shibamata, vol. 1

LAST WEEK I was given Taishakuten as an assignment. Taishakuten is a Buddhist temple, rather well known in these parts. It was an achingly hot day. My shirt kept sticking to me all day as I dreamed of surfing and cold mountain waterfalls.
In Japan, you know you're really in the countryside when you start using train lines you've never heard of before. I had traveled for more than an hour and barely occupied trains, until I was literally off the Metro map. My train slowed down for the last time: it was the end of the line, Shibamata.

I knew something was different as soon as I disembarked - I blinked, half expecting to have my head jerk upwards after dozing on the train. An empty plaza stood in front of me, quietly holding in the summer heat. A bronze, life size statue of a man in a suit stood in the middle. The village roads bent around the plaza, and a small yakisoba(1) stand stood on the left, cooking steam silently escaping from its roof, as large characters silently advertised tasty noodles. Very little has changed in Shibamata since the Edo Period - the street vendors, the temples, even the streets themselves are small and narrow, as if cars haven't been invented yet. I felt like I had walked into a Miyazaki film; Shibamata is 5% myth.

Not particularly inclined to follow maps, I took the most promising street(2), which led me past a yakitori stand (right), an ancient toy store, and several restaurants. The street gradually broadened into a sort of promenade introducing the temple up ahead. Venders and souvenirs shops began to multiply rapidly; so did the people. There were mochi sellers, imo ice cream(3), fishmongers, lantern sellers, and a lady selling 25 different kinds of daikon who had lived in New York and spoke decent English. She gave me a few samples of the vegetable on toothpicks. All and all a grand time. Yes, and I ate all of the above food stuffs.
















Above: jars of senbei (Japanese rice crackers)
right: stores and tourists approaching Taishakuten

(1) yakisoba is an originally Chinese dish of fried noodles and toppings like pork, cabbage, ginger, and bean sprouts. Easy to make, very cheap, yakisoba is the hamburger of Japan.

(2) streets mean something different in Japan. here a street can have pets, small vans, motercycles, and pedestrians traveling both ways at once, missing each other by inches, in a space that is narrower than, say, the tire-to-tire width of a Hummer.

(3) imo is potato. Potato ice cream is delicious. It's also slightly purple. You can usually only find it at rural, touristy places, so I leaped at the chance.