My Tokyo

 By Fukiko Aoki Hamill

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TOKYO IN BLOOM

Tokyo isn’t simply a city of places and monuments; it’s a city of seasons.  My last trip was April 1992 and coincided with the beginning of the cherry-blossom season. For centuries the Japanese have marked the blooming of the cherry trees with an activity called hanami, or flower viewing. You can see hundreds of otherwise respectable businessmen drinking, singing, and carousing under the trees in places like Ueno Park, which is covered with pink blossoms. I prefer quieter places.

One of the Japanese people's finer points is their affection for the flowers of the changing seasons. Spring begins with the plum blossoms. April brings the cherry. In late spring and early summer we have wisteria and azaleas, and summer is the time of morning glories, lotus, and iris. Certain places were famous for all these flowers until the Meiji Era, but after the calamities of the 20th century most have disappeared. One that remains is the superb Iris Garden, at the Meiji Shrine, where each June some 150 varieties of iris reach for a place in the sun.

The area stretching from the Meiji Shrine through Yoyogi Park is, for me, another important, unchanged part of Tokyo. Once, in the years before the war, the park served as the parade ground for the Japanese imperial army. After the war it became a housing complex for the U.S. Occupation forces; they called the district Washington Heights. After the American army left, the site was used for the Olympics and housed athletes from all over the world.

THE GINZA

When I return to Tokyo I always visit the Ginza, whose name means "silver mint”; the mint was established there in the 17th century. I love the area for its style and historical aura. After its reconstruction following the 1923 earthquake, the Ginza became popular as a symbol of civilization and enlightenment Tokyoites loved walking in the evenings on the Ginza and even created a new word to describe the experience: gimbura. The Ginza has always tried to be first in introducing Western culture while at the same time adding a Japanese flavor to the import. Typical is the 1933 Lion Beer Hall, at Ginza 7-chome, which was designed by a Japanese architect influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright. I always tell my friends to go and have a beer in the great, dark room.

Shopping remains at the heart of the Ginza, parts of which resemble New York's Fifth Avenue. If you stand on the southern corner of Harumi Dori and Chuo Dori, among the expensive jewelers, boutiques, and restaurants, the only vestige you see of the old Ginza is the 19th-century Wako Building. Generations of Japanese have rendezvoused under its clock tower. A few doors down is the Kimura-ya bakery shop, founded in 1869 and famous for inventing the anpan, a delicious bun with a sweet bean filling that is now common all over Japan. On the second floor there's a tearoom, where well-off Japanese women meet to gossip or rest from the exhausting task of shopping (4-5-7 Ginza).

Two blocks farther north of the Wako Building, on Chuo Dori, is the great Itoya stationery store (2-7-10 Ginza). The company was established toward the end of the Meiji Era, in 1904, and now fills all nine floors of a modern building. This store is one of my husband's favorite shops in Tokyo. Even a casual visitor could easily spend a day wandering around the store and still not finish examining every new gadget and writing device.

A WALK WEST

The Ginza is a good place to begin walking around Tokyo. If you wend your way northwest through the Ginza you will come to the Yurakucho area, once the home of three of Japan's major daily newspapers - the Asahi, Mainichi, and Yomiuri. I used to visit friends here, but now all three papers have moved to fancier quarters and the neighborhood seems strange to me. Heading toward the Imperial Palace from Yurakucho brings you to Hibiya, full of theaters, movie houses, restaurants, music and video stores, pizza shops, airline offices, and, facing Hibiya Park, the new Imperial Hotel. The old Imperial Hotel, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and erected in 1922, was demolished in 1967 despite protests from Japanese and international architects; part of it was saved and reassembled in Meijimura, a theme park in the city of Nagoya, 140 miles from Tokyo. The old hotel survived the 1923 earthquake and World War II (it was Douglas MacArthur's first residence in Tokyo), but - and it always strikes me as an extraordinary irony -  it did not survive the 1960s.

MY CITY

 There is no end to the Tokyo I remember, the unchanging Tokyo along with the Tokyo that has vanished. For me there is no other city with such delicious food, no other city so convenient and livable. Nor is there a city that changes or that loves the new and the fashionable with such fierce if fleeting passion. Yet my Tokyo is always there for me. It's as if it whispers, "Come back, Edokko. Come and see how much I have changed. Come and see how I remain the home you have always known."