While I was living in Tokyo the local temple decided to build a Buddha next door to my apartment block. If you look in the 1st photo mine is the white building behind the statue. Now you might be thinking well this is probably an every day event but I don't know anywhere in central Tokyo which has a Buddha statue anything close to this size. For reference the apartment block is three stories high and look how tiny the guy is in front of the stautue!
You might also be thinking "what a nice part of town you lived in Sugar"?
And to the left of the Buddha you see this rather pleasant river with steep sides. Actually these are nothing but giant storm drains. When the typhoons come the water level will rise about 8 metres (27ft or so) and you could white water raft down them. The cherry trees alongside the river are pretty in the spring though.
Also that first picture is quite the posed shot because if you pan to the right you get a more typical Tokyo back street scene - narrow street with lots of overhead electricity and phone lines. When I first arrived in Tokyo all this overhead cabling rather shocked me as the only place I had ever seen it before was in Cairo. I thought Japan was meant to be ultra-futuristic ....and it is in places. A curious mixture of very traditional and futuristic. You would think they'd do something about the cabling though as there are quite a few earthquakes and it could get pretty messy.
Anyway back to the area. This is Takinogawa and it is an odd area. It's just one station away from one of Tokyo's main hubs, Ikebukero, and about 10 minutes away from that station. Just a 10 minute walk makes it pretty unpopular with Japanese people who call anything over 5 from the station is considered the ends of the earth. That means it is cheap and cheerful. The only people that live here are non-Japanese, extremely old women (like 85 plus) and small dogs (small dogs are counted as being pretty much humans in Japan). Not so far away is Sugamo and this is where all the old people hang out and party. It's all tea shops, people playing shogi (Japanese chess) and a type of bawdy/traditional theater which is a couple of steps down from kabuki. When the husbands die the women tend to move westwards first through nishi-Sugamo and then finally Takinogawa. As a result there are quite a few clinics round here too. In that last photo you can see a clinic called Miyaki.
there are a lot of other religous rarities in this area too. An inari shrine - a shrine to foxes - These are not as common as people believe and they have a tendency to be a bit neglected. There are also several Korean churches, A Jehovah's Witness Kingdom Hall, A Mormon temple and a nunnery. I have a sneaking suspicion that the Buddha was built to deal with the competition.
I planned to upload rather a lot more photos for this but unfortunately Steem wouldn't let me so I'm going to have to split this post.
Part 2 will be soon.
