Visiting the Emperor

Got to Tokyo at about 5:30 local time, and took an hour train ride into the city. Ruth likes taking local trains to get a sense of the place, so it’s not just a downtown with destinations. But I could’ve been happy taking an express train.

Found our airbnb apartment with the help of a nice young man who had the same brand of backpack I do, and wanted to practice some English. He asked us where we were from, and we said California. We asked him, and he said Hiroshima prefecture, “have you heard of it”. Unfortunately, that’s one of the Japanese cities most Americans have heard of…

Our apartment is in an entertainment district, so there’s lots to do at night, but we are super tired from the flight and are taking it easy. Had dinner at a stand up barbecue bar; quick and delicious.

In the morning, we awoke and headed to the Imperial Palace for one of the only days each year it is open to the public, on the occasion of his birthday. We stood in line in the relative cold for about an hour, with the calmest large crowd I have ever experienced. Through a few rounds of security, and then across a moat and the palace gates. The place was rebuilt in the 1960s after being destroyed in the war, an unfortunately common feature.

There were some nationalists in the crowd, who waved flags of Taiwan for reasons that weren’t clear to me. Maybe something to do with the recent election, where the Democratic party lost in a landslide to the former ruling (and more conservative) Liberal Democratic Party. In any case, the emperor’s speech was short, and probably didn’t touch on any of that. The crowd still loved it.