Digression around Ginza

A short digression on the way back from an errand yesterday. The Sukiyabashi park is located behind the Gap store at the intersection of the Sotobori and Harumi streets. A single sprig of grass qualifying for the Japanese term of park, there are lots of urban parks that simply do not deserve such naming suggesting lawns and flower and dirt paths devoid of cars. Sukiyabashi park is just a small green spot that yet deserves not to be ignored. First because of the Young Clock Tower of the late Okamoto Taro, and the close-by Taimei elementary and kindergarden school.Okamoto Taro clock is fun and peps up the bland surrounding. Children of all ages love Okamoto Taro.




The Taimei school is an incongruous establishment nowadays in a district where residents are apparently an extremely rare species. And the school partly surrounded by the elevated highway is the least clean and silent place where to have ones kids go daily. But it's a charming sight all the same with cement arches.






While the original school was built here some 120 years ago, the wrought iron gate is a rather recent acquisition, seemingly for the South of France. It was once the gate to a rich French dwelling.





This is a convenient map and site on Ginza

Technorati Tags: Japan, Tokyo

Skywalking in Tokyo Panoramic

Yesterday's brief but strong storm in Tokyo has cleaned up the sky this morning. The air texture is Autumn. An anomaly in May that will be quickly rectified. Panoramic pictures these days are so easy to create, thanks to software, that it is hard to resist.

Click to open in another window, click to enlarge and scroll horizontally to look for the numbers.

1. The Kudanshita crossing. When the black trucks of the extreme right thugs gather here at a short distance of the controversial Yasukuni shrine, the free Japanese media don't even mention the fact. Part of the folklore.

2. This is the new Aozora bank head-office now building. Tokyo is mushrooming. Most of the skyscrapers in the distance facing the sea waterfront were not here 9 years ago when we got to start living in the center part of Tokyo. An non-economist question to ask is how those blood-in-the-red banks can still pour money into building yet new head-offices.

3. Hotel Grand Palace, the starting point of my currently suggested walks in Tokyo, on an iPod near you, or more in details scattered all over the place here.

4. The tiny Tokyo Tower, to be dwarfed by a bigger one in a few years.

5. This bit of copper layered roof is the Budô-kan, a circular hall for music and sports events.

6. The Kitanomaru park, which is part of all the green seen on this side of the picture, which is the huge imperial palace district.

7. The colossal but here tiny top of the Yasukuni shrine portal.

8. This building delivered about 2 years ago near the Indian embassy is one of the most expensive condominium in Japan. It sold out immediately. We walked along it one day and were definitely not impressed.

9. The French lycée.

10. A tower at the Hosei university of Law.

11. Mount Fuji with snow that is clearly melting. Seeing Fuji-san in May from this distance with the sky usually milky whitish and filled with smog is a rare opportunity. It actually looks much bigger with human eyes.

12. The Tokyo government towers in Shinjuku district.

13. The building on top of Iidabashi station. Historically, Iidabashi was the starting point of a major railway track that ran away as far as Kôfu city in Yamanashi prefecture, famous for grapes and fruits. When we moved in, the extreme right of the picture was the second generation remnants of the tracks.

14. Tokyo may be located on the sea front, but mountains are very close by and hard to get unnoticed.

15. This one tower, courtesy of tax payers, is brand new and even still not open. It will be a Tokyo wards council something where civil servants will gather for unending discussions and no actions plans I assume.

Exquisite asphalt

French poet and master flâneur Jacques Réda published some 20 years ago a book under the title "Le Bitume est exquis" (The Asphalt is exquisite). I now believe I do fully understand - and enjoy - the beauty of this short expression, how it fits indeed the requirements of a qualified urban flâneur. It is not a suggestion to keep ones nose and eyes bent down toward the asphalt while walking - a pretty risky attitude - but acknowledge the grayish surface as a core element of the urban flânerie experience. Do urban surfaces have signatures of their own, cues of a terroir characteristics? The glistening pavement of Brassaï pictures of Paris at night belong without any doubt to Paris. This may be the result of intellectual knowledge, but it is a certitude all the same. There is probably a community of experiences for kids having been raised on asphalt and cobblestone urban areas at times when the season allowing it, the playground was the street outside the house. The community lays in the asphalt, where we usually crouched or sat and played jacks, where knees got bruised so many times following roller skates accidents. Asphalt was sometimes warm and welcoming, sometimes an enemy generating scars. Rare are the cases when I see school children crouching on the asphalt in Tokyo. Grown-ups are quick at frowning at such mean attitude. Crouching on the asphalt is an attitude that belongs to the tramp, the homeless. It calls for despise. Funny when I think about it now how we crouched on the asphalt for Summers after Summers without much reprimand. Urban walking which is urban flânerie is a rare opportunity to regain contact with the child inside. The condition for this to happen is simply a matter of awareness of the common ground of identity of asphalt here and there. When one reaches such awareness, it is not much a pang of sad nostalgia than a wink from some cunning smiling angel that sort of gently strikes from out of the blue, in Paris, in Tokyo or with a Patriot of the Fourteenth Ward, Brooklin. Indeed at such time, the asphalt is exquisite.

