Asakusa
We’re off to see the Wizard
Today’s post takes you on a taxi ride from Ueno station to the Thunder gate at the entrance to Sensoji Shrine in Asakusa. Even short taxi rides can be an adventure.
Nikko is Nippon
Nikko, in case you don’t know, has roughly three claims to fame: a Buddhist, a shogun, and three monkeys. OK, here you go, the quick and dirty history lesson: At some point in the mid-eighth century some dude named Shodo Shonin established a Buddhist training center just up the mountain from the town of Nikko.
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Chamerberlain plays witness to a fictionalized account of Tokugawa’s rise to power and his ultimate uniting of Japan, thus ushering in the Tokogawa Shogunate and the Edo period, which would last for roughly 200 years.
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One of the panels is the pictorial representation of the Buddhist maxim of “Hear no evil, Speak no evil, See no evil.” This is believed to be the earliest pictorial representation of this maxim using monkeys.
