| Submitted by: Evelyn C. Leeper United States |
| Submission Date: 09 February 2005 |
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Finding the exit after wandering around to find the sushi can be difficult; I find a compass is really useful (though admittedly strange). I have also used the compass to orient myself in the maze of shopping arcades in Kawaramachi.
By the way, it is not necessary to bring tissues to Japan. You know how in the United States they hand out flyers on street corners to advertise things? Here they hand out little packs of tissues with an advertisement on the wrapper. These are handy because the public restrooms have no paper towels and restaurants frequently have no napkins. So far we've collected about twenty packs with various ads on them. We figure they'll make interesting hand-out souvenirs for people at work-the most technical folks will get the ones with URLs on them. (By the end of the day, the people handing them out-mostly students, I suspect, are so eager to get rid of their supply that they stuff ten or twenty packs in some people's shopping bags!)
On the way back we priced tickets for kabuki at the Minamiza Theater. They seemed to be between ¥4,000 and ¥10,000, with no indication that a single-act ticket was available, so we will skip this as well. Walking back from the theater we saw a poster for either the film Anne Frank Remembered or a production of the play. The poster was entirely in Japanese but the picture of Anne Frank is instantly recognizable in any language (at least to us).
The problem with the Seiki is that it's noisy. It has nightingale floors-and elephant occupants.
October 24, 1996: After yesterday's 'day off' (well, by comparison), it's back to the sightseeing whirlwind.
Four more days to go.
Today's plan was basically walk number two from the Tourist Information Center's pamphlet on Kyoto walks, covering the southeastern part of the city. We started by walking east through one of the quietest parts of Kyoto we've been in-a cemetery. It was very big and the gravestones were very close together-is it just ashes buried here, or are people buried standing up, or what? There is hardly any representational art-the tombstones are pillars with an inscription, and there is an incense burner and a flower holder for each.
After about fifteen minutes of uphill climb, we arrived at Kiyomizu-dera Temple (¥300), in a beautiful setting among the trees of the eastern hills. It is known for its view of Kyoto (though Kyoto is not a very pretty city from a distance) and the temple recently purchased some adjoining land to avoid having a high-rise building erected that would have blocked the view.
The main hall of the temple has a wide verandah which overhangs the hill it is on, supported by massive columns and cross supports. This is good, because the verandah is constantly full of people-the usual hordes of schoolchildren on a field trip. (Do Japanese students ever spend any time in school? It seems like in October the answer is, 'No.')
During World War II, one of the caricatures of the Japanese was that they had big buck teeth. Well, there is some truth to that. In actuality, it may be because the Japanese are less into orthodontia than Americans (I don't think I've seen anyone wearing braces and their teeth, and I've seen a lot of schoolchildren), but I don't think the Italians (for example) have as much orthodontia done either, and they are not known for prominent teeth. I suspect it really is a racial characteristic.
I mentioned earlier than you can't buy individual postcards most places. What people apparently buy instead are phonecards. For example, at the Kyomizu-dera Temple, you can buy a phonecard with a picture of the temple on it. After you've used up the amount on the card, you have the card as a souvenir. Of course, the cards come in fairly large denominations; I think the smallest is ¥1000 and we would not have used that up, or even come close.
The Kiyomizu-dera Temple has extensive grounds, including a waterfall with supposed therapeutic properties. There was a long line waiting to drink from it, but it's not even really a waterfall any more; it's channeled into bamboo pipes at some point high up the hill.
There is also the Jishu Shrine, with its 'love stones.' These are two stones about a half meter square and three-quarters of a meter high which are about eighteen meters apart. They say if you can walk from one to another with your eyes closed and not miss it, you will find your true love soon. Apparently coaching by friends is allowed, because the sign talks about how goals cannot be achieved without the help of friends.
They also had a statue called 'Nade-Daikoku-san,' which they said meant 'Daikoku to be patted.' I think I'll nickname Mark 'Nade-Mark.'
We left the temple and walked downhill for about two hundred meters through the usual string of tourist shops that one finds leading up to (and conversely, away from) every major tourist attraction here. What is amazing after a while is the realization that they are all selling exactly the same things for the same prices. (Is this the Japanese 'group mind' in action?) For example, every souvenir store we went into-here, the Kyoto Handicraft Center later, and the souvenir shops in the shopping arcades-had the same five sets of five different sake cups in ukiyo-e style: geishas, kabuki actors, sumo wrestlers, scenery, and semi-pornographic ('Kama Sutra'-type illustrations, but of a very mild sort). The only difference seemed to be that a few things were slightly cheaper in the shopping arcades.
After this street we went down two other streets (still going downhill), Sannenzaka and Ninenzaka. These are lined with pottery shops (of the more expensive sort) and tea shops. Some people like this sort of thing, but I can't say it does much for me.
