, we visited the private museum, Ukiyo-e Ota Memorial Museum of Art, devoted to a collection of 12,000 Japanese woodblock prints.  Mr. Ota recognized the importance of woodblocks in Japanese art and collected them to save this important part of Japanese culture.  Originally, woodblocks were cheap and plentiful.  At one time, when large quantities of Japanese porcelain was shipped to Europe, the pieces were wrapped in discarded woodblock prints.  The recipients in Europe were amazed at the beauty of the woodblocks and started collecting them as well as the porcelain.

kaiseki lunch