4:30 AM--- I was riding my rather rusty mountain-bike through the deserted streets of Tokyo, headed for Arai-Yakushi Temple and its first-Sunday-of-the-month “Nomi-on-Ichi” ---flea market, temple sale.
A good sized furoshiki cloth was in my satchel in order to carry back anything I might buy. Second only to an early look at all the interesting junk and treasures that dealers and pickers might bring in from the countryside, I looked forward to my monthly “mooningu” breakfast with friends at a local coffee shop near the temple. Awaiting me there was my private jar of Japanese-made Scotch-marmalade.
Marmalade? In Japan? A private jar? Let me explain, using a very old Japanese custom. At tiny private bars, with only a few chairs or stools, member-customers each have their own bottle of Johnny Walker with their name on it up on a shelf behind the bar, a symbol of membership, purchased at an inflated price from the bar. Each drinks from his own bottle, or serves a guest he brought along, or a 'round to all “on the house” if the owner was celebrating a promotion or his child just got into a prestigious kindergarten, thus on an auspicious path to Tokyo University and a good company job in the far future.
But back to marmalade. Now I truly love a traditional Japanese breakfast, with raw egg and soy sauce over hot rice, eaten with salty nori. But my favorite Japanese breakfast is “mooningu”, Japan’s pronunciation of the English word ‘morning’, their term for “a perfect western breakfast”---strong coffee in a small cup, a hard-boiled egg still warm in the shell, and 2-inch thick hot buttered toast. Mrs. Tanaka laughed when I asked permission to bring some marmalade for my toast next month. The next month the jar went up on a shelf with my name on it. She called it my Johnny Walker bottle, promising to guard it with her life.
440 AM---- I had a long ways to go, wanting to get there early. I rode quickly by the corner where our neighborhood put out garbage and recyclables for collection but which now stood immaculately empty except for the plastic bottles of water to keep the feral cats from peeing on the cement wall; Locked up my bike at Takadanobaba Station and jumped on the first Yamanote Line train of the morning; transferred to the Seibu-Shinjuku Private Line; Now an hour later, walked the 5 minutes from the Araiyakushi-mae Station to the Buddhist temple grounds through narrow back streets lined with shops, the shop owners still sleeping in the small rooms above, their shuttered entrances just inches from the side of passing delivery trucks. In Tokyo space is money. The pickers were just unloading their wares onto their tarps on the swept dirt grounds under the cherry trees.
After greeting and chatting and laughing and dickering with the pickers, I rushed---in Tokyo everyone rushes--to the coffee shop for my marmalade ‘mooningu’. Tanaka-san-no-okusan had a long look on her face when she saw me enter. Bowing much deeper than usual, and in that most polite and apologetic manner for which the Japanese language is so eminently suited, she explained that some of her daily customers had developed an inexplicable and uncontrollable urge to eat ‘maamareedo’ on their toast. “Moshiageraremasen,” she said, showing me the empty marmalade jar.
4:30 AM--- a month later. With extra jars of ‘maamareedo’ in my pack for all, I once again headed for my favorite temple and temple sale and the Tanakas’ coffee shop.
Tom
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| Araiyakushi Temple is as serene and beautiful for meditation on a weekday as it is exciting on market day. 3 old film-photos mechanically spliced together, now framed here at home in Nova Scotia. |
