The day before yesterday, on a tip from one of our guidebooks, we went the Fukagawa-Edo museum. This is an interesting place – basically the town council built a 1:1 scale reproduction of a portion of a city block from the lower (commoners) ward of Edo (Tokyo) circa 140 years ago. The reproduction is inside a very large room, and visitors are allowed to walk in and around the buildings and touch and inspect anything they like.
< Fukagawa-Edo museum
As we were entering, a wonderful elderly Japanese gentleman named Abe Yutaka approached us and offered his services as a volunteer guide. In English! We gladly accepted, and he spent the entirety of our visit – about 75 minutes – telling us about Tokyo during the Edo period, explaining all the exhibits and in general making the trip about 1000 times more interesting than it perhaps would have been. His english was very good, and he seemed genuinely surprised and happy that we’d visited many of the locations we had in Japan, not to mention it was our fourth trip. I salute you, Yutaka Abe!
< Translator-sensei!
After the museum we wandered over to a nearby garden that I had found (before leaving the ryokan) on google maps. We didn’t know anything about this garden… but what a surprise we were in for!
It is called Kiyosumi Garden, and is a typical Japanese feudal lords garden. A very large pond (with a few islands) is surrounded with beautifully landscaped gardens and patchways. The pond is absolutely teeming with koi (carp) including some of the biggest we’d ever seen – as long as my arm. There were also turtles everywhere, and both the carp and the turtles were extremely interested in me when I had food in my hand 🙂
The turtles in particular were aggressive beggars and seemed to have little fear of humans…
The garden also had a beautiful iris display away from the main pond:
< Iris Garden
As we were walking around the pond, we came upon a group of a half-dozen or so ‘old people’ sitting and painting under the guidance of a gentleman who was obviously some sort of instructor. The average quality of their paintings was extremely high and we were quite impressed. Hopefully you can get an idea from this shot:
After the park, well we were tired. Very tired. We staggered through the streets like zombies, and boarded a train back to the ryokan. We had hit a wall and it had hit back, and soon enough KLS was snoozing the afternoon away and I was DSing the afternoon away.
Basically, we took a much needed rest 🙂
The next two days would be filled with nothing but toy/game/goods shopping in the two holy lands of Akihabara and Nakano. I’ll detail them together in the next post, which will be the last of this trip, so stay tuned!