Wabi-sabi Wanderings in Yanaka: Stories from Arigato Travel

Yanaka feels like a Japan that might have been. The tighter packedstreets and small, almost quaint buildings stand out like a plateau against a wind-leveled valley. It is uninterrupted, either by war or by natural disaster.

Long lanes of sakura run straight as an arrow through buildings from a dozen different eras and a dozen different emperors. Incense pervades the nostrils, a soft and heavy backbeat to the syncopation of soft chatter from the many groups come to gaze at the beauty in pinks and whites and the pale blue sky, so visible without Tokyo’s ever-pervading skyline.

And yet, unlike most of Tokyo, which is merely built upon it, Yanaka is saturated with a visible sort of death. Vast fields of gravestones cover entire neighborhoods.  The whitewashed walls of temples and estate walls are built from old roof tiles; and statues of rooftop cats, which no longer live to chase mice themselves, are everywhere.  The centuries-old tea shops border grave carvers, a rarity anywhere else in the city. The calm gaze of the Buddha looks down upon the people, an ever-present reminder that nothing lasts forever, that all things decay, though it is a decay celebrated by the locals.

While the clumps of foreign tourists, speaking their many languages, watch the cherry blossoms, locals walk dogs between the gravestones, including a tiny white sprite-like creature who hops up against me with total joy and the single fattest and lowest-to-the-ground corgi one could imagine.

I stop by a croquette shop known as Suzuki Menchikatsu, the best croquette shop in the city. Across the way, I spy an old souvenir shop; a daruma doll with both eyes filled in rests in pride of place atop a shelf. I wonder what goal the shopkeeper accomplished to fill in that second eye. Was it the current shopkeeper? His father? His grandfather? How many generations have owned that storefront? Could it be that I am simply imagining things? Perhaps there has never been a single family who owned that shop, and instead I, in my way, am adding gravitas to a tourist trap.

But there is something that feels different about Yanaka. It speaks to a Japan lost in two tragedies, one following the other. Neither seems to have touched this place, leaving a Japan of an era that never came.

There is nothing shiny about Yanaka, nothing glittering and high-tech and new age. But there is something authentic about it. Something unpretentious and simple, something that knows what it is and is fine with that. As cliché as it may be, there is undeniably something akin to wabi-sabi in Yanaka, a place that feels no need to hide its spots.

Featured Photo Credit: Japan Still

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