2109 Japan Trip - Day 7 - Tokyo - Past, Present & Future

Day 7

On this day, I played the tourist, going to three places in Tokyo that I’ve wanted to go to since hearing about them.  

Sensõ-Ji Temple

Sensõ-Ji temple is the oldest Buddhist temple in Tokyo, first established in 645 CE.  Legend has it that two fishermen found a statue of Kannon Buddha in the river and brought it to the headmaster of their village who converted his home into a temple to enshrine it.  According to Wikipedia, it’s the most visited spiritual site in the world, with over 30 million visitors each year.  

If you come to Tokyo, it’s definitely one of those place you “have to seen.”  Having been to Tokyo four times previously without a proper visit (a friend’s husband drove me past it on a quick car tour of Tokyo one time, getting a ticket in the process for an illegal turn), I figured it was time I went.  

The main entrance to the temple is the Kaminarimon, “Thunder Gate."

The temple grounds are a bustling place.  Not only filled with hundred of visitors, but with rows of tents where various types of Japanese "fast food" is served.  

This is the purification font, located across from the temple entrance.  Water constantly pours into the vessel. There are bamboo ladles hanging from it.  You're supposed to dip the ladle into the water with your right hand, then pour it over your left.  Switch the ladle to the left hand and repeat the process with your right.  Dip the ladle into the water again and pour some into the palm of your hand.  Sip it into your mouth, rinsing it out, then spit it out into the drain below the font.  DO NOT SPIT IT BACK INTO THE FONT ITSELF.  Finally, get one more ladle full of water and stand the ladle up so the water pours down the length of its handle.  You've now purified your hands, your mouth so only good words can come out, and the ladle itself for the next person to use.  You're now ready to approach the temple.  

The temple grounds are filled with Guardian Spirits.  The biggest and most powerful are at the entrance to the temple itself.  The ones that look like lions or dogs are called shisa, and are scattered throughout guarding lesser sites.  They always come in pairs.  

I don’t know who this statue represents.  Probably the Buddha in one of his aspects.  I watched as people would step up, pray before it, then run their hands over his head, down his shoulders and arms, to his feet.  The statue has a patina of rust except where hundreds of people have touched him after their prayer.  Those places look brightly polished.  

These placards contain the wishes of people visiting the temple.  Every so often they are gathered and burned before the temple’s alter.  They rising smoke and ash transport the wishes to the Buddha to be granted.  

It says something like, "You can meet a lot of gods and happiness will delivered to you."

"Prosperity for the family.  Much health.  Much Happiness.  The Soto Herrera  family, Japan, April 2019.  Chilé."

There is a small statue of a female figure standing amidst the flowers in a pool of what looks like oil.  People would come up and dip small ladles into the oil to bathe the statue.  I've not seen this practice before.  

Some women visiting the temple will rent a kimono and have their pictures taken throughout the temple.  There were a lot of them doing this the day we visited.  Listening in on their conversations with their photographers, most were Chinese or Korean, though I did hear one pair of Japanese women doing it as well.

There’s a shopping area, or shoutengai, leading from the temple.  It features a lot of traditional gifts to buy, plus the typical knock-offs for tourists.  There are also lots of places to eat.  

here is also a mini-zoo in the shoutengai.  They had a collection of small, cute animals you could look at and pet.  

She also had this guy with her to call attention to her place.  He kept twisting his had about, getting a bead on whatever caught his attention.  “Probably a dog,” his handler kept saying whenever he spun his head around. 

Tokyo Sea Life Park

I heard about this aquarium several years ago, when I first started studying Japanese.  It was described in one of the pod casts I listened to, an audio blog by a Japanese college student and all the things she saw and did.  

The one feature that caught my attention was a particular creature they had on exhibit not found at other aquariums. 

The Sea Life Park is under this big metallic dome.

The pool by the entrance makes it look like it stretches out to the ocean.

I’ve only seen hammerhead sharks in Japanese aquariums.  They have a lot of them at the Sea Life park.

They have a lot of barracuda at the Sea Life Park as well.

The fish at the Sea Life Park were very photogenic.  At numerous tanks, it looked like they were swimming up to the glass just to pose for your picture.

The Tokyo Sea Life Park’s claim to fame is their maguro, or tuna, exhibit.  They either have the largest, or maybe the only, collection of life tuna on display in an aquarium.  

Maguro are like sharks in that they have to keep swimming in order to breathe.  That’s why they have to have such a large tank for the number of fish living in it.  They’re apparently very fast swimmers to.  They can tuck their dorsal fins inside their bodies for extra speed.  You might catch a bit of that in the video I took of them.

The barracuda in the next tank over thought they were pretty interesting, too.  

The park had a pretty decent penguin and puffin exhibits.  

The puffins like dancing in the water.  

Given the Japanese penchant for eating seafood, I was wondering as I walked through the aquarium if seeing all these fish in the tanks made anyone hunger.  Then I spotted this in the gift shop. 

The Life-Sized Gundam

Mobile Suit Gundam (1979) is to Japanese Science Fiction movies and TV what Star Wars is to to the American market.  It created an entire genre of story-telling featuring large, humanoid vehicles that were to fight and fly through space in.  

There used to be an 18 meter tall “life-sized” model of the original gundam suit in Odaiba, Tokyo Japan that was dismantled in 2017.  I didn’t get to see that one, unfortunately.  But I did get to see the 24 meter tall model of the RX-0 Unicorn Gundam built to replace it.  

The first glimpse of the gundam as you approach from the station.

They’ve gone all out to support the statue being there.  The area has been renamed as “Gundam Base Tokyo.”  And the closest train station is called, “Tokyo Teleport Station.”

An as close as you can get close-up.

The Unicorn Gundam is described as “temporary.”  There are plans to have another gundam built by the end of this year, the 40th anniversary of the original series, that will be able to walk.  That would be something worth seeing.

The sign indicates the times the Unicorn Gundam "transforms."  We missed the times for seeing that.  We didn't stay late to see the movies either.

I think it's pretty impressive for them to put up something like this.  There were lots of people like us that made the pilgrimage to see it.

There was a Bumblebee from the Transformers series, off to the side in the same area.  It was facing the gundam as if to see what it could be when it grows up.