Exploring Kanto: Weekend Pilgrimages from Tokyo
Tokyo is a magnificent beast of a city, a circuit board of buildings stretching far across the Kanto Plain, rolling on into the surrounding provinces of Chiba, Saitama and Kanagawa. Home to 24 million souls by day and 12 million at night. Tokyo is one of the megalopolii. A concrete jungle where space is the ultimate luxury.
It is easy to forget, when one lives in Tokyo, that there is more to Japan than just office buildings, subway lines and harried office workers. To forget that out beyond the confines of the city there are mountains and rivers, farms and rice fields, open spaces and yes, even nature.
Michael Plastrow’s excellent Exploring Kanto: Weekend Pilgrimages from Tokyo is a guide book for day walks one can do from Tokyo. Covering 33 routes it offers a plethora of options for those looking to get out of Tokyo for the day.
These 33 walks follow the order of, and cover the 33 temples of the Bando ‘Sanjusansho’ Pilgrimage. As Plastrow writes in the introduction:
The Bando circuit is dedicated to Kannon, (Avalokitesvera in Sanskrit), a merciful bodhisattva who is supposed to have thirty-three separate manifestations (hence the number of temples on the circuit).
The book covers 9 walks in Yokohama’s Kanagawa Prefecture, 1 in Tokyo, 4 in Saitama, 2 in Gunma Prefecture, 3 in Tochigi Prefecture, 6 in Ibaraki Prefecture and 7 in Chiba Prefecture. We have been on a couple of the walks in the book and found it to be a useful guide – not just to the temples themselves, but also to local sites of interest that one passes on the way.
Published in 1996, it is a little dated in parts but overall the temples and walks described in the guide book are all still there making this book still as useful as when it was first published. Bus and train times may well have changed in the interim however there is enough in this book to make it a valuable addition to ones bookshelf during ones stay in Tokyo.
Highly recommended as a source of inspiration for what to do whilst living in Tokyo.
# Title: Exploring Kanto: Weekend Pilgrimages from Tokyo
# Author: Michael Plastow
# Paperback: 256 pages
# Publisher: Weatherhill; 1st ed edition (June 1996)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 0834803321
# ISBN-13: 978-0834803329
This book is reasonably hard to find, you might get lucky with one of the second hand bookstores in Tokyo – such as Good Day Books in Ebisu, or you should be able to pick up a copy from Amazon.com: Exploring Kanto
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