Flying koi at the Tokyo Tower

During dinner The Family said “Let’s go see the Tokyo Tower afterwards.” It was a short ride on the metro and a little uphill walk after that. I hadn’t been there in thirty years, but I remembered that the approach was different. Not that it mattered. It looks like the Eiffel Tower, and is equally impressive. It loomed over us from more than a kilometer away, and we stopped to take photos now and then.

One of the stories that I like most about it is that it was made from scrap iron sourced from tanks destroyed in the Korean war. Of course there are many other interesting stories about it. For example, that it is nine meters taller than the Eiffel Tower, and that its height was determined by the requirement that the antenna at the top should be able to transmit across the Kanto plain. Can both these stories be equally true?

It was two days before Japan’s Children’s Day, and in celebration of the festival, these koinobori, windsocks in the form of carp, were strung across the base. It seems that the black carp celebrate the father, the red the mother, the blue the eldest child, and the rest all the other children. I’d been buying the special oak leaf wrapped kashiwa mochi every day for breakfast. I was a little embarrassed to discover why the sales staff had been so concerned about telling me how long they would last each time they sold it to me. They’d expected me to take it back for the children in my family. I guess I won’t tell my nieces what I didn’t get them for children’s day.