Tokyo 16th arrondissement

If you are lucky enough to stay in the Tokyo Prince hotel or the brand new Prince Tower hotel in the Shiba park area, you have a wealth of walking experiences to enjoy nearby. Besides the famous temples in the area, the lateral street running behind the Hibiya avenue and hidden by a lush cluster of green and shade is reminiscent of a kind of Bois de Boulogne or 16th arrondissement in Paris. Walking along that backstage street, I found the Crescent House restaurant building behind the foliage. I have no clue about the history of that brick state house, but the view from many angles is beautiful and well deserve a slow, very slow approach, with many standstill phases, like a hummingbird flâneur. This way, I could notice on the top of it a sundial.







When in front of the restaurant, you walk along that lane on your right, you will discover after crossing a street a mysterious temple like visibly very old small religious building made of stone that seemingly belongs to a private person and is not mentioned in the many maps to be found around this strangely beautiful area.

China in Tokyo

I am not actively looking for the weird association of the ancient and the (no so much) modern, but the combination keeps coming in full view these days. Today in Tokyo, in the area of Shiba-Koen, that is, Shiba park, I took a few minutes before a work errand walking inside the Zojoji temple where I had not set foot for years despite brief glimpses from a taxi window many times.

A good in my eyes temple is Buddhist, red and a little bit decrepit. This one, or at least part of it, fairly fits the bill.

A good in my eyes temple is a reminder these days of a film I remember having seen a few times as a child on French TV. A film, possibly American, for kids. where the only thing I can remember is two children, a brother and a sister in pajamas on bed, and the bed for some reasons I forgot ends up in the middle of the open space in front of a Chinese temple, with the kids startled at what is happening. I also remember a monkey like character with a particular habit of spitting balls out of its mouth or ears like a magician.

Among the conventional and usual conversation starters one goes through here is the question about what triggered ones coming in Japan and learning the language. Among the set of possible answers I keep in my mental wallet is a cover page of Air France in-flight magazine about Japan with a doll like Japanese girl picture. Japan is a female that lured me in.

But before Japan clarified in the mind, it was part of an imaginary mic-mac called Asia, where bits of China, Vietnam, and Japan where messily but happily living together. Karate practiced a few years on the trail of the Bruce Lee craze was an early sign of longing to elsewhere. Elsewhere can happen when crossing the street. My elsewhere was Asia with a heavy slant at China.

But when thinking more deeply about all this, it appears that Japan started with China which was all the same, bundled in the same bag of fantastic and mystery. And this film seen on TV is probably the most early visual representation of elsewhere, a film I would love to find a reference about today. China was elsewhere. It turned to be Japan when subjectivity meddled in the picture. For China, that is, the China of red temples with a court where a bed carrying two startled kids clad in pajamas sort of landed is the true real and inaccessible dreamland.


"One never thinks of China, but it is there all the time on the tips of your fingers and it makes your nose itchy; and long afterwards, when you have forgotten almost what a firecracker smells like, you wake up one day with gold leaf choking you and the broken pieces punk waft back their pungent odor and the bright red wrappers give you the nostalgia for a people and a soil you have never known, but which is in your blood, mysteriously there in your blood, like the sense of time and space, a fugitive, constant value to which you turn more and more as you get old, which you try to seize with your mind, but ineffectually, because in everything Chinese there is wisdom and mystery and you can never grasp it with two hands or with your mind but you must let it rub off, let it stick to your fingers, let it slowly infiltrate your veins"." "Tropic of Cancer" (Henry Miller)

Walking with the eyes of the spirit wide open

Where does this lead to? Enchanting entrance in Hiroo.

"The great thing is to try and travel with the eyes of the spirit wide open, and not too much factual information. To tune in, without reverence, idly - but with real inward attention. It is to be had for the feeling, that mysterious sense of rapport, of identity with the ground. You can extract the essence of a place once you know how. If you just get as still as a needle you'll be there."

From Landscape and Character, in "Spirit of Place: Letters and Essays on Travel" (Lawrence Durrell)

Technorati Tags: Japan, Tokyo

New Walk in Tokyo

I added a fifth walk PodText guide to the collection of minimalist directions to enjoy walking around in Tokyo. The new one is a night walk that starts again from the Hotel Grand Palace and leads up to Ochanomizu then back. It's a one hour legs stretcher and mind relaxation stint going through a variety of micro areas that are very quiet at night but very busy during week days.

You can see an html version of the document here, or download a PodText version here for your iPod with Notes function integrated.

Technorati Tags: Japan, Tokyo

Exhausting the place

Almost finished in a rush the other day this small piece of gem by Georges Perec: Tentative d'épuisement d'un lieu Parisien, referred to in this Economist's article as a micro-chronicle of a day in a Paris square. The square is the Place Saint-Sulpice in Paris (web cam here). The time is 1975. The purpose for the author mostly seating in cafés is to record down by writing every little thing, every non-event that his eyes and ears perceive. A flâneur dream! The result is incredibly powerful, all the more if you know the place. And the recipe enticing to be imitated in other places. Of course, Tentative d'épuisement d'un lieu Tokyoîte is itching madly.