For lunch on Monday, we ate chankonabe, the traditional lunch of sumo wrestlers in a little place near a sumo arena. According to Ako, our guide from JICE, sumo tournaments happen only 6 times a year and we were lucky enough to come during one of them! But, it is being held in Osaka. How anti-climatic. When entering, we enter on a floor of cement and rocks, and need to take off our shoes before entering the dining room.
Here, we sat around a table that was decked out with salted cabbage, limu or seaweed, rice, and the pot in which the soup was being cooked before us. It was different to be sitting on the floor eating and many of us kept re-situating ourselves. It was definitely something to get used to.
When we left, we started walking to the Edo-Tokyo Museum. It is a 7-story high building and a really long escalator.
The exhibit that we went to was the permanent exhibit so it was all about history of Tokyo and Japan. When we arrived, we were lucky enough to happen upon a shamisen performance. It looks like a banjo but it has only three strings. The beauty of this type of music was in the beat of the picking and also in the deftness of the performers’ fingers.