While I was in Tokyo last week for the tradeshow, we found some time over the weekend to do a bit of sight-seeing. One of the places we visited was the Meiji Shrine in Harajuku. I remember Kitteh and I tried to go there the last time we were there but it was closed or something.
The walk to the shrine goes through a really long road surrounded by lots of trees. It was a really pleasant walk… would’ve been more pleasant though if it wasn’t so hot. When I was over, it was supposed to be Autumn but for some reason it still felt like summer and summer there is a lot hotter than it is back in Malaysia. We were sweating all over while trying to play tourist and take pictures of the little things we saw on the way to the shrine.
Xiaxue wasn’t really enjoying the walk. Before we came she had made good effort dressing up with her hair made into a bow or something, all ready to go kai kai! The heat though made her grumpy just like how it makes Kitteh grumpy because it ruins your make-up and stuff like that. Wish I had taken a picture of her then but I didn’t dare, she looked so on the edge that she might’ve just grabbed my camera and jump on it 3 times before throwing it into the jungle.
Anyway after the 15 minute walk or so we reached the Shrine.
We saw a group of people all formally dressed up, some in some traditional Japanese costumes taking a slow and quiet walk. We were trying to figure out what they were doing. At first because a lot of them were dressed in black suits we thought that it was a funeral.
But we later concluded that it was a wedding ceremony…. for some rich and powerful Japanese family or something.
One thing that impresses me about Japan is how they’re such a modern and developed country but yet they still keep and hold a lot of their old Japanese traditions.
Further inside the shrine we came across this section which had a lot of these wooden plates hung up.
We went to take a look and I notice that written on these wooden plates were wishes by people from all over the world who visited the shrine.
I took some time to read through some of the wishes and it just felt like you were hearing echoes off a wishing well. It’s just… something to get a glimpse of what people all over the world are wishing for.
I didn’t want to take pictures of too many of them but this is the one that touched me the most.
I know that it could mean almost anything but for some reason my first interpretation of it was that it was some friends of Nicole asking her to fight on against a life threatening illness be it cancer or something.
Most of the wishes were written in other languages too. Like this one looked like it was written in Vietnamese probably by someone from Vietnam who dropped by the shrine a month ago.
Or this one in German that I am guessing is written in German.
Inspired by all this! We all decided to write wishes on our own. We took this piece of paper, wrote a wish, put it in a given envelope
and put it in a box
.
It was only after we all had put our wishes into the box did we learn that we were actually supposed to put in some money as a “token” offering. Of all of us, only Mike knew to do that but funny enough he didn’t know they gave our envelopes so he put his money in just with a piece of paper. The money probably slipped out once it got into the box and whoever opened the box probably wouldn’t know that the money came from him. So to make up for it we all later went to another part of the shrine and made some token donations.
After our visit to the shrine it was time to take the long walk back, a walk that Xiaxue was dreading. So when she saw a cab right outside the Shrine she took it as a gift from up above and quickly hopped into it offering to pay for it and inviting us all to go with her for the short cab ride. We all felt guilty about taking a 1 minute cab ride that would just take us outside the temple so we decided to take the long walk while Ringo went to keep her company.
The truth was halfway back on our walk we took a wrong turn and ended up taking an even longer walk so much that at some point we wished that we had taken a cab back too. Haha.. don’t tell Xiaxue this though. She would gloat till the day we all die and even after then her great grandchildren will be telling our great grandchildren about how their great grandmother was smart enough to take a cab many decades ago in Tokyo.
The saving grace though was that on our long walk back we bumped into an ice-cream parlour and had some nice Japanese green tea ice-cream.
And that made the walk worth it 🙂
Really… ask Maylene and Elaine here.
Timothy Tiah – Co-Founder of Colony, Kuala Lumpur Co-Working Space