Masami had some business to do for a few days in some less interesting parts of Japan, so Theo and I went on our own little adventure, spending 3 days in Kyoto. Kyoto is really the epitome of traditional Japan. All of those rock and moss gardens, temples and so on that one thinks of when they think of Japan are in Kyoto. It's also a big city, so it was a kind of a shock to us. Foreigners (gaijin) are nothing special there, and some people really don't like them, probably having bad experiences with the foreign horde that is always present there. It felt odd just seeing all the gaijin after 6 weeks of hardly seeing any, surprisingly even in Okinawa. So we were back to being just a couple of schmos in a big city. I had a hard time finding our guest house, again, one of those places where you have to stand in front of it to see it. I was in a good location, with a little shrine across the street and the imperial park a couple of blocks away. Although Kyoto can be as big and ugly as any Japanese city, there are still all these little pockets of beauty everywhere, which you can see just by wandering around. For example, there are some 2,000 shrines and temples in Kyoto, some pretty small and run down, some major sights. Our guest house was another funky gaijin house, but cheap, with free AC. We decided the people who invented AC should get the Nobel Prize, since we couldn't have survived without it. It was even hotter than in Okinawa, which didn't seem possible.
Not really wanting to deal with the city just yet, Theo and I escaped to the hills the next day, to hike along the Kiyotaki river gorge and go swimming. We had to wait 45 minutes for a bus connection, and after a long winding bus ride to the end of the line, we were in Takao, a tiny village nestled in the green hills. There was a major shrine there, Jingoji, which was a long walk down stairs to the river, then a longer climb up many steps (we didn't even count this time) to the shrine.
There wasn't much to see there, as most of the buildings were closed to the public. We hiked to the top of the hill to someone famous's grave, I guess, but we had no idea who it was, since there was no English info. The big tourist attraction was tossing clay disks off a steep cliff into the gorge below. Kind of like littering for good luck.
We were soaked with sweat and ready for some river time after that. Once we got past the touristy tea houses, the river bed was unusually natural for Japan, with very little cement. We would hike along until we found a promising swimming hole, one with water trickling down a mossy rock wall or one with good rocks for jumping off of into deep pools. We would hike in our swimsuits until we got hot, then stop to sample another swimming hole.
We didn't see many people until we got to the little town of Kiyotaki. It was packed with people barbecuing, seemingly camped out with tons of stuff. there were some remains of abandoned barbecues, too, piles of garbage on the bank. Restaurants were built up to the cliff edge. One was abandoned, the windows falling off, into the river it seemed, as there was nowhere else for it to go.
After that one little inhabited spot, it was a natural walk through a beautiful river gorge, with nice rocks and trees and moss.
The hike ended at a train station, and it was only one stop to my favorite part of Kyoto, Arashiyama. This is the Kyoto that I long for, walks along stone streets, through bamboo forests, past traditional buildings, shrines, and temples, bordered by a river that winds through the green hills.
I decided to brave the city the next day. Our guest house had bicycles for rent for $5 a day, so we did a bike tour of the city. Things seem so far away when you go from train station to train station, walking up and down endless flights of stairs, or are always waiting for a bus to come, so it was great to have wheels. We toured some of the major temples, some of which were major disappointments, like Ginkakuji, the silver pavilion, which charged $8 a person to look at a construction site. The pavilion isn't even silver, unlike the golden pavilion, which is actually gold. They did have a nice collection of moss, however. I didn't realize there were so many different kinds of moss, including "Moss the interrupter." With the bikes, we were able to get a little off the beaten track without all the walking up the long entrances that shrines and temples usually have, so we got to enjoy some of the quieter places without the hordes of tourists. The expanses of gravel at the big shrines were too much to take in the heat. I felt like I could see with my eyes closed, the reflection from the white gravel was so bright. The path of philosophy, a shady lane along a canal, lost some of its charm in comparison to the river of the day before.
Finally, the heat got the best of us, and we headed to the river. It was decidedly urban, but the locals were hanging out, so we figured it couldn't be that bad. It was kind of depressing, a shallow, weed choked trickle. Still, it was a great relief from the heat. The Shimogamo shrine was nearby, which encompasses a small patch of old growth forest in the middle of the city. That's really the great thing about these old shrines, since many of them preserve the landscape much as it was when the shrines were founded, some 1500 years ago. Later we found our favorite restaurant, Raju, an Indian restaurant with great set meals with mango lassis for $14. Best Japanese food I had all trip.
I wasn't in any hurry to get to Osaka, so we spent the next day seeing a couple of sights before we went to the conference hotel. We lugged our luggage to Nijojo, the most beautiful castle in Japan. Most of Japan's castles were bombed out in WWII and are cement reconstructions. Even the original castles look impressive on the outside, but there's really nothing to see on the inside. They are basically museums shaped like castles. But Nijojo has preserved (or recreated) the original decorations and artwork. The details are impressive, from the squeaky "nightingale floor" that warned of intruders, to the painted and carved ceilings. It also has one of the best water and rock gardens that I've seen.
Nijojo had refreshed me to do some more sight seeing, so I decided to check out a shrine that I had never been to, Fushimi Inari taisha. Inari is a popular god, the god of the harvest, or in modern terms- money. This shrine is the headquarters for countless other shrines all over Japan. It takes up a whole mountainside, with many little shrines dotting the hillside.
The pathways are lined with torii, the red gates that are entrances to all shrines. But here, the pathways are lined with these tightly packed torii donated by people who wanted the god to help them out with their finances. There are tens or even hundreds of thousands of them. Some are rotting out at the base, and some have been removed. I don't think anyone really knows how many there are. We imagined one of them falling and knocking down hundreds of thousands more in the world's biggest domino effect. Walking through these tunnels of torii was a hallucinatory adventure, sort of like being lost in a maze, which I find an appropriate metaphor for Japan. These tunnels of vermillion wind though the hills for miles. You become disoriented after a while; even though there are maps every so often (in Japanese), it seems like you're going around in circles. They could be a grand entrance to something, but really they just lead to tiny altars here and there with their fox messengers and donations of small torii stacked by lesser endowed wealth seekers.
The real point of going there is to take the journey through the torii tunnels. We spent hours there, and it was dusk by the time we left. It's really the best time to visit shrines, when almost everybody has left and you can enjoy the forest and the quiet, an experience that takes you out of time.
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