A Series Of International Incidents: The Terrifying Tourism*

On the third day of my mother's visit we went to the Imperial Gardens, which was the second time for me, and it was a bit gray and rainy. Still a very nice place, but it seems as though many water features in Tokyo, including the waterfall here, were either off or set to very low, probably for the purposes of electric conservation.

After seeing the garden, we had a haunted tour of Tokyo lined up. It turned out to just be the two of us and an American employed in Korea who was on vacation in Japan taking it. While the haunted tour was not very spooky, there was a lot of interesting information about Japanese history and the Japanese mythology of things like goblins, and we also walked through some previously unseen areas of Tokyo. We saw some creepy old pre-WWII houses, very small, very wooden, and surprisingly still standing and housing tenants:

We learned about the kitsune, or white fox spirits, who grow an extra tail every 100 years and extra powers to go with those tails. They can be good or bad, and can shapeshift like many Japanese spirits. Many temples have kitsune statues to protect them from malevolent spirits:

We stopped by a Zen Buddhist temple...

...saw the grave of that guy who did all the famous Japanese paintings like the great wave and all the goblins, Hokusai Katsushika...

 

...visited a temple known for its affiliation with toads, who in Japanese lore heal skin afflictions - you can buy a toad statue from the temple, take it home, and when it's cured your skin condition, return it to the temple with thanks...

...and finished up the tour in the Kappa area of Tokyo. Supposedly, this area was swampland with horrible drainage. One resident, fed up with the lack of drainage, made a deal with the local kappa, turtle-ish water demons, to dig a sewer system, and the area never had water problems again.

The kappa in the Harry Potter books really is not true to Japanese lore. True Japanese kappa do not have long spindly fingers but rather webbed fingers, and to defeat one, you simply bow to him and the water in his head dish will fall out, leaving him at your mercy. If you can refill it with water, he will be forever grateful. They, like most Japanese spirits, can change form into people. 

Upon learning that my favorite vegetables are the same as the kappa (cucumbers, zucchini, and yellow squash), the tour guide hinted that I may in fact be a kappa. I suppose we will never truly know.

We finished up the tour at one of Tokyo's most famous shrines (Britney Spears visited!), Sensō-ji. We purified ourselves in the incense out front, so that no goblins followed us home, and thus ended the tour.

For more pictures, check out Flickr, and tune in next time for the Tokyo Disney portion of the adventure!

*Tourism not particularly terrifying - the titles of this series of posts references A Series of Unfortunate Events because the international incidents part is semi-accurate and coming up with alliterative names for the rest of it is amusing.