Photo/Illutration Right across the road from JR Takadanobaba Station under the Yamanote tracks is a colorful mural of manga art featuring characters created by Osamu Tezuka. (Photo by Lisa Vogt)

When I started watching anime, one of the first words that I latched onto was the name of a beloved and classy grandmother figure everyone called baa-baa, like in “black sheep have you any wool.”

It sounded like a katakana version of “barber.” I later heard a sharper rendition of the word used in an angry situation, and it was easy to see that it meant something like an old hag.

Just as in going to a hospital or beauty shop ("byoin" / "biyouin"), being scary or cute ("kowai" / "kawaii") to please wake up or violate ("okoshite" / "okashite"), you need to make your sentences very clear to avoid unintended consequences.

What a name, I thought, when I first heard Takadanobaba! Who was Takada-san, and was she loved or despised? But then I saw the kanji and realized that “baba” meant a place of horses.

Takadanobaba is quite a mouthful, though not as bad as Kokkaigijido-mae, Shirokane-Takanawa or Kiyosumi-Shirakawa--I digress.

Again, Takada? It turns out that this area was occupied by retainers from Echigo province (today’s Niigata Prefecture), which brings to mind a famous “retired Echigo crape fabric wholesaler” with a long white beard who traveled the country during the Edo Period (1603-1867).

Never mind--there was a fiefdom here called Takada, and a high court lady, Her Highness Takada, liked visiting this place that housed many horses.

Horses? Did Japan always have horses? There are a few native breeds, but most horses probably first came from Mongolia or in the fifth century from the Korean Peninsula as cavalry for the ruling classes. In elite samurai societies during Edo’s pinnacle, horsemanship was highly regarded.

Horseback archery, one of the highest forms of martial arts, is regularly held by nearby Anahachimangu shrine. A picture scroll from 1728 depicts the event being held there to ward off the evil that brought smallpox to Tokugawa Yoshimune’s heir.

Fast-forward a couple of centuries, and Takadanobaba is a university town probably most famous for Osamu Tezuka (1928-1989), the manga creator who spent his life here. His fictional Astro Boy was created at Takadanobaba’s Science Ministry in 2003.

Tezuka died in 1989, but his spirit still thrives on the streets here. There’s a vast mural under a JR Yamanote Line overpass with other famous characters from his works, such as Black Jack, Kimba the White Lion, Phoenix, Princess Knight, The Three-Eyed One, and more.

The platform uses the familiar anime theme music to signal train departures, and lamp posts display the Mighty Atom.

Baba, with its interesting name, archery history and future AI vision, is right on.

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This article by Lisa Vogt, a Washington-born and Tokyo-based photographer, originally appeared in the March 21 issue of Asahi Weekly. It is part of the series "Lisa’s In and Around Tokyo," which depicts the capital and its surroundings through the perspective of the author, a professor at Meiji University.

This is the last installment of the series.

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