Plum blossoms (ume), make an early appearance at Yushima Tenjin.
A fantastic book that I have had for years and occasionally take down from the shelf is Jean Pearce's Footloose in Tokyo, which is an homage to the main Japan Rail line that forms a ring around the city center, the Yamanote-sen. One who does not know Tokyo well, and even the most serious aficionado of this megalopolis could find out a lot about the city just by ruffling its pages and traveling to some of the places highlighted in the book. A little dated, it still lays out some great adventures, history, and itineraries for the Tokyo traveller.
Tokyo has mild winters, and about mid-February, some blossoms of one flower or another begin to reveal themselves after the long slumber since the previous spring. My favorite is the first harbinger of spring, the plum blossom, or ume 梅 in Japanese. The Japanese people hold these flowers in high regard, but they play second citizen to the vaunted cherry blossom or sakura 桜. The venerable sakura is celebrated in song and verse and is a metaphor for the temporal existence of life in full blossom. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the Chushingura tale, or as we know it in the West, the Tale of the 47 Ronin, where our hero Lord Asano is forced to take his own life by performing ritual suicide (seppuku), as cherry blossoms fall from the trees around his blood-stained body. Beyond the famous legends of the samurai, the sakura is the basis of what could probably be best described as a cult, as the Japanese try to predict and time their annual cherry-blossom viewing, hanami 花見.
Those of us in Western Tokyo are blessed to have the best of both worlds as the ume reigns supreme in late February to mid-March, whetting our appetites for the coming of sakura. Not far from where we live is the town of Ome 青梅, which you may be able to tell from the kanji characters means blue plum. In Ome they have a famous annual explosion of ume at their park, known to be the best place in Tokyo for ume, which release their wonderful fragrance and demand that we drink the most fruity and fragrant sake we can find, along with seasonal delectibles; I am normally willing to oblige.
Until then, I am on the prowl for the earliest blossoms, and normally stumble upon them by accident - or by word of mouth (or book in this case) - that leads me to the prize. In Footloose in Tokyo, I learned of a place I had never been before, Okachimachi, one stop on the Yamanote line from Ueno, that has the jewel in the rough of Yushima Tenjin.
Yushima Tenjin has not only ume, but the ideal that us Westerners seek when we are looking for the "real" Japan. My experience is that the "real" Japan is hard to define, but that has become a worn cliche to recount, and the next non-Japanese to write that, "Japan is a land that holds in harmony the ancient and the modern as girls in kimono use cell phones," should be summarily executed. Tokyo is megalopolis and NYC could fit in it several times over, in area and in population. There is nothing like it on the planet. Most of it is bleak city-scape, full of overcrowded trains full of people going to and fro their 60-plus-hour-a-week jobs, to their shoebox of an apartment where they pay too much in rent and taxes compared to the average American.
But Tokyo has its manifest charms, and among them are the temples where people congregate during festivals, or to see flowers, or to pray for propitious outcomes related to some major life event. At Yushima Tenjin, it is to pray for auspicious academic success, at other shrines and temples it is to have a healthy baby (it worked for us), or to be cured of an ailment.
At Yushima Tenjin students write prayers on emma, little wooden signboards, that they leave to be answered by the temple deities.
As a photographer, these are the places I haunt, camera in hand to catch a glimpse of something going on. Is it the "real" Japan? I don't know. But I have long ago given up trying to define people as a people rather than individuals. But the Japanese culture has produced many of the things I adore in life, and as the winter turns to spring, I am ready to see it all take place again - hopefully in front of a lens.
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