Ueno Park
Another stop that is worth time in Tokyo is Ueno. In November, Ueno is known to offer a number of museums, including the Tokyo National Museum, one of the country’s largest, and a few scattered shrines. Yet, as I’ve stated before, museums are something I have mostly avoided in Japan, wanting rather to see the country, than artifacts of the country.
What brought me to Ueno was Ueno-koen Park. See, in Japan, hanami, or flower viewing, is a fairly popular day-trip during the spring. With a tradition of hundreds of years in Japan, couples and families and friends will take a plastic mat and a sushi picnic with sake, and sit underneath the trees of any of 60 prominent viewing locations in Japan, watching the flowering beauty flutter in the warm wind of spring. From early April in southern Honshu to mid-May in Hokkaido, any of those locations are overrun with Japanese awaiting a relaxing day of hanami. With some 1,000 cherry trees, Tokyo’s Ueno Park is known to be one of the finest locations for hanami in all of the country.
I have seen many beautiful photographs of the park in the spring, but, unfortunately, I will be long gone from Japan by then. Still, I needed to be able to say that I had been in Ueno Park, hanami or not. The Park also has the odd distinction of being the location of the only resistance to the modernizing revolution, the Meji Restoration, almost 250 years ago. Some 2,000 Tokugawa loyalists were soundly defeated in 1867 by the country’s first modern army.
I arrived at Ueno Park, made Tokyo’s first public park in 1873, just after sunset. The famed trees were naked and silent, their sakura, cherry blossoms, the unofficial national flower, were nonexistent. There was some fine fall foliage left near Shinobazu Lake, but with night setting in, the most color I found was nearer to Ueno Station, known for housing a once prominent black market and a modicum of Asian bazaar-style shopping.
Since the devastation of World War II, the area around the Ueno station has also been known for a large number of homeless communities, something not as often seen in Japan as it is in most American cities. Ueno also has Japan’s first zoological garden, revered for its pandas, though space is limited compared to American animal preserves.
I skipped it all. I just had to cross it off my list: see Ueno Park, cherry blossoms or not.
Jaa mata,
Christopher
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