Interesting Things To Do in Nishi Nippori

Wait a minute! Did you not just write about things to do in Nippori? So why do I need another blog post about it?

Because this post is about Nishi-Nippori, 西日暮里, which is a different station than Nippori. It means “Western Nippori” and if you stand on the tips of your toes you can see Nishi-Nippori Station from Nippori Station. Sometimes, the stations on the Yamanote line are that close, barely giving the train time to accelerate before it has to brake for the next station.

That also means Nishi-Nippori can lay claim to many of the sights in the area, in particular Yanaka Ginza, which actually is slightly closer to Nishi-Nippori than Nippori or Tabata, the next station on the Yamanote line (on the inner loop). But that does not mean there is nothing to do around Nishi-Nippori station itself. Apart from the usual restaurants and bars that belong to any residential area around a major station in Japan.

There are several old streets around the station, some of them offering surprising views – for instance, of Mt Fuji.

The area from Ueno to Ikebukuro used to be the northern edge of Edo. That is one reason you will find so many temples here – they were established as a green shield by Tokugawa Ieyasu when he founded Edo. Nishi Nippori is no exception.

Just outside the western exit of Nippori station are no less than five temples and a shrine. There are several more temples nearby. Before the railroad, these temples were part of the green ring established by Tokugawa Ieyasu to make Edo easy to defend. The shrines used to be part of the same complexes as the temples, before the Meiji revolution when Shinto was turned into the national religion.

To get the most out of your visit to the temples arrive early; both shrines and temples open at sunrise, which in practice means around 7 AM. And do remember that they are religious places. You would not want foreigners to trample around in your home church or mosque laughing and running between the headstones in the graveyard, so do not encourage this kind of behavior among the people you are with. Especially children. But do bring a camera; temples always strive to have a small but beautiful garden.

Give an offering in the collection box, and always take off your shoes when you enter a building, except if it has a stone or plastic carpet floor. That means your walking shoes need to be comfortable, and you should bring some small change. Which actually, is easier than it sounds, since Japan is still very much a cash society.

The Suwa shrine is the first you will encounter of a whole series of temples lined up along the railway to the southeast, creating an experience that you are strolling through a town of old temples, some of them going back to long before the foundation of Edo. There are several other Suwa shrines around Tokyo, and the mother shrine is in Nagano. When the Meji regime had made Shinto the national religion, they realized there were way too few shrines for all the would-be worshippers, so famous shrines were encouraged to establish daughter shrines in Tokyo.

Family Affiliated Temples

The Buddhist temples were not affected. They already belonged to different sects, and during the Edo era affiliating yourself with a temple was a way of getting onto the social agenda of the important people praying there. Temples (and shrines) where the shogun and his family went to pray still proudly display the crests they received, along those from other important families. Affiliating yourself normally meant making substantial donations, and many temples have been able to retain their donations, and increase them as they sell gravesites and associated prayers.

The temples in Nishi Nippori are no exceptions. They are surrounded by graveyards, like almost any temple in Japan – as the saying goes, ”born Shinto, marry Christian, buried a Buddhist”. Buddhism is, after all, a religion concerned with the gradual uplift of the believers into Buddhahood, perhaps not until many cycles of universe creation and destruction. But every little bit of kindness and appropriate behavior helps, and that is what the temple priests are there to teach.

The temples are not only surrounded by graveyards, however. Several of them have famous Buddha and Juzo statues, and outside the Jokoji temple there is a collection of stone carvings; you might have believed them to be grave markers, and in a sense you are right. But they are not everyones grave markers; they are pagodas.

Pagodas, in most visitors view, are the five-storied towers you will find near Buddhist temples. But the wooden pagodas are an interpretation of Indian and Southeast Asian stupas, towers that contain a religious artefact, originally a relic of a saint but more often their writing, in the form of sutras (the Buddhist holy books).

Small Stone Pagodas

The wooden pagodas are tall but stone stupas are much smaller, rarely reaching over two meters in height. That is the kind of pagoda you will find outside Jokoji in Nishi-Nippori. They are carved with hindu deities and scenes from the lives of Buddha. And the carvings are old, so old that their mere appearance is awe-inspiring. There is no explanation available as to what the carvings represent.

But the carvings outside the Jokoji temple is not the only remarkable sight in Nishi Nippori. One of the more unusual sights in Nishi-Nippori is a museum dedicated to a French entomologist. The Fabre Insect Museum is run by the Henri Fabre Foundation, named for the French insect researcher and popular writer whose books on the lives of insects were required reading in Japanese schools for almost a hundred years.

The museum (which is quite small) has an awe-inspiring collection of various kinds of insects, from butterflies to stag beetles. There are also live beetles, immensely popular with Japanese children (boys especially), who often make a hobby of collecting and feeding stag beetles so they can pitch them in battle against stag beetles owned by other boys (sorry, they will neither evolve nor fit in a pokeball).

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