Tokyo at Christmas.🎄
I’m leaving around the holidays. Suitcase 🧳 half-zipped. Last coffees. Last train rides where nobody looks up. I’ll miss the small rituals: the warm vending machine cans, the way Tokyo can make me feel anonymous and seen all at the same time.
This time of year hits different. Not sadness exactly—more like gratitude and bewilderment. Tokyo never begs me to stay. And I thought I wanted it to this time.
December 2025
Fuji-san showed up for me today.
In my photo, the foreground is all noise. —Fuji rises. Snow-bright. Clean lines. A mountain so iconic it almost feels like a symbol and not a real place.
Fuji’s significance in Japan is part geology, part myth. It’s a stratovolcano—beautiful because it’s dangerous, serene because it’s powerful. The last eruption (the Hōei eruption in 1707–08) sent ash all the way to Edo, the old Tokyo, a reminder that the postcard version of Fuji is only half the story. Even when it’s “sleeping,” it’s still a living mountain with a long memory.
But Fuji isn’t only rock and risk. It’s also sacred space. For a long time, people approached it the way you approach something larger than your life: with ritual, with reverence, with a kind of humility that modern cities try to breed out of us. Shintō tradition ties Fuji to Konohanasakuya-hime, the blossom princess, and Sengen shrines spread across Japan are devoted to her—gateways, in a sense, for people who wanted a relationship with the mountain without necessarily climbing it. In the Edo period, Fuji pilgrimage became a mass movement through Fuji-kō confraternities, and Tokyo still carries that history in miniature “Fujizuka” mounds—small replicas you can climb when the real ascent is too far, too expensive, too impossible. Even the city, even the daily grind, made room for a symbolic climb.
And then there’s art—Fuji as the ultimate muse. Hokusai and Hiroshige didn’t just depict it; they multiplied it, placed it in seasons and weather and distance, turned it into a rhythm. Fuji became a kind of visual heartbeat for Japan: constant, reappearing, changing only in light and mood. That’s part of why UNESCO listed Fujisan as a World Heritage cultural site in 2013—not just for what it is, but for what it has meant, spiritually and artistically, for a very long time.
What I love about seeing Fuji from my classroom window in Tokyo is the contrast. The city is all construction, an endless present tense. Fuji is slow time. Fuji is old time. Fuji is perspective. It reminds you that Tokyo, for all its steel and speed, still lives under the same sky as mountains and myths.
Some days, you get lucky and the world gives you a clear line of sight to something enduring. Today was one of those days.
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December 2025
Nisonbutsu 二尊仏 = “Two Buddha Statues” at Sensō-ji
These are a famous pair of large statues called Nisonbutsu – literally “two revered Buddhas.” They stand in the open air just past Hōzōmon Gate, a little off to the side of the main approach.
Who are they?
Although people call them “two Buddhas,” they actually show two bodhisattvas:
Kannon (Avalokiteśvara) on one side – the bodhisattva of mercy and compassion
Seishi (Mahāsthāmaprāpta) on the other – the bodhisattva of wisdom and spiritual power
In Pure Land Buddhism these two usually stand beside Amida Nyorai; here they appear together as a pair, balancing compassion and wisdom.
Edo-period origin
The statues are Edo-period works, made in 1687 by a sculptor named Takase Zenbē (Zenbee) from Tatebayashi in present-day Gunma. He dedicated them to repay a debt of gratitude to a rice-merchant family who had helped him:
Kannon, bringing mercy, for the father
Seishi, bringing wisdom, for the son
Because they sit outside in an open space and are always exposed to the rain, they’re also nicknamed Nurebotoke 濡れ仏 – “the Wet Buddhas.” Local guides describe them as two of the most magnificent Edo-period Buddha statues at Sensō-ji.
29nov25
Main Hall (Kannon-dō / Hondo)
The main hall of Sensō-ji enshrines Kannon, the bodhisattva of compassion, and goes back to a temple founded in 645, making this Tokyo’s oldest temple site. The hall was rebuilt many times under the Tokugawa shoguns, survived fires and earthquakes, but was finally destroyed in the Tokyo air raids of 1945. The present building, completed in 1958 with donations from people across Japan, stands as both a living place of worship and a postwar symbol of recovery and resilience.
29nov 25
