Ueno, Asakusa and the beginning of a random night in Shinjuku

After the excessive amounts of joy and glee that I had scurrying about the Studio Ghibli Museum, followed by drinking it up with Mamoru, Go and Shingo, the following day was supposed to be a bit more chilled out. “Not so“, says Japan.

One thing I may not have mentioned, I switched accommodation for the first three nights of this trip. Being the lazy so-and-so that I am, I hadn’t really organized my trip until about two weeks prior to actually leaving. There were a few places I definitely knew I was going, but for the most part it was a partially-written, but ultimately 95% blank slate type of deal.

The place I was staying at for this particular night was a charming little place called RetroMetro Backpackers in Asakusa. They only opened a few months ago. When I arrived at Tawaramachi Station, there was a lot of commotion on the streets. Certain areas were closed off to traffic, a lot of street merchants selling snack foods and drinks and a lot of families just hanging out in front of their houses on the street putting on meals for people. It dawned on me that there must be some form of celebration happening on that particular day. Captain Obvious, ahoy!

After some help from some locals, I managed to find RetroMetro and Nue the assistant was kind enough to check me in early and give me some pointers vis-à-vis where to eat in the neighbourhood. Nue also informed me of the matsuri (portable shrine of sorts) festival that was happening in Asakusa and that what would actually happen later that night. I’ll come back to that later in this entry.

All I had really planned to do was check out Ueno Park.

I ate a tempura lunch directly across the road from RetroMetro, at a restaurant called ‘From New York’. The owners and their daughter all could speak English and they went to an extra effort to accommodate my severe Japanese deficiency. I kept trying to use what limited Japanese I know, they kept insisting I just speak English. When I first arrived, the female owner said something along the lines of, “I am panic.” referring to how busy they were on this particular day.

I thanked them for all their efforts (they were super-apologetic about how long the food took) and made my way to Tawaramachi Station. On the way there, I encountered two different parts of this particular matsuri festival. One was a group of men marching the matsuri through the streets of Asakusa. The other, which I stopped at for a while, was an amazing taiko drum group from one of the local shrines. The crowd actually asked for an encore (in varying degrees of broken English) but unfortunately they had other festival-related things to do.

Picture of said large taiko drummer and his homies…

Once I arrived at Ueno Park, I severely underestimated how freakin’ large it actually is. There are a number of Japanese museums – art, royal, history and so on – that seemed like they’d be well worth investigating. Unfortunately, I didn’t really have time to see any of them and it was a Sunday so they all closed fairly early.

After Ueno Park, I made my way back to Asakusa, specifically to the area surrounding Sensoji Temple. As it turns out, this matsuri festival has four (possibly five) different Gods. The Gods just happen to drop in on this particular weekend to say “Hey, thanks for doting on us and all” before deciding that puny humans can wait, but playing badminton, whiffleball and tetherball against each other cannot.

So, all the people that have been lugging these matsuri around Asakusa for this particular weekend make their way back to Sensoji Temple to return the matsuri.

Here’s where it gets interesting.

Rather than celebrate the fact that they don’t have to carry around portable shrines around that could potentially do a lot of spine and/or back damage in the long run, all the different groups fight each other.

And when I say fight each other, Nue told me that in previous years, people had actually been killed at this festival and that more often than not, the police had to be called in to break the whole thing up, which often lead to police getting beaten up too.

I asked whether me going there would mean that I would be beaten up.

Nue said that if I didn’t get in their way, I should be OK.

She then paused and said, “Actually, maybe don’t go at all.”

This closing part of the festival takes place between 6 and 8pm. I was only around until 6:30pm because I had made plans to meet up with Kirsty and Satoko to explore the Golden Gai district in Shinjuku.

I didn’t get to see any punches being thrown or people getting the stuffing kicked out of them, but there was a palpable excitement in the air that only intensified when police started blocking off access to the public by putting up massive barricades. It was at this point that I had to leave to make it in time to Shinjuku, but the next day Nue informed me that it wasn’t as impressive as previous years efforts and that many people were quite disappointed about the lack of violence.

But let’s be completely honest for a moment, who wants to see a bunch of people kick the living snot out of one another? Well, everyone, it seems.

Yet ultimately, none of that matters if you get to take pictures like the following…

That has to be the front-runner for shot of the trip at the moment.

The beginnings of a random night in Shinjuku. Well, the bulk of the beginning is I hopped on a train, arrived at Shinjuku and then had a policeman help me find the Don Quixote store near Kabuchi-ko (a famous shopping district in Shinjuku).

Once Kirsty and Satoko arrived, well, that’s when the random night began and shall be delved into in the next entry. Seriously, like I’m going to tell you all the most interesting stories at once. Patience, reader!