(no subject)

Yesterday I went to Meiji Jingu, a large shrine in the middle of Tokyo. (The wikipedia article has the usual tourist-style pictures; the torii [gates] are quite impressively large). The shrine is only a few minutes from Harajuku station but it almost succeeds in making you forget where you are. (You can see from the photo that it can't quite manage it...) It was fairly uncrowded (as I suppose you'd expect on a weekday) so it was a pleasant hour. Unfortunately I arrived a bit late so didn't have time to wander around in the gardens. Still I wandered through the shrine and along the large tree lined avenues and pondered weighty questions about the meaning of life and whether it makes any sense to write down your wishes on a little bit of wood in the hope that the departed spirits of a 19th century Emperor and Empress might do something about them. (Meiji was one of the Good Guys in my opinion but I don't think he was particularly divine...)

After that I wandered around the rest of Harajuku, which is about as big a contrast as you can get, since it's a very popular shopping district for young Japanese. Finally in the evening I found out that a friend (who was in the same class as me when I was studying at Yamasa) was in Tokyo, so we hung out at a cafe in Tokyo station for an hour or two before he had to go and catch a night bus to Nagoya and his flight home.

On the way back home a guy in Tokyo station hit me with the classic line about "needing 200 yen to get his train home", which I think is a first for me. (Full marks to him for equal opportunity panhandling.) I haven't really seen homelessness and begging of the typical UK town centre kind (although perhaps I haven't been wandering around in the right places and times). On the other hand you do get a phenomenon here where homeless people congregate in parks and set up semi-permanent structures with blue tarpaulins and bits of scrap wood and so on (presumably these are tolerated by the police).