Nezu Shrine

This last week or so has been bad for natural disasters in Japan. If you check the news sources you will find that there was a bad earthquake yesterday (I felt two of them in my apartment and could see the curtains sway a bit) and a typhoon a while back. There were a number of deaths and really it has been bad. As I think I've said before, my apartment and the place I work are designed for earthquakes. The trains are designed to shut down if an earthquake is detected but it still can be bad. When the typhoon went through it shut the trains down and I got stuck (ate dinner at the rail station) until it passed through.



Today I went for a walk in an old area of Tokyo near Ueno. There are a lot of old buildings and stores from a 100 years ago or more (must have seen an earthquake and a typhoon or two). Fortunately there was a festival going on at the Nezu shrine. Nezu shrine is about 1,900 years old and this was the first time I had seen it. The women in the picture are participating in some way. I don't know what the festival was about but there were loads of people. One interesting thing about it was that they were having a kind of neighborhood garage sale beside it. The same sort of stuff you would see in the United States - baby clothes and things outgrown. And there were lots of tents set up as usual where they were selling food and drink.



There were a number of art museums in the area and I also walked through the University of Tokyo campus. The University of Tokyo looks very European, and of course has a very good reputation. That's about it for this week.