Day 1 – Nijo Castle, Imperial Palace, Heian Jingu, Gion, Kiyomizudera, Kodaiji
Nijo Castle was a nice place to start and gave me a taste of what to come. The castle was really big (horizontally) and had nice gardens all around it. There were also a fair number of high school kids visiting on field trips. Oh, and like all Japanese castles and temples, we had to walk all the way around it to find the entrance. The most interesting thing about Nijo Castle is probably its nightingale floors (‘uguisubari’ in Japanese and ‘anti-ninja-flooring’ in Splinter Cell). These are floors that creak, very much like nightingales, when you walk on them so that you can’t sneak around; no matter how quiet you try to walk, the chirps will give you away.
I guess I’ll talk about visiting Japanese places in general since this is the first one. Most of these historic parks have nice gardens around them which are free, but if you want to go in, you buy a ticket which is usually 3-500yen. When you go in there’s always a place to put your umbrella and then a wooden platform you step up onto after taking your shoes off. You put your shoes into a cubby and leave your bags with someone and then you can go in. Sometimes you go in barefoot and sometimes you have to put on these horrible rubber slippers which I wore as loose as possible. Most of the time people exaggerate how small Japanese people are and how hard it is to find things that fit Americans, but shrine slippers play right into the stereotype. I’m only 5’7” and my feet are certainly not big, but they do not make shrine slippers even my feet will fit in. Anyway, when you go into a temple or castle, there’s usually a preset path you walk around with optional side-quests and eventually you come back to the entrance from another angle, get all your stuff, and leave.
After Nijo, we went to the Imperial Palace which had a huge garden around it. That’s one thing that would be great about living in Japan; everywhere has amazing gardens and even if it’s a place with an entrance fee, the gardens around it are free. I’d always be going to visit places like that if I lived here. It was incredibly hot and sunny and it took forever to find the entrance to the palace. Once we finally did, it turned out it was closed that day.
We asked the guard for a good place to eat lunch and went to a little soba restaurant down the road we came from. I wish I had pictures of all the places I ate, but they were always very authentic, quiet Japanese restaurants and I would feel bad taking pictures. One thing about Japanese (traditional) restaurants is that you can never tell where they are or if they’re open. They keep their doors closed and you kinda have to know it’s there, then open the door and go in and call someone from the back to let them know they have a customer. Anyway, we had some good food and moved on to the Heian Jingu.
Actually I’m looking at my pictures and I see a lot of pictures of a random shrine we found on the way. That’s another great thing about Japan (mainly Kyoto). When walking around areas with business or houses (which are all mixed together in Japan), you’ll always just find random shrines and temples you can go visit. The smaller temples you find randomly might be my favorite part. There’s never anyone there and they’re small but very beautiful and have an amazing atmosphere.
We found the Heian Jingu by the big red torii (gate) on the road near it. It would have been neat but it was just a modern built, steel torii and cheapened the shrine instead of being a nice entrance. I think this is when I explained “tacky” to Eri which is hard enough to define in English, and was quite a trick to do in Japanese. The shrine was very nice but I can’t think of anything particularly unique to write. Oh, one thing is I love the shrine girls with the red hakama. I think I took a bad (too far away) picture of one here but I got a nicer picture at another place. Also they have a poster in Tokyo subways advertising Nikko that I’d be tempted to steal. It’s a picture of the stairs leading up to a temple with a shrine girl standing on them.
I think it was after the Heian Jingu that I saw some of my first good Engrish. A middle-aged guy was wearing a shirt that said, “I scored last night.” I couldn’t get a picture because he just walked by, but I told Eri about it and explained Engrish to her. It was hard to teach her about the name “Engrish” because she could barely hear when I said it with an R or L. Eventually she understood and said she’d seen a few Japanese shirts like that (we saw some more later and I dubbed it… something clever that I can’t remember now). She also told me she had some shirts with English on them and she’d write it down and show me later to see if it was Engrish (it was, but that’ll be in another post).
Later we headed to Gion, the famous Geisha district in Kyoto. It was actually pretty disappointing because it was small and we didn’t really see anything except hundreds of traffic cops; apparently something big was going on later. Maybe this is a good time to talk about jobs like that in Japan. One thing I’ve noticed about this country is that every job (especially construction or government) is overstaffed by at least 3 or 4 times. The best example of this is one time in Tokyo there was some construction on the road and they needed power so they ran it across the road. Of course they taped it down to be safe, but they also had one guy on each side of the road and his job was to stand there with his little light-saber and tell people to be careful as they stepped over the cord. There was one in Japan job that was understaffed, and that was grocery bagging. Actually you have to bag your own groceries in Japan, and I can’t figure out why they decided to pick that one thing as something Japanese people would do for themselves.
After Gion, we walked up a mountain to Kiyomizudera, a very famous temple with a story about people jumping off. The temple was pretty nice but nothing like you see in pictures because it was covered in tourists. The mountains around it were also very pretty though. When we finished looking at it we had to walk back down the tiny road packed with people and junk shops. A Japanese guy from Aikido has a sister that works at a food shop on that street. I was thinking before I got there maybe I’d say hi, but I didn’t know how many there would be.
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When we got down from Kiyomizudera, we stumbled across Yasaka Jinja and went in to see it. It was a medium-sized shrine which was for traffic safety. Also when we were stopped at a corner trying to figure out where to go, an old man came up and started talking to me to see where I was from and such.
As it got dark, we headed to Kodaiji which was one of my favorite temples. I’m not sure if I like it so much because of the temple itself or just because I got to see it at night when no one was there. Even though I’d seen a lot of famous sites already, this was my first real hardcore Japanese experience I thought. The temple and its gardens were gorgeous and the weather was great with the sun gone. There was everything you could expect, bamboo forests, stone lanterns, rock gardens, etc. Actually one of the best parts I think wasn’t Kodaiji itself but a subtemple of Kodaiji which I’ll have to try and figure out the name later by asking Eri or looking at my tickets. I forgot if I mentioned this yet, but Japanese tickets are meant to be kept I think, which is great for me since I keep my tickets anyway. There’s a big part with a picture or something and then a little part they tear off. From almost all temples I have the ticket and an information packet they gave me, sometimes in Japanese, sometimes in English. Actually I just looked it up and the one I really liked was Entokuin.
I think it was in the main part of Kodaiji where there was a jazz band and a light show, which was a really interesting find. The jazz band was obviously not very Japanese, but light show was projections showing a story from Japanese mythology. In the story, I also saw the umbrella monsters from Legend of the Mystical Ninja (video game). Later I’ll talk about that game and how it changed my experience in Japan, but the short story is I knew a surprising amount of traditional mythology indirectly through that game which changed how I saw a lot of the lighter traditional stuff like monsters, music, and festivals.
After this it was very late, so I headed back to my apartment and went to sleep.
