Crossing off the Bucket Lists

Poor Kyo

2016 is the year of the Red Fire Monkey. I can tell because every where I go, every store I go to, is covered in monkey toys, monkey merchandise, monkey posters...Starbucks, where I'm currently sitting, has some hella cute mugs for sale all covered in the same little red monkey, smiling and looking cute. Before I came to this half of the world, "Lunar New Year" was a thing that existed on chinese food placemats and set up manga that fifteen year old me was absolutely obsessed with. Now it's become one of the only two vacation holidays I get with my job, and is a Really Big Deal.

But for now, I don't want to talk about monkeys. I want to rewind the clock an entireeee year and finally write the post I've been meaning to write since Lunar New Year, 2015. For those of you who didn't know, for context, 2015 happened to be a Green Wood Sheep year, so lots of fluffy plushies and even a sheep cafe existed for a while. But for me, the highlight of the New Year was something I'd been dreaming of doing since summer camp in the early 2000's. On a cold Wednesday last February, I stepped off of a plane at Haneda airport. I'd landed in Tokyo.

I have no money anymore.

For those of you who haven't figured it out, I'm a giant nerd. Dan towed me around Tokyo for almost a week while I hyperventilated, pretty much shut down as a person, and silently (and not-so-silently) crossed things off the mental list I'd been keeping since I'd been a preteen. Sushi, check. Harajuku, check. Shibuya crossing, check. Akhihabara, Ikibukero, all the places I'd spend my formative weeby years lusting after suddenly became real, and I was there, and it was fabulous. 

The only photo you can see things in.

But the most important, I think, came later. Our last night, when on a whim I looked some things up and we spend a long time getting lost in parts of Tokyo we'd never heard of. I had done the arcades, the Pokemon Cafe, the shopping centers. What I hadn't done was a shrine. So we came here.

"Here" is Tokyo's Yushima Tenman-gū Shrine, which I found in a complete coincidence and definitely not because of an anime or anything, that would be weird.

Basically, it's a shrine dedicated to Tenjin, Shinto's kami of learning, and it's the place that aspiring students, scholars and - drumroll - writers go to pray for success! Being that I can't be trusted to finish anything I start, I decided it was time for some proper divine intervention.

Ema all in a row.

Unfortunately, we showed up at night, so while we were able to see gorgeous buildings and trees (we'd managed to show up righhhhttt after the plum blossom festival) neither of our cameras take decent night pictures and everything is over/under/aroundexposed and terrible. The shrine was amazing, and we wandered around for a bit before I left an offering of 1000 yen and purchased an ema (small squares of wood used to leave prayers for the kami to see) to leave with the rest of the desperate literates. 

They leave them hanging up there and the sight is fairly impressive. It was a little humbling to purchase the ema from the monk and try and find a good place to leave it. But, I did, and walked away with a desperate hope that maybe - just maybe - it'd be enough. 

It's 2016 now, and though I'm not finished, it's within spitting distance. I hope to have it finished "enough" in the next week to print it out for the planes, trains and automobiles in the month ahead. So maybe it was good for something! Either way, I'm so happy I got to see this place. It left only a handful of places in Japan left on my "see before I die" list, and well...let's just say that I've managed to cross a couple more off since then. 2015 was a crazy deer - I mean, year.