I woke up at 5:30ish and wrote in my book. I also did a bit of research about how to get to Tono later that day. I was finally able to get Jives to wake up at about 8am. We set off to get some breakfast from a combini.

We walked over the Sumida river, in the direction of a temple I had followed online for years, Takagi Jingya. The shrine is for onigiri, and popular with students preparing for exams as well as young couples. We stopped at a vending machine to grab a coffee before finding a combini to get our snacks.

I love how vending machines will sell you hot coffee in a can, especially in the winter. Our first stop was to visit a little Inari temple that was right beside the Onigiri shrine. The information about this temple is exclusively in Japanese, but from what I have been able to translate the shrine is built around a very special ginkgo tree and home to the tree Inari. The ginkgo tree survived the Tokyo bombings during world war two but you can see the scars left by the bombs. 

The Onigiri shrine was everything I was wishing for. The ema ( prayer tiles) were onigiri shaped and there were onigiri hidden all over, in trees, plants, on the stone lions. There were also a lot of rabbits because it was newly the year of the rabbit (lunar new year was a few days before). Afterwards we sat in a little park and ate our onigiri breakfast. I had a salt onigiri and a tuna and mayo one. We then walked back to our accommodation to pack and check out.