A pilgrimage to a whirlpool and beyond

The last day of spring break, I took a day trip to Shikoku, the large island south of Himeji. To get there, I took a bus across the world’s longest suspension bridge, Akashi Kaikyo Bridge, 3,911 meters long.
Shikoku has many tourist attractions, like the Naruto whirlpools which were my first destination. The whirlpools are caused by the changing tides rushing through a narrow strait. There is a science museum at the site of the whirlpools to educate people (well, those people who can read Japanese) both on whirlpools and bridges.
At the entrance to the museum, everyone spun a bingo ball kind of thing, and the color of the ball that rolled out determined which prize you won. I was the lucky winner and was presented with a large and heavy bag of Japanese food which I then had to drag around all day, trying not to be ungrateful. Since I don’t like Japanese food, I tried to distract myself by thinking of who I should give this food to. I decided a couple of teachers at school could be the lucky recipients, including one English teacher who always eats cup of noodle for lunch (yes, it’s very popular here, but they call it “Cup Noodle”, dropping the “of”.)

After the museum, it was low tide, one of the ideal times to see the whirlpools, so I followed the crowd walking under the suspension bridge (this bridge was not the longest one in the world). The walking platform had glass windows in the floor so you could see the churning water 45 meters below you. It was cool, but the girders of the bridge really obstructed the view. I was a bit envious of those people below in the sightseeing boats.
After low tide, I moved on to my next site, a couple of the temples of the Shikoku pilgrimage. This pilgrimage is famous throughout Japan. People walk (or take a tour bus) around a circuit of 88 temples on the island. It’s about 1,400 km long and can take a couple of months to finish! The pilgrimage follows in the footsteps of a famous Buddhist priest from the 9th century.
The temple seal book I bought in Kyoto was getting full, so I decided to buy a second book and collect as many of the 88 temples’ seals as I can (but over a series of day trips with just a bit of walking). At the temple shop where I bought my new book, the Buddhist monk also gave me the white vest that pilgrims wear and insisted that I put it on. So you can imagine me, trudging along in my white vest and carrying the heavy bag of Japanese foods I really didn’t want. My serenity was severely compromised! Later I read in the brochure that the white vest used to symbolize a death shroud, showing that the pilgrim was prepared to die at any time. Luckily they didn’t give me the traditional walking staff which was formerly used as a grave marker for a pilgrim who passed away along the journey!

Surprisingly I was able to find the first three temples without too much trouble (I can just make out the basic kanji for numbers and for temple.) This coming weekend I’m going back to Shikoku and will visit a few more of the 88 temples. Maybe I’ll get a photo of myself in the white pilgrim vest then…

Sakura and Hanami

It’s cherry blossom (sakura) season here in Japan!! Cherry blossom season is the time for hanami, picnics beneath the blossoms. We had one last Wednesday with the people who were attending our spring break classes, and again on Saturday. Saturday was also the day of Himeji’s cherry blossom festival, so there were literally thousands of people picnicking on the castle grounds under the cherry blossoms. We watched koto (Japanese harp) and taiko drumming performances while sharing food (sushi and snacks) and getting free refills in our square sake cups. The pictures can speak for themselves.

A bit of trivia about the cherry blossoms – they don’t have a fragrance, at least not one I can smell. And the cherry trees in Washington D.C. were a gift from Japan in 1912.

Nikko

Before even coming to Japan, I had heard about Nikko as the origin of the three wise monkeys who see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil. For some reason that totally caught my attention and I have been looking for an opportunity to visit Nikko since I arrived! The saying itself came from China or India, but in Japan it became associated with monkeys because of a play on words ("don't do" sounds similiar to "monkey" in old Japanese).

Nikko is in the mountains, so it was considerably colder than the spring temperatures we had just gotten used to! In fact it snowed the morning we left Nikko (sleek actually, but snow sounds more dramatic). We stayed at a really nice place in Nikko. I'd definitely recommend Nikko Park Lodge! It's really cozy and is clearly the place to stay, judging by all the cool travellers we met there! Nikko was pretty and had cedar forests. We even saw wild monkeys and deer!

As we walked from our hotel to the sites, I noticed this severely over-engineered river channel! And then this billboard directing tourists to the interesting weirs around Nikko! Maybe there was a hydrologist convention in town that weekend?

We first saw Shinkyo which is sacred bridge. It didn't look particulary sacred, but you be the judge.

Then we went into the National Park where the temples and shrines were. The most impressive was Tosho-gu, a shrine and Ieyasu's mausoleum. (Ieyasu established the Tokugawa shogunate.) This shrine was confusing to me, because it had a pagoda, which I think are generally associated with temples rather than shrines.

And it's not like other Japanese shrines. It's covered in gold leaf! Really beautiful! This is where the carvings of the monkeys are. And these carvings of elephants were made by an artist who had never seen a real elephant (at least according to Lonely Planet).

We then climbed these stairs to Ieyasu's mausoleum. On the way we missed the Sleeping Cat, which is famous throughout Japan (we're not sure why. Probably just because it's cute). We looked and looked for the cat before asking a fellow tourist who directed us back down all the stairs, and sure enough, there was a crowd of people taking pictures of the cat carving. We walked right under it on our way up.

After seeing the rest of the shrines and temples there, we took a very expensive bus ride up a very curvy mountain road to Kegon Falls. Japan’s most famous waterfalls are not so breathtaking, at least not in very early spring. We took an elevator down through the earth to a platform. The falls drop 318 feet. And yes that's snow on the ground.

We had just a bit of daylight and energy left after the falls, so we walked along these Jizo statues. This particular walk is called the Mystery Jizo walk because the number of jizos you count isn't the same coming and going. We didn't bother counting - it was sprinkling, and there were other tourists there counting for us. They did get the same number though.

