Tokyo Tour

After our meetings, we toured Tokyo by bus, boat and foot. We started at Akusaka, the tourist shopping mall that is next to the oldest Buddhist Temple in Tokyo. As is common on Japanese tours, we were hurried along at a fast clip with only moments to sample the sweets or buy souvenirs.

We then dashed off to board a boat to see Tokyo from the water. The canal we travelled along is used for commuting as evidenced by the large number of peers and boats lined up to take people to and from work. As we motored along we saw that the walls bordering the canals were decorated with large colorful murals. In several places, I saw blue tents set up along the sides of the canal, these were the same as tents I had seen earlier in the park that morning. I later learned from our tour guide that these blue tents belonged to homeless people. The tents I saw in the morning were quite amazing. In amongst the trees was what looked like a tent city. Homeless people had set up tents replete with basins for washing, hangers for drying clothes and even a large clock, hung up on a tree to alert the owners of that all important Japanese imperative – TIME. According to our guide, Maya, the police and citizenry tolerated this well organized and orchestrated homelessness because the homeless do not beg or harass other. She explained that the homeless were exclusively men – no women or children and not the mentally ill. Food was easy for these men to come by - they scavenged food discarded but unwrapped but was past the sell-by date. This approach to treating the homeless is another fascinating cultural difference that will be worth exploring in more depth.

Our afternoon excursion was blessed with bright, sunny and very warm weather, so I appreciated the breeze afforded by the boat ride. I was envious of my companions who were quaffing beer to quench their thirst. I declined joining them as I knew my bladder wouldn’t cooperate. While we were boarding the boat, Maya, our tour guide pointed out a funny building. She said the building was owned by Asahi Beer and had commissioned the architect to design a building that resembled a mug of beer with a head of foam. They also wanted a red, vertical structure that represented their logo. However, when the building was constructed, the fire department would not allow the structure to be red and the earth quake codes disallowed the vertical position, so it ended up being painted gold and oriented horizontal to the ground. You can see why the Japanese refer to this structure as the “Poop”.

The boat took us to an Edo Period garden called Hama-rikyu. We had a more leisurely stroll and wandered amongst the purple hydrangea and ancient bonsai-sculpted pines. The most revered pine was supported by long poles and is over 300 years old, having survived even the Tokyo bombing during WWII.