Strolling around Yanaka

Many parts of Tokyo have been rebuilt since World War II, following extensive damage and also with the rise of Japan as a modern industrial country. But some parts of old Tokyo remain, where you can get a sense of the pace and nature of life in the first half of the twentieth century. One of the best of these is Yanaka, where I took a leisurely stroll for a few hours. Yanaka is adjacent to Ueno and close to Asakusa, both of which reflect traditional Japanese culture.

The pace of life in Yanaka is slow, with bicycles and walking both popular forms of transport and with streetscapes that look very different from areas like the skyscraper district of West Shinjuku, from which I am writing this. The area has many small temples, but also many residents, and I found strolling around the small streets to be the best way to wander around. There are small shops, too, like the one above, in which the shopkeepers live above the shop. I liked the way people decorated their front doors, with flower pots often featuring prominently. In some cases, however, front doors just somehow looked picturesque. In fact, as it is summer time now, there are lots of flowers evident around the streets of Yanaka.

The most striking thing about Yanaka for me was the large number of small (and some not-so-small) temples in the area. Many of these showed lovely craftsmanship and had beautiful gardens around them, so it is not surprising that Yanaka has been called  the “town of temples and slopes”, and in 2007 was apparently named as “One of the Top 100 Historical Views of Beautiful Japan”. Most of these are described only in Japanese, so I am struggling to name them, but the selection of pictures here shows some lovely traditional Japanese temple architecture, with extensive use of wood, tiled roofs and gardens of rock and greenery.

The little wooden tiles (called ’ema’) are for people to write down their wishes and leave them at the temple, in the hope that they will be fulfilled by the relevant deities, and are common throughout Japan.

Temples also have statues prominently displayed (usually outside in the garden), and there were some lovely examples around the temples in Yanaka. I especially liked the large seated Buddha, very similar to (but much smaller than) the famous seated Buddha at Kamikura, just out of Tokyo.

There were also other statues around, such as the following two. The seated man was perched high on top of the Asakura Museum of Sculpture while the smaller statue of an interesting – almost comical – rock amused me, and was located in a small park I passed by.

I saw many examples of lovely trees, often around temples. Some of them had clearly been manicured and carefully shaped, to beautiful effect. (Somehow, they seemed to fit the stereotype of Japanese garden trees, in fact!) Because it’s summer, everything is very green; I tried to imagine what it would look like in winter, especially with snow falling on them. Here are a few examples, including some nice bamboos (which were much less common).

Temples often have cemeteries associated with them and I was struck by how different these seemed from the various ‘western’ cemeteries and graveyards I have seen. Some of them looked relatively new, but maybe they were just well-cared for (like the temples themselves). The large Yanaka Cemetery (with the big trees) is different from the smaller cemeteries around temples. I was not quite sure of the significance of the wooden plaques (about the size of skis) which were often evident. Maybe a Japanese person can enlighten us?

Cemeteries notwithstanding, the pace of life is definitely slow around much of Yanaka, with very little motorised traffic and a mixture of pedestrians and bicycles. Unlike my experiences in Perth, none of the bicycles went fast; they are built for comfort and efficient transportation of goods and children, and seemed to move at a leisurely pace. They were clearly used for shopping, ferrying children around or just going visiting a friend rather than racing along in lycra in a peloton. In Australia, it’s pretty common to build suburban houses with two-car garages, so I was a bit surprised to see the six-bicycle garage shown below.

Unlike other parts of Tokyo, the electrical system in places (especially busier places) seemed to be a chaotic bunch of wires, reminding me of similar things in South-east Asia, such as in Bangkok or Hanoi. I tried (but failed) to imagine what it would be like to undertake routine maintenance of the wires. Here are a few examples:

There are many small shops, cafes, restaurants etc around the streets of Yanaka, many of them quite picturesque. For example, the old coffee shop below has only a few tables inside – notice the benches outside for waiting customers to sit (extremely common in urban areas in Japan). The last two people on the bench were allowed inside just after I took this photo, and I was too impatient to wait until someone left to go in myself, but it looked like an authentic place inside. The Indian restaurant is a timely reminder of the extraordinary ethnic diversity of foods here; if you can imagine it, there is a restaurant serving it somewhere. [Just down the road from here was a restaurant proclaiming that it was serving “Turkish, Persian and Uzbekistan cuisine”!]

There were very many other signs of old Japan around the streets of Yanaka, and lots of old shops, but there are also signs of more recent Japanese life. A few snaps below show some examples, with iconic Japanese scenes, including some sake barrels, one of the ubiquitous slot machines (there must surely be millions of these in Tokyo!) and a modern looking izakaya (pub) on the corner (or maybe a restaurant … with seats for a queue outside). The insides of a couple of shops in Yanaka Ginza (a local shopping area) show an interesting shop devoted to cat paraphernalia and another selling strange cat-like objects; quirky things like that are pretty common in Tokyo.

Finally, I became intrigued by, but have not yet unravelled, some of the interesting street markings I saw in my travels. They seem to be sewer manhole covers or otherwise connected with plumbing systems; I’m really not sure. But they reminded me that it pays to look down as well as up and ahead when strolling around somewhere new:

In all, I thoroughly enjoyed my stroll around Yanaka, got lost regularly, took heaps of pictures (of which these are just a small sample) and was pleased to have been able to let time pass by in old Tokyo, before heading back to the madness of peak-hour trains and the skyscraper world of Shinjuku.