This short essay appeared in the July edition of Gekkan Asakusa, a monthly town paper based out of Asakusa, Taito-ku in a column entitled “Asakusa Hakken” (“Asakusa Discovery”). It was printed in Japanese and has been translated and edited for this English format.
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Even as a newcomer to Japan, I could feel that Asakusa was a place full of history. After just a few weeks of my new life in Ibaraki, I made my first visit to Tokyo with friends. Asakusa was at the top of our must-see list.
After dropping our bags at the hotel, we walked across Azumabashi to my first sight of Kaminarimon. In my few weeks in Japan, I had not seen a more quintessentially Japanese view; the huge red gate was a picture come to life.
The smells of ningyoyaki pulled us through the gate to Nakamise Street, and we loaded up on souvenirs for family and friends back home. We had a delicious lunch of kaitenzushi, welcomed by boisterous chefs offering us types of fish we’d never seen before. By the time we made it to the rattling omikuji and wafting incense of the temple itself, both our bags and our bellies were happily full.
In the afternoon, we visited the Edo Tokyo Museum in Ryogoku, where I spent hours looking over the artifacts and artworks of the city's history. Two dimensional figures danced at festivals and fireworks lit up the night sky. Crowds bustled down streets into red temples. Even though these scenes were so far away in time, they also felt eerily familiar.
That evening, we sat by the river near Azumabashi and talked as the sky slowly darkened and the neon lights around Asakusa station illuminated. At that time, I knew little of Tokyo or Japan. Hiragana and kanji were exotic, incomprehensible pictures. I could barely remember the names of all the Japanese foods I was trying, let alone names of comedians. But this day spent in Asakusa felt like my first day in Japan. These pictures I had seen in the museum were no longer just images, but memories of a city I now found myself in.
For me, Asakusa was the place where Japan changed from a foreign land I might one day visit, to a place of living, breathing history where I now resided. Even now, I find these days of memory-making and discovery are far from over.
Reflection
Particularly when translating this essay back to English, it struck me that this short glimpse into a day in the life of a tourist in Asakusa is not particularly unique. I would estimate that an overwhelming majority of tourists to Japan find their way down Nakamise Street at some point during their stay, and the number of Instagram photos featuring Sensoji Temple and its neighboring pagoda is unrivaled by nearly any other sight in Tokyo. This is as close to a common “tourist in Japan” experience as you can get.
But I considered the audience of this essay, published in Japanese in a town paper read primarily by locals and Japanese visitors to Asakusa. For these readers, Kaminarimon is less an “image of Japan” than it is a roadblock of crowds on their way home from work. The men and women rowdily jangling the omikoshi during packed festivals are not just icons of a foreign culture, they are the neighbors at the local bar, the parents at the school sports days, the shoppers at the grocery store on Sunday nights.
So as I rewrote this supposedly common experience in English for an audience who would read in Japanese, the significant gaps between different experiences of the same place stood out. I want to keep exploring these differences by resisting mere comparisons and searching for synthesis. There is no better place for this than Asakusa, where the world comes to meet Japan in a progression of peace and shared culture.
Thank you for reading, and check out Gekkan Asakusa from the links below!
Notes
I’m very grateful to Koyata Aso and the editors of Gekkan Asakusa for providing me the opportunity to share a few scenes from my first visit to Asakusa. Please visit the Gekkan Asakusa website for local news and insights in Japanese. Additionally, you can read Koyata Aso's interview with the author of Tokyo Alleyways here.
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