Wow!

Fashion disaster or triumph? A human sakura (cherry blossom) in Shinjuku Gyoen station, April 2010.

Spring flowers

I already wrote about sakura (cherry blossom) fashion. Now here are some snaps from our annual picnics (hanami) under the cherries.

Last weekend, the peak of the flower experience, we went to Shinjuku Gyoen, a huge, well-kept park near Shinjuku station, with many families from Arno's school, Willowbrook. Crowds lined up outside the gates to get in.


Blaine took this gorgeous shot that expresses the pure hanami experience of picnicking beneath the boughs.


Arno took charge of my camera and delivered this self-portrait...


... and a shot of his parents. I am drinking a can of hot green tea purchased from a vending machine.


Lucinda and Arno


The finale to this year's hanami was in Kinuta Koen (Kinuta Park) in Sendagaya-ku, Tokyo, at the Willowbrook spring picnic. Amazing trees!


An elegantly dressed older lady brought out to gaze at the blossoms.


And Arno's Take/Takenoko (Bamboo/Bamboo shoots) class this year.


Happy spring!

Colors of Sakura

The cherry blossoms (sakura) are here again - and so, too, is the fashion season when women, men and children accessorize in shades of pink and raspberry, a cheerful sight after the coldest months. I noticed this a few years ago but it took a while to play Bill Cunningham and collect enough decent photos to show it properly. (It's harder than it looks to take pix of people who are walking and talking in crowds.)

Last Monday, a national holiday, Ginza's streets were pedestrian catwalks.



This incredibly slender woman (who would have been a perfect photo for Blaine's story about thin Japanese women) had a Vuitton bag and pashmina.




Spring shoes:


Wrapped chopsticks at the famous Kyukyodo paper store:


Older man:


Young girl:


A classic pose: cellphone messaging


A few more, to prove the point:




And finally, a flash of pink on an ice-cream vending machine.

Pre-spring

I saw these lovely plum blossoms in Aoyama cemetery about 10 days ago. Magenta blossoms, very fragrant.

Mystery treats at the konbini

One of the games I play in Japan is "mystery treat": At the konbini (convenience store), I buy random things without knowing exactly what's in them. I search the label for English clues, decipher Japanese hiragana when I can (like finding the word oishi, which means "delicious"), look for color clues (among soy milk boxes, for example, I've learned that yellow is banana flavored, pink is strawberry, green is green tea), and buy it anyway.

Sometimes it works, like when I found green-tea flavored milk or honey-flavored milk with tapioca in it. Sometimes it doesn't, like when I bought ume (sour plums).

Tonight I found an unusual ice-cream treat at our local AM/PM konbini. The only English was "White Taiyaki," and because it was in the ice-cream freezer, it seemed logical to guess that it would be a fish-shaped ice-cream dessert.


This is what it looked like inside: a palm-sized fish, very lightweight. The outside layer was made of very thin, styrofoam-y, edible wafer material.


I've seen fish-shaped treats lately at the grocery store, which led me to believe there were greater cultural forces at work in the design. I was right... Wikipedia tells me that a taiyaki is taiyaki is a "fish-shaped cake" that is usually filled with azuki (red bean) paste. I think they must also be an expression of autumn, because the Japanese love seasonal variations in food. Here's the taiyaki from Wikipedia.


I'm not a huge fan of azuki because it can be thick and bland; today's other "mystery treat" was azuki-bean-flavored soy milk that I bought for Lucinda. Not a big hit. So I took a bite and...


Delightful! Inside the fish, there is vanilla ice cream and a thin layer of sweet red bean jam.


So delicious that after Blaine finished writing about the new Japanese prime minister, he rode his bike to the konbini to get one, too.

Hanami

It's hanami - flower viewing - season in Japan, when people flock to parks and cemeteries and wherever to see sakura, or cherry blossoms. I'm definitely getting into it, and here's my photo-fest to prove it.

We went to Ueno Park a week ago; it's been a chilly spring, so the cherries have emerged more slowly than the Japanese weather service predicted (these predictions and pronouncements are taken quite seriously). But there was still a good crowd. You constantly see people photographing the blossoms. But how can they tell one year's trees apart from the next?


We set out a tarp, which is common in Japan, to eat the picnic lunch we bought in the Ueno train station.


Lucinda had fried calamari.


I had an obento (lunch) box with ginger beef, rice, and sauteed leeks, and a bottle of green tea.



People take naps under the flowers...


... meet friends and sit around box-tables set up for this purpose...


and have hanami parties with fellow suit-wearing salarymen.


Lucinda's entire school had a hanami lunch in Arisugawa Park on Friday.


And the children and I saw a lovely tree at a temple that's 1 block from our house.

Springtime in a new park

Lucinda and Arno had their spring vacation a few weeks ago, and we were looking for new things to do. One new find was Showa Kinen, a vast park in Tachikawa in western Tokyo, that had gorgeous flowering trees, with blossoms just emerging, and very cool play equipment for children.

You can take a train from Shinjuku Station to Nishi-Tachikawa; my friend Laurie drove us and her children for about an hour on the highway, past Chofu, where the American School in Japan's big campus is.

This is the modern entryway. Tickets are cheap: only 400 yen ($4) for adults and 80 yen ($0.80) for children age 6+. That's only $5 for the three of us!


Central Tokyo, where we live, is mostly roads and buildings packed together, with fairly small parks and playgrounds. So it was a treat to see wide-open spaces with lawns you can run around on -- very rare in Tokyo! The children found a hill and decided to roll down it.


You can rent bikes there and there's a "train" that goes on the paved path around a lake, but we walked from place to place. Many adults, including several elderly people, were on the lookout for spring flowers. This weekend is the official high point of the Tokyo sakura (cherry blossom) season, and we saw plenty of flowers and color.





Then we started to come to the children's attractions: a big playground with bridges and passageways that Arno and his friend Max turned into a pirate ship, and a fun seesaw.


We marched through a non-narcotic poppy field...


...to the "rainbow hammocks," which Arno and Max called "Spiderman's webs." The children hurled themselves onto it and climbed and jumped for a half hour.


After a picnic lunch, we found a prime attraction: the "Bouncing Dome" giant trampoline that looked more like a moonscape. It's very sturdy, rubberized white canvas that's quite bouncy and everyone removes their shoes, so it's quite clean. At the top of each peak, there's a particularly bouncy patch.


At a smaller moonscape, I took this photo of our hair-flying group.


Next up: Dragons to climb on...


...and the "dragon's lair" rock maze (which did not prevent Laurie from checking her Blackberry).


And finally, quite tasty soft ice cream - I had the sakura (cherry blossom) flavor, while the children had choco-vanilla swirl.


Showa Kinen went on and on and on - and we didn't even experience the waterslides and summertime activities. We'll have to go back on a weekday this summer.