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Original Description:
Parcly Taxel: There are three major holiday periods in Japan:
Original Description:
Parcly Taxel: There are three major holiday periods in Japan:
- Golden Week (end April to early May)
- Bon (盆; mid-July)
- and the New Year which we were currently in.
Train services looked normal on New Year’s Day when we entered Oshiage Station, save for a strand of domestic travellers. It may be that the Skytree has services to both Narita and Haneda, airports that handle a significant amount of domestic flights in addition to their international connections, but I shrugged that off.
Spindle: Woozy from the frenzied party of only a few hours ago, we left the apartment at 11am for Ueno (上野) and its park, strolling along its broad paved avenues lined with cherry blossom trees – most of them bare but not dead, just hibernating in the winter. Fitting the holiday’s nature, the sun shone down a cloudless sky upon us, its rays diffused through my ethereal, semi-crystalline body.
There are legends connecting windigos to crystal ponies, but we have no evidence to confirm that.
Parcly: Adjacent to the park’s natural core are assorted attractions which may or may not stylistically match: we saw the entrance to the Ueno Zoo, then in leaving the Brutalist National Museum of Western Art, then the more organic entrance to JR’s part of Ueno Station. The latter location is elevated; right beneath lie one-room stalls forming an imitation of the lanes in temples/Shinto shrines where pilgrims could receive goods and services on their way to prayer, a genuine example being the one we passed through at Sensōji.
Spindle: Passing through Ameyoko (アメ横), a name we realised referred to America, we stopped by a pseudo-Korean yakiniku restaurant and settled on that for lunch. Other than that, though, we wandered through a very quiet day across Tokyo, including luxury shops on the hills of Omotesandō (表参道) which neither of us were into at all in the first place.
Lyra Heartstrings: It wasn’t exactly quiet everywhere on New Year’s Day; next to Omotesandō is that epicentre of Japanese youth culture Harajuku, and the posh young mares and stallions were out there in full force. Crêpes seem to be more frequent than other snacks on its main street, Takeshita (竹下通り).
On the opposite end of that street lies Meiji Shrine (明治神宮), not home to the grave of the eponymous Emperor, but still in the top tier of Shinto shrines across Japan. Parcly and Spindle found the approach through a recently renovated torii somewhat crowded; half-intending to enter they followed along, only to encounter the same heaving mass of visitors as Sensōji!
If I had played my lyre there, would they remember my name?
Spindle: The crowd control police at Meiji Shrine were dispersed over a much wider area under a lush forest of evergreen trees, flanked by barrels of ceremonial sake and ceremonial wine from Bourgogne. Despite this extra space they enforced one-way movement throughout the complex.
We stared the phalanx down its outer half and – to our dismay – watched it turn right into its other, equally long half. We went back along the designated return path, decided to have one more look halfway, made another round and finally purchased two steamed red bean buns for our troubles.
Lyra: Later Luna informed the alicorn that she wouldn’t have been allowed inside the main hall if she persisted. All she would have done was throw a coin from afar, pray and leave.
Parcly: Not inserting myself into the phalanx at Meiji Shrine was fine, Lyra. I’d already suffered too much at Asakusa.
Lyra: Your move.
Parcly: I pondered about the trackside shops in Tokyo Metro stations as I headed back to Oshiage for a dinner somewhere in Tokyo Solamachi, a part of the Skytree Town. What does their existence say about the lives of commuters? Hectic to the point where at least some of them give in to temptations? Pampered? I myself wouldn’t care about them.
My dinner wound up as a pork and cheese croquette tonkatsu, which I chewed on with delight. I wasn’t going up the Skytree or the Sumida Aquarium or planetarium – all were already closed anyway – but it was a good thing that not every place closed on the New Year.
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