The Trip to Sakura Shinmachi

Those of you who have lived in Japan for a while will be familiar with Sazae-san, a popular postwar family manga/anime series that is on TV every Sunday evening.

That's Sazae-san standing in the doorway (sorry, this is the best screen still of the show I could find on Google). Well, it turns out that the area the comic strip and the TV cartoon series is set is called Sakura Shinmachi, which is just one stop away from Komazawa, where Yuko and I live.







So, this weekend we took Elena on a little stroll to Sakura Shinmachi. This area has lots of cutesy and a few high end shops, but otherwise it just feels like a typical, if somewhat upscale, residential Tokyo neighborhood. Here's Yuko and Elena, in front of a cutesy little tea shop there.







The highlight for Eric, besides picking up 2 kilograms of granola & muesli at the one supermarket within 5 miles that has it, was finding this sign. I'm not quite sure what business these guys are "kind of no. 1" in, but they sure don't have much confidence in their superiority, do they?