Free-Day #2, Ueno Park

I decided to spend my second free day in Tokyo at Ueno Park. This was really fun!

Being that it is our sixth day in Tokyo, I felt a little more confident with the subway system so I went out on my own. This was nice because I was able to spend as much time as I wanted on the things that I wanted to see.

I had lots of fun with this day. This park is free to walk in to enjoy the activities. Being a Sunday there was quite a bit of traffic, but at the same time this place is fairly large. (I didn't notice the amount of people until I was trying to leave.) At Ueno there are museums, temples and shrines, local shops, a baseball field, and even a zoo! Many cool things.

I really enjoyed the temples. While in some of these temples, I would
notice people come in to pray. They prayed by tossing a coin into some

sort of box, clapping twice, then bowing their head in prayer. I also saw some people in a temple praying in silence on their knees sitting atop their ankles. One women leaving this moment of prayer in a temple took steps backwards making sure not to turn her back from the place where she was just praying.

This was very interesting to me because religion was done in a place with public access and tourist taking pictures. It was interesting to see that in a public place people were doing something that is so personal. Japan is a collective society so it stuck out to see people focusing on their religion that is founded on searching the self from within (Buddhism). To me this makes sense: to spend time focusing on the self just as much as one spends time helping out in the community.