We usually travel to the past, but this time let’s travel into the future.

It is now the dangerous year 2050, and the zombie apocalypse that has resulted from the unstoppable spread of the coronavirus known as SARS-CoV-2 following the botched prevention measures at the Tokyo Olympics 2020 2021, has left much of the world in ruins. For the past 29 years, all the attempts to suppress the super-pandemic have failed as the ruthless virus variant dubbed as the “Samurai Virus” raged throughout the planet, leaving only a small minority of humans unscathed.

It’s 6 o’clock in the morning. The early sunlight glimmers through the bright green leaves of the giant cedar trees, many of which have been standing here for hundreds of years. The sounds of birds singing can be heard from every direction, yet there is not a single bird to be seen.

Congratulations! You won a ticket to one of the most colorful temples in Japan!

This is Part Two of the article about the city of Ome. Click here to read Part One.

In the central area of Ome, in the past, movie-related billboards were even more widespread, but in September of 2018, the same year when Kubo Bankan died, the typhoon No. 24 has damaged and blown off several billboards around the city. This prompted city officials to reduce the number of billboards that were on display. As an alternative, this led to a new type of town revitalization — the cats. But this doesn’t mean there are a lot of cats here roaming the streets. Instead, there are many cat objects, statues and illustrations in all shapes and forms to be found along the roads, in front of the buildings, in back alleys and hidden spots.

In the city of Ome at the western edge of Tokyo Prefecture, there were three movie theaters in the 1950s. At that time, a self-taught artist Kubo Bankan sold his hand-painted movie billboards to a local movie theater Ome Daiei, launching his career as a young billboard artist. Two years later, he became the exclusive billboard artist of the Ome Kinema and Ome Central movie theaters. At his peak, he produced billboards at a rate of one per day.

We are in front of an entrance to a dark cave.

On a level from 1 to 10, how scared are you?

We are about to visit the oldest living thing in Tokyo. And no, I’m not talking about one of the 80,000 centenarian people in Japan. This thing is far, far older.

To find it, we need to go to Azabu-juban, one of the most expensive neighborhoods in central Tokyo. To be precise, it’s located on the tranquil grounds of a temple called Zenpukuji — the second oldest temple in Tokyo after Sensoji in Asakusa.

Higo Hosokawa Garden is one of those hidden spots that people discover by chance and then wonder how come they didn’t know about it before. Myself included.

It’s a traditional Japanese-style garden with a pond, a bridge, forest on a hill, stone structures such as lanterns and a pagoda, a large variety of trees and other plants, a bamboo water fountain and various other things you’d expect to find in a garden of this kind.

Let’s walk right in (don’t worry if you lost your wallet, the admission is free).

Over 700 years ago, during the Kamakura period, a white snake lived in the clear water spring near the main building of the Kamishinmeitenso Shrine (now Hebikubo Shrine). As time passed, the spring disappeared and the white snake was forced to move to a pond in what is today’s Togoshi Park. One day, a farmer named Moriya had a dream in which the white snake appeared and begged him to return it back to its original place. Moriya told a monk about the dream and the monk decided to build a pond where the snake used to live, and in the middle of the pond he built an islet. In the cave on the islet, he enshrined the spirit of the white snake. The legend says that on the night when ceremonies were being held to celebrate the return of the white snake, the clear starry sky suddenly turned into a storm with powerful wind and thunder.

Temples and shrines in Japan are usually fairly normal but every now and then, you will come across some more unusual ones, like the Irugi Shrine, located on a hill a few minutes of walk away from the Osaki Station in Tokyo’s Shinagawa ward.

Here is a dense and quiet residential neighborhood but when you arrive at the shrine, it feels like a very secluded and isolated place surrounded with many old, tall trees.