We stopped for beverages. I was so confused trying to decide among the many varieties of canned coffee in the machines that I ended up with hot coffee instead of the cold I wanted, and also managed to spill a bit on my shirt opening it. Oh, well, it was getting hot and I had a T-shirt on under the shirt, so I took the shirt off. The weather had turned rather warm (later we saw a thermometer that said 23 degrees Centigrade). The hot coffee made the can hot enough that I needed to use my bandana to hold it. (Bandanas are also useful-mine has been a towel, a ground cloth, a cushion, and a pot holder so far this trip.)
We passed a pay phone that didn't have traffic roaring by it, so I called United Airlines in Osaka and reconfirmed our flights. I started with a whole handful of ¥10 coins and it took eleven of them to complete the call (it probably would have been cheaper at night). Our flight is scheduled to leave ten minutes later than the previous scheduled time.
Our next stop was Todai-ji Temple (¥500), built by Hideyoshi Toyotomi's widow in his memory. I haven't mentioned Hideyoshi before, but he was one of the three major shoguns at the start of the Shogunate (a.k.a. the Edo Period) around 1600. The other two were Odo Nobunaga and Ieyasu Tokugawa. This temple was just recently opened to the public, and the main hall is still not open. It has many art treasures, most of which are not on display. Even the statues of Hideyoshi and his widow, normally on display, seemed to have been removed for some reason. (There was an English pamphlet, but it didn't go into such details as why the statues weren't there.)
Considering how Japan makes the best-known cameras in the world, I find it interesting that such a huge percentage of the Japanese tourists are using disposable cameras. They are everywhere!
We walked through Maruyama-koen Park and stopped for a snack. We had ... something. Mark thinks they may have been balls of pounded rice mixed with what we think we seafood, fried, and covered with a sauce. Maruyama-koen Park is known for having beautiful foliage in the fall when the maple leaves turn. This is supposedly mid-October, but this year it must be late, since almost all the leaves were still green.
We continued north, past a couple more temples that we didn't stop in (you can't visit every temple in Kyoto, certainly not in the short time we had), and ended up at the Heian-jinja Shrine. This is where the Jidai Matsuri Festival ended its parade a couple of days ago, and we were able to buy a program book (with English) and a set of postcards of the festival. Since the same costumes and order are used each year, these are accurate to what we saw except perhaps for some of the faces.
The shrine itself is nothing special, being a two-thirds scale reconstruction of the Heian Imperial Palace from the beginning of Kyoto's history (1100 years ago). It is painted white and what they call vermilion but I would call orange. Its most impressive feature is its torii gate, which is very large (though apparently not as large as the one at Yusukuni-jinja in Tokyo, which was listed in one of the books as having the largest torii gate in Japan, or anywhere else, one assumes).
That concluding the sightseeing plan for the day (we decided to skip the Kyoto Museum of Modern Art), we walked a couple of blocks north to the Kyoto Handicraft Center. This is a cooperative of several companies, and is clearly designed for tourists. There are a few people demonstrating techniques for making woodblock prints and such, though at least they are not trying to claim that everything there was made by these people. (This was the case in the 'factory' in Toledo, Spain, we went to.) Every few minutes the loudspeaker would announce things like, 'Sunrise Tours Number 27, please return to your bus; it is about to leave.'
We looked around for souvenirs and gifts, and came to several realizations. One, almost everything we liked was expensive. Two, almost all the people we were looking for gifts for had been to Japan already and probably had what they wanted. (We're not exactly the last people we know to visit Japan, but we are pretty much the last of our gift-giving circle.) And three, woodblock prints like the ones we got from my parents, who got them from a friend who had been to Japan in the Fifties are probably worth something.
We decided to walk over to the shopping arcades in Kawaramachi, where we picked up this and that as souvenirs. I'm not a shopping person (except maybe for books, which are way too expensive here when they're in English), and this tired me out as much-or more than-the sightseeing. We ended up by buying take-out sushi in Takashimaya, which has a better sushi selection than other stores, but is still not up to Tobu's, and then taking the bus back to the Seiki.
October 25, 1996: Today we finished the eastern area and the 'Path of Philosophy.'
We started by taking the bus to the northwest corner of Kyoto University. The area seemed much more conservative than around universities in the United States, but my universities for comparison are the University of Massachusetts (and the other four colleges in the area) and Stanford, which are not among the more conservative back home. There were big hand-painted signs advertising various events, but of course I have no idea what they were for.
Mark got steamed buns at the Lawson's at the bus stop, and some squid jerky for later. (I had some chocolate bread earlier in the room.)
We walked east a fair distance, but we could see we were headed in the right direction by the hordes of schoolchildren, and the string of souvenir shops, where Mark found an inexpensive demon mask (from Noh theater design) as a souvenir for us. All the stores seem to have children's items that say 'Shinsengumi' and have a cartoon of a little kid with a samurai sword; I have no idea what this means.
At the end of this string of shops was Ginkaku-ji Temple (or more accurately, Jisho-ji Temple) (¥500). Ginkaku-ji is also known as the Silver Pavilion, but was never covered in silver-that was the original plan, but it never happened. The name seems to have stuck, though. This was built in 1482, about a hundred years after the Golden Pavilion, and the idea probably came from that. Even now, there seem to be parallels. |
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