That was it for Nikko. The next day we took a 14 hour train ride back to Himeji. Luckily it was incident free, but the skies were too cloudy so we didn't see Mt. Fugi.

It's a Small World After All!

Just north of Nikko are several theme parks -Tobu World Square, Edo Wonderland, and Western World. We started at Tobu World Square which has many monuments and famous buildings around the world, all at 1/25 the actual size. Somehow we imagined this much bigger than it actually was, and we thought it might take the whole day... We were initially disappointed with this theme park, but then got into the "small world" spirit (and kitschy-ness) and spent the morning posing with all the famous buildings we had been to! Here are just a few photos. (My remedy for getting excited about this place was to take photos of EVERY building.) They had the Twin Towers, which was weird, but also the Eiffel Tower, the Pyramids, Taj Mahal, Great Wall of China, and many many sites within Japan.

What was especially cool was the little people, often dressed in kimonos or school uniforms, or in the case of this NYC scene, window washing uniforms.

After we finished our around the world sightseeing trip, we headed back in time to the Edo period here in Japan at Edo Wonderland. It met up to World Square in terms of kitschy-ness factor, but by then we were prepared for and expecting it. It was rather like the Renaissance Festival, with lots of people in costume and lots of random shows. We saw a show of a famous geisha at the time entering town,

a ninja show, a water magic show (this was an all new low in entertainment value as we could actually see the tubing at her wrists!),

and a couple of short plays.

Spring Break

It's spring break here. Spring break, though, is not really a "break". All the teachers still go to school, and students still go to school for club activities. Lucky us, though, we ALTs give English lessons to the community during the school breaks. It's great on so many levels - instead of an hour commute, I have a 5 second commute (just going down to the meeting room on the ground floor of our apartment building). Classes are just from 9 am to noon, so I get to sleep in AND finish early! And we all share the teaching responsibilities, so each ALT leads one or two classes, and just assists with the remaining classes. Not a bad gig for two weeks.

Spring is here, definitely, although it's not consistently warm yet. I can't wait until summer! Seriously, I want to know when I get dressed in the morning that it will simply be hot. I hate wondering: will be cool or warm, rainy or sunny?? Do I need a sweater, T-shirt, jacket, umbrella, sunglasses - maybe all of the above? Can I wear capris or a skirt or will I regret it? Makes getting dressed too complicated! Bring on summer!!

Anyway, back to the real topic of this post - my weekend trip to Nikko! Because it's spring break, the railway offers a special ticket - basically as far as you can go within one day for $22. Heather and I decided we'd show them how far we can go! Last Thursday, we used a ticket to travel from Himeji to Tokyo. I'll simply mention that a shinkansen trip from Himeji to Tokyo costs $150 and takes 4 hours. Instead, we did it for $22 and 14 hours... We're still not sure it was worth it...

We left at 8 am on Thursday with our handy "timetable" listing all the transfers we'd have to make along the way. All went smoothly for the first two hours, until we got on a train which didn't depart on schedule. We were puzzled, until I overheard the word "jiko" (A quick aside - knowing Swahili has come in surprisingly handy here - only because I can associate words that sound the same in Swahili and Japanese. So when I heard "jiko", I thought of the Swahili word for stove (also "jiko") and I used my random memory trick to remember that in Japanese "jiko" is accident (think of a stove accident). Heather witnessed this in action as I muttered the word jiko a few times trying to remember the connection - ah-ha!! "stove" => "accident")

Having some connections between trains only 4 minutes apart, the initial 40 minute delay turned into us arriving in Tokyo two hours later than expected. But we found our hostel and got a bit of sleep.

In the morning, we headed to the nearest convenience store, joking about how sad it is that we often get a complete breakfast there. We grabbed orange juice, yogurt and a pastry and walked on towards our first sightseeing destination. But what did we see along the way?? A Denny's!! Yes!! We immediately decided our convenience store breakfast would be better eaten as snacks later in the day. I ordered the french toast and Heather the scrambled eggs and toast (no Grand Slam breakfast on the menu in Tokyo. But the Denny's bathroom was as gross as you'd expect a Denny's bathroom to be).

Across the street from Denny's was our first sightseeing stop of the day: Senso-ji temple. It's the oldest temple in Tokyo. On the back of one of the buildings was an enormous pair of straw sandals, apparently for one of the gods' use.

The sign in the background of this photo shows the proper protocol for rinsing your hands and mouth at a temple or shrine.

Although it was only 10 am, the vendors around the temple were already setting up their stands to sell squid and octopus on a stick. Luckily I was still full from my Denny's breakfast!

Not unusually, there was a shrine within the temple grounds where we saw this cat taking a nap under the shisha statue.

Surprisingly the cherry blossoms were at their peak that weekend in Tokyo (they're not yet at their peak here in Himeji, which is further south than Tokyo). After seeing the temple and shrine, we took a stroll down a riverside park which was full of sakura (cherry blossoms).

Next on our itinerary was the restaurant wholesale district. But on the way, we noticed this advertisement, quite possibly for raw beef sushi. I continually ask "what will they think of next", but there's always something stranger and less appetizing.

We knew when we'd found the restaurant wholesale district.

Heather's main objective while in Tokyo was to buy some plastic food. Many restaurants have displays of plastic food outside, giving a useful visual of their menu. And apparently Asakusa in Tokyo is THE place to buy this plastic food! Here's the store where Heather purchased her bowl of plastic udon.

Once that task was accomplished we were back on the train to Nikko. I'll post about that in a separate blog - but here is one last photo of Tokyo, where even the subway station entrances look like temples!