While in Tokyo we shared time with our dear friends of almost three decades, Naoto and Hiromi Katsube. Here's a shot me and Naoto-san on the platform waiting to take the (ancient) Toden-Arakawa Streetcar Line. It's kind of like a toy train for grownups:
Unaware of our destination, they kindly took us to visit Paper Nao, the gallery and showroom of renown traditional paper maker Naoaki Sakamoto, who had been highly recommended to us by Dana's friend Noreen Fukumori
and checked out his work.
We were patiently attended to by staff member Nabeka-san. Here's a shot of her with Dana after she'd spent an hour or more helping us sort through pieces we might like to bring home with us:
Then we moved on to Sugamo, a mojo-free zone (don't ask), where Dana made ritual contact with a larger-than-life duck-butt. Legend has it that if you pat his butt in just the right way, one will avoid the humiliation of needing diapers in one's senior years. Suffice to say, the recommended incantations were fully observed.
Another day, Naoto-san and Hiromi-san took us to visit
Nishi-Ogikubo. Among other interesting attractions, we visited Hiromi-san's alma mater, Tokyo Women's Christian University, also the alma mater for famed
Marie Kondo, author of the cult-classic
The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. Dana and Hiromi-san commemorated the significance of the moment:
A surprising number of Japanese people we met (for the first time, in each case) and engaged in conversation eventually allowed that (unsolicitedly, mind you), in their opinion, I look amazingly like Sting ('su-ting-gu' in their delivery). For the sake of journalistic neutrality, I include this selfie from the
Bamboo Forest and leave it to you, dear reader, to draw your own conclusion:
One evening in Tokyo, while shopping in the
Ginza district, we concluded this would be the perfect opportunity to avail Dana of her first shabu-shabu experience. Can you feel this sense of anticipation?
In Kyoto, while waiting and praying for the cherry blossoms to reveal themselves to us, we spent a day temple and shrine hopping (see separate post
Temples, Palaces and Shrines) around town. At the end of the day, after everything closed, making our way back to our Airbnb, we got just a wee bit lost and stumbled upon the studio of internationally-recognized textile dying artist,
Hiroshi Saito. Given the late hour, we assumed his studio was already closed. But as fate would have it, Saito-san was holding his annual open studio and so he invited us in and gave us the warmest welcome and tour of his studio. Following the 2011 tsunami and consequent Fukushima nuclear reactor environmental disaster, he became inspired to complete switch over his textile dye art to use fully organic dyes. He has been a major contributor to the AIDS-awareness quilt project, calling that his "life work." As we prepared to say our good-byes, he insisted on a group shot. Thank you, Hiroshi-san!
On our final day in Kyoto, as the drama finally crested and we realized our bucket-list quest of immersing ourselves within wall-to-wall cherry blossoms, Dana could scarcely contain her joy:
