Gratianus

I arrived in Tokyo on Friday evening, just missing a minor earthquake. It has been an intense but very satisfying time since then. I am staying in a hotel that also serves as Tokyo University's guest house.



The hotel is very quiet and comfortable. The room is small, but the bed is full size.

On Saturday we first had a great lunch in a restaurant on the top floor of the university hospital, with an amazing view over Tokyo. Then I and Peter Landau gave our lectures. Here is Landau, who identified the famous (but so far anonymous) Archpoet with a named twelfth-century jurist.



After the talks, which together went on for something like four hours (including the questions and answers afterwards, which took some extra time since some of the conversation there was translated between Japanese and German), we had a wonderful dinner at a Chinese restaurant in the Ginza district. We had very much very good food, including shark fin soup, Peking Duck, and dumplings.

On Sunday we visited a museum which actually was inside a shopping mall. The museum had a very beautiful exhibit of woodblock prints from the late eighteenth century (and a few from the very beginning of the nineteenth). We also walked around a little in the mall, where we had a light lunch.

The photo below is from the mall.