Tokyo Sightseeing

Mrs. Kida was a gracious host and did a wonderful job fitting in many different sites around the enormous city of Tokyo.  I met her in Shinagawa station near my hotel.  This is one of the largest stations in Tokyo and it is full of so many people.  Luckily, I had met Mrs. Kida before and she was wearing a beautiful kimono so we were able to find each other.



Our first stop was the Origami Kaiken (museum).  In the museum, there are origami exhibits, origami classes, an origami store, a paper store, and a paper making studio.  There we met Mr. Kobayashi who is an origami master.  There were no classes going on that day but he offered to give us a folding demonstration.  We walked through the exhibits of art all made with paper.  There were amazingly intricate displays depicting scenes from famous Japanese screens.

It was amazing to watch Mr. Kobayashi's hands work as he spoke. 

He never looked at his hands but he would so quickly turn a piece of paper into a dog, or a frog, or a rose, or a bird, or a maple leaf.  He did use other tools like a folding knife, scissors, and tweezers to make the spiral of the rose. 

During the demonstration I learned that Mr. Kobayashi has been all over the world teaching about origami.  He showed us a photo of the dining table decorations he made for an important international summit.  He also wrote all of the origami books in the store.  Quite the celebrity.  I wondered if he was related to the Lawrence School Kobayashi family as they are pretty special too.

Our next stop was Asakusa where we looked at the large shrine gate and walked through the market area.  

Beside the busy tourist area we entered a lovely quiet traditional restaurant with private tatami rooms for each party.  Mrs. Kida ordered a traditional Bento and some Sukiyaki for me to try.  I ate many things that I have never eaten before, like a whole river fish and sashimi.  The octopus was quite good.  I didn’t care for the squid very much but the tuna was delicious.  Tuna in Japanese is Maguro (which is the closest sound you can make to McGraw in Japanese).  The students in Mihara Elementary School even drew pictures on the board of tuna sashimi when they heard my name. 

 In the afternoon we visited the Taiko Kaiken to see drums from Japan as well as all over the world..  The huge taiko drum made such a deep sound that the other drums in the room made noise when it was beaten.   The learning we did with Genki Spark at Lawrence made me think that the rhythms and dances of taiko drumming are very mathematical.  We did not see a demonstration there, so I’ll just have to go see Mrs. Wang, Ms. Hsu and the other members of Genki Spark again. 

From there we sped over the Tokyo Sky Tree to get a bird’s eye view of Tokyo before it was time for abacus class.  The Sky Tree is so high that you can see just how expansive the urban area of Tokyo actually is.  On clearer days you can see Mt. Fuji from the tower, but despite the sunny skies, it was too humid for us on that day. 

It was a wonderful whirlwind mathematics tour of Tokyo…..but wait there’s more.  Next came Soroban school.