見わたすかぎり．．． (miwatasukagiri)

Cherry blossoms are a big deal in this country. There's a word, "hanami", which you could translate as "flower viewing", but in effect means "cherry blossom viewing", because, well, cherry blossoms are a big deal in this country.

Now, I thought I knew cherry blossoms, and yeah, I knew they were pretty. After all, there are a few streets back in Vancouver lined with cherry trees, right?

Bah. Those trees are nothing. They are trash. An insult to the eyes!

Here there are parks full of cherry trees, and rivers lined on either side for kilometers with cherry trees, and right about now they are all in full bloom. Now, I'm not really one for pretty things, as such, but damn are they ever pretty.

Today we took a trip over to the Imperial grounds and Kitanomaru Park. Here's a shot of the park from the street; I think that's the Budokan (built for butts to be kicked in) at the upper left.



To get to the park you need to cross a bridge over the moat, and the way is lined with more trees. Here's a great shot looking down the side, and I'm trying not to be a sissy here, but will you look at that! Purest pink above, green and purple below.



After checking out the park, we crossed the street to Yasukuni Shrine. There was another trainload of cherry trees here, although nothing so spectacular as at the park, in my opinion. Because it's hanami time, it had quite the festival atmosphere, with dozens of stands selling food, toys, and (live) goldfish (which, as I recall, have a habit of dying even quicker than the ones back home); mats were laid down for the groups of people lying around, eating and drinking, many of them looking very red-faced, one or two passed out already (and this at about 5pm on a Thursday).



To top it all off, there was even a guy showing off his trained monkey; I thought I could take a picture of it over the crowd by holding up our digicam and viewfinding with the screen, but the LCD doesn't really work at that angle.

Anyway, with all that, you'd never know that this is a terribly controversial place, enshrining 2.5 million war dead, including a host of certified war criminals.

We walked up to the shrine proper, though of course we didn't pray.



On the way out, I saw an elderly Asian couple walk up to the torii gate (which frames the above picture), look around dourly, and leave without really entering. I'm not as good at differentiating between Asian races as I perhaps ought to be, but I'm pretty sure they were Korean.

Hmm. Chilly. I seem to recall a story from Won Yung about when she was class president in South Korea, leading her peers in a barrage of thrown coke bottles aimed at some Japanese tourists. (This was after she knew I was partly Japanese. It was said in good humour, though. I think.)

Here's another sakura shot, taken by Kate during an earlier solo outing along Meguro River:



The Meguro River would be one of those lined by cherry trees for entire kilometers. Hence the line in the title, "miwatasukagiri", which means "as far as the eye can see" or words to that effect. It's a line from "Sakura Sakura", a children's song I know from some time or another, and which, as it happens, I've been struggling, in vain, to find on KaZaA. There are apparently a couple dozen awful pop songs with "sakura" in the title (not to mention all the songs that ever appeared on Card Captor Sakura), but the good old lullaby is nowhere to be heard.

By the way, these picture thumbnails are linked to the "full views" of the pictures at DeviantArt, and there are some more sakura pictures there as well.