Day 2: the insect temple in the Valley of Nightingales, dead animals, snakes and motorcycles

For the second day of my Tokyo farewell tour, I boarded the train for the area around Ueno on the other side of town. First stop was the adjacent area of Uguisadani – a lovely name (it means “valley of nightingales”) for a seedy area. One side of the station is a cluster of love hotels around a fiercely pronged temple, while on the other side a graveyard stands on a grassy bluff.

I headed past the cemetery and in a few minutes I was at my first stop : the Kan-eiji temple. This was once one of the most important in Tokyo – all of what is now Ueno Park was part of its lands, and it was used as the personal temple of the Tokugawa family.  In1869 it was attacked by supporters of the emperor, whom the Tokugawa shogans were trying to usurp. Supposedly, there are still bullets imbedded in parts of the temple walls. But I went there to see this:

In 1821 Sessai Masuyama, a feudal lord, ordered this monument .  Its purpose  was to console the sprit of dead insects.  Sessai had sponsored scholars working on anatomy books – one of which, called “Chuchi-jo” was  famous for its realistic depiction of insects.  The shrine is to honor those insects who were killed to serve as anatomy models for the book, giving up their lives for the advancement of science.  Today, its officially designated by the city of Tokyo as a historical monument.

From the insect shrine  it was a brief walk to the Northern fringe of Ueno Park. The tone of the neighborhood also changed- from the lovel hotels and seedy sidestreets of Uguisadani, to this :

a leafy street of imposing Georgian and Victorian buildings, with the copper domes of the National Museum poking up on the horizon to the South and (pictured above) the Library of International Childrens literature.  It was more like Bloomsbury than anything else I had seen in Tokyo.

Then, I was at the park itself – announced by a striking blue giraffe …

… and a cluster of homeless men – more than 100, 150 of them – sitting around quietly, chatting, or collecting aluminium cans. One pair of old dudes was fighting a spirited duel with umbrellas.  It was jarring to see such a large-scale show of poverty – even poverty as good natured as this – in a city like Tokyo, but Ueno Park (as well as Yoyogi, the Shibuya traintracks and Shinjuku-chuo Park) is famous for its “colony” of homeless in blue tarpaulin tents, and boxes.

I walked along. Ueno is not a park in the sense that I understand it. Although big, there is no feeling of space – its absolutely filled with buildings, crowds and paved-over plazas. There are precious few patches of lawn to sit on, or leafy areas in which to lounge.

I walked by one of the park’s numerous museums – this one, of Science and Nature – and although I hadn’t planned to stop, I went in on a whim. They were having a gold exhibition with the star attraction a loaned display from Colombia’s Museo de Oro in Bogota. When would I have another chance to see that?

First there were gold bars you could touch, various gold ornaments, famous gold nuggets from history (including one on loan from Australia – the 75kg nugget we had all learned about in history class that had helped to fuel the 19th century Gold Rush that built the city of Melbourne. It was called, with typical Australian humor, “the Welcome Stranger”). There were also displays on gold in Japan –   a single red camellia in a vase in a gold and red room  – and then the glittering, beautifully displayed collection of pre-Conquest Colombian treasures.

The rest of the museum was as cool as I had remembered it. Unexpectedly perhaps it is one of Tokyo’s best, more for for its imaginative design than the exhibits themselves. For example, you walk into a room built like a fake forest with fibreglass trees and stuffed squirrels and recorded birdsong, only to be surprised when it morphs halfway into a library. Then in a huge, dark chamber, a multitude of beasts stare out at you from a neon ringed pedestal -leopards, camels, tigers, gorillas. You can even walk over the glass floor above the antelopes’ heads, looking down at their sharp little horns. Amazing. In the sea hall, whales and sharks frolic above you, suspended from the ceiling, while imitation kelp streams upwards to the roof. Aquatic dinosaurs swoop down at you in the basement through dramtic smoked glass. It is a revelation. But what would the priests and scholars of Kan-eiji have thought after this – these halls full of the unhonored spirits of dead beasts? What grand gesture would be necessary to make up for this, I wondered?

After the park, the rest of Ueno is crowded and dingy and down-at-heel. Traffic roars by on overhead freeways, and the shops look poor and tatty. The trainstation is located next to a ten-lane intersection, bridged by a  pedestrian plaza, bleak and windy,  with bad modern art.

The day of my tour, the sky was looking dark and ominous.  I headed over to the motorcycle district – lining both sides of a busy street, divided by a raised freeway.  Block after block of dealerships, shops selling helmets and riding gear…

Note the color of the sky on the left!

Right in the middle of the motorbike district is my favorite snake shop – selling the beasts dead and alive for medicinal use.

I wandered the backstreets of Ueno for a while, with rain starting to splash down from leaden, rumbling skies. The buildings here have that old, worn-out charm that you find in parts of Tokyo. I realised, if I hadn’t already, that the city is at its most aesthetically appealing at its most homely. For all the bright lights and shiny shopping malls, it is scenes like this that say TOKYO to me, and I will miss them the most:

Then, the rain started. Still, I was relieved to know that in all of Tokyo this is probably the best place to get stuck in a downpour. Stretching along for miles under the train tracks is a rabbit warren of arcades that go all the way to the next Yamanote station. Ameyokocho and Okachimachi – parrallel shopping streets on either side of the raised tracks – started life as black markets during the occupation.  Today they sell denim and cheap clothes, dried fish, old army uniforms and enka records, bags and backpacks and military surplus. There is also a Chinese shrine, and a basement food hall for Asian immigrants selling imported durians and rambutans, and live turtles flapping around in buckets, with pigs heads hanging on hooks. West African traders push barrows loaded with denim and T-shirts. I made my way through the market to Okachimachi station, and hopped on the train – a few short minutes to Akihabara.