Pictures (part seven): Kamakura, Yokohama, and Tokyo

Well, this is it, you guys.

This is the last post.

You must be heartbroken, I know.

I recommend filling the void by going outside and doing something exceedingly awesome. Like hang-gliding. Or singing odes to semicolons.

You can, as always, read the correspond posts here (for Kamakura and Yokohama), here and here (for Tokyo), and here (for pictures).

Because people asked for a bigger version of the class picture from before, here it is.

Note that my male sensei (all the way on the right) looked like that approximately all the time. This would be why we loved him to death.

Okay, here're the pictures from Kamakura and Yokohama.

Here's the big Buddha.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand that's all you need to see of that.

Remember how I said that there was a crazy story associated with the shrine I visited? Well, since TWO whole people asked for it, you get to hear it. If you don't want to read my spazzing, you can just skip ahead.

Okay, so basically this shrine was built by the wife of Minamoto Yoshitomo. Yes, THAT Minamoto Yoshitomo.* While he was off fighting the Heike, she was wanting babies. So apparently she decided to build a shrine so that she could GET babies. In addition, she built the shrine so that it would help defeat the Heike.

How did she do this?

Well, there's an extensive garden associated with the shrine. This garden has two huuuuuge ponds with a bridge going over them. One of them is the Genji pond because it has white flowers, and the other pond is the Heike pond, because it has red flowers.** The Genji's pond has three islands, because the word for three in Japanese (三, san) sounds the same as the word for childbirth (産, san). The Heike's pond has four islands, because the word for four in Japanese (四, shi) sounds the same as the word for death (死, shi).

And that is the short version of the cool story associated with the shrine.

*The leader of the Genji, who overthrew the Heike. Also, he became the first shogun.

**The Genji's color was white, and the Heike's color was red.

Here's the bridge leading to the shrine.

Here's part of the Heike's pond, with the red flowers.

Here's the bridge from the side.

Here's the hand-washing place.

Kind of flashy, don't you think?

That's a stage which important ceremonies are performed on.

These are the steps up to the main shrine building.

This sign says to please not tie fortunes to the trees. I guess they must have had a problem with that.

Here's the Genji pond. It's kind of hard to see, but the flowers are white.

This was just awkward.

These were some really strange mannequins we ran across on our way back from dinner that night.

(There was also a mannequin that looked like it was seducing another mannequin. I started laughing hysterically, and no one else could understand why.)

THE CROSSWALK THAT TRAIN MAN WALKS DOWN AT THE BEGINNING OF THE MOVIE. (It's the one under the overpass thing. AAAAHHHH!)

Here's the gate into Asakusa, a district of Tokyo that's supposed to be like Edo-era Tokyo (or Edo, as it was known at that point).

Inside a mall at Asakusa...

A street in Asakusa...

We couldn't figure out what all these guys were doing.

Then we realized that they all had some sort of portable gaming device and were having a tournament of some kind.

Akihabara at night!

I figured this would be a somewhat appropriate picture to end the blog with.

In any case, it's been fun, guys. Hopefully, it's been at least fractionally as enjoyable to read as it has been for me to write.

Overall, this entire trip was an awesome experience, and I feel like I learned a lot, thanks to my senseis and my host family and my language partner and all the random people who weren't afraid to talk to me.

If I wind up in Japan after I graduate (which I most likely will), I'll probably wind up writing a blog again, but until then,

This is Squid, signing off.

じゃ、またね。