We had reservations on the 1:00pm train to Tokyo from Kyoto – it had been really hard to get on an earlier train since it was the Golden Week holiday weekend. The station was very crowded – it seemed like everyone and their parents were there to take a train to some place! We had eaten breakfast at our standard spot for the last few days and wandered around the stores in the Kyoto station until it was time to get on the train.

We reached Tokyo at around 3.00pm – we took the train back to Minami-senju to pick up our luggage from the hostel we had stayed in earlier. We would be staying in a different place since the hostel didn’t have any rooms for us for that weekend. It turned out that the new place was only a 10-minute walk from where we were. We dropped off our luggage at the hotel – it was an interesting place with a modern design but the rooms were still the traditional Tatami-style Japanese rooms. The room, however, was tiny – it was probably the size of a walk-in closet in a standard suburban American home! We weren’t too concerned since we planned to be out most of the time and would use it only to sleep.

Kabuki-za

We really wanted to get a taste for the Japanese performing arts while we were there. Our guidebook informed us that the Kabuki-za in Ginza offered tickets to single acts of a kabuki performance, along with headphones providing English translations. This seemed too good to pass up – so we headed for Ginza to catch the act that was to begin at around 6. The line was already snaking alround the side of the building – a ticket official came round to tell us that the tickets we’d get were standing-room only. We were determined to get a glimpse of the performance, even if we had to stand for two hours!

We rented the ear phones which provided English translations – best money spent ever!   The theatre was pretty big; we had seats in the upper balcony area behind the very last rows. The balcony section was packed, mostly with foreign tourists eager for a taste of Japanese theatre. The curtains opened and the act began. The stage decor and sets were lavish, as were the costumes and make-up worn by the actors. The music score was provided by an orchestra that sat off-stage. The story was one about 4 thieves that get into some trouble with the police, with several melodramatic twists and turns along the way. The actors enunciated the dialogues very forcefully and dramatically. It was a thoroughly enjoyable performance – parts of the plot reminded us of Hindi and Tamil films we’d seen in our childhood. The act wound up with a fight scene where one of the heroes fought 10 men all at one time, on the rooftop of a temple – this was so like a Rajinikanth movie that R & I speculated that this was the reason why there are claims of his films being wildly popular in Japan !