Our last day in Tokyo for now.
We go to Asakusa and see some amazing temples and a good deal of stalls selling tourist tat. We bring bento boxes with us for lunch, which I can highly recommend and are usually found in the basement of most department stores. Whilst eating our lunch an old man approaches us and engages us in English conversation, asking where we are from. He reminds me of a character related in Niall Murtagh’s account of living in Japan, The Blue-Eyed Salaryman, and spends part of his time reminiscing about the time after the war. This is slightly surprising, but the sentiment is similar to the character in Murtagh’s book. Perhaps now that the Japanese economy has stalled, some prefer to look back to “the good old days”.
He also laments the “youth of today” – something more universal and likely to be echoed by grumpy old men across the world – blaming technology and computer games specifically for what he perceives to be the parlous state of Japanese family life. More surprisingly, he seemed to think that the Japanese worked too hard and also praised the British empire for its legacy of multi-culturalism*, which he compared to his own culture which he declared was still “too closed”. Of course, it’s not really possible to extrapolate from talking to one old man, but this perspective was interesting nonetheless.
More prosaically, he also told us that he thought everyone wore face masks due to high pollen counts, so at least we knew the reason for that.
* I don’t really want to get into that discussion. It seems like the currency of that particular word has been de-valued, but I can’t think of a better alternative.