A reader writes about the Saturday edition of The Japan Times and how much she appreciates the listing of what's going on in our city. She especially enjoyed Robert Yellin's Feb. 13 article about Nezu Museum and its current exhibition revealing the elegance of traditional sake drinking, the sake cups and the serving containers, many with long histories and crafted by potters from famous kilns in Japan and other countries as well, mainly China and Korea. She could better appreciate what she was seeing because of his review.
However, she enjoyed more than the exhibition. She hasn't been in Japan long, but she saw more beautiful kimono that day than she saw even during shrine and temple visits during the annual New Year's celebration, and she wonders if women always dress so traditionally when they go to Nezu Museum -- and who is/was Nezu?. She was also surprised to find the extensive garden, with winding paths, streams, teahouses and stone carvings, a pleasant retreat from the surrounding busy streets of Aoyama. She recommends the teahouse overlooking the garden as a pleasant place to extend your visit with some light refreshments.
However, she was baffled by something she saw. She knows about Japan's winter-wrapped trees, which rather look like families of straw people standing together, nodding their straw heads as they converse. She has heard the straw wrappings protect trees from insects. However, she would not call them cute. What she saw there were, indeed, cute: groups of three little straw people with fringed hats throughout the garden. Since they were about 30 cm tall, they couldn't be covering trees. So why were they there?