| Submitted by: Mark Leeper United States |
| Submission Date: 09 February 2005 |
|
 |
|
This area is the only one I know of where when the deer see the people they hush each other and try to sneak up on them. If you see them coming, throw down any food an back away. The deer see you as standing between them and sustenance. They don't care that you had to pay for the privilege. As Eli Wallach said in THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN, sooner or later you have to pay for every good deed.
Our next stop was supposed to be the Nara National Museum, but it was closed preparing for a special exhibit. Just as well the exhibit had not started. They would just have increased the admission.
As we walked to the next site we passed a vendor selling hot yams on the street. That is something we would not see at home. Pretty much wherever we went we had deer roaming and mugging the unwary. They keep the males from being really dangerous with deer wrangles on Sunday in October. It is sort of a local rodeo to cut antlers. From the pictures they get a really big turnout at 500 yen a head. And that's per tourist head, not per deer head.
Todai Temple is the largest wooden building in the world. It houses a huge bronze Buddha 16 meters high. The statue is bronze but looks like ebony, from the oxidation I suppose. It is the largest bronze statue in the world by one account and certainly one of the largest. It stands there with a huge upraised palm in a symbolic position. There seems to be even less variation in Buddhist art than in that of other religions. This is because each position has a symbolic meaning and there are only a very limited number of these. When Buddha has to be in a pre-defined position, it stifles creativity, I suppose. There just is not a lot of variation we are seeing in Buddhist art. I guess it is because the Buddha is more a symbol than a representation of a human. There is not much interesting variation in crucifixes either. To the right and around the back of the Buddha is a pillar with a hole cut through it. It is said that if you can fit through the hole you will attain enlightenment. Many people try, but it is mostly children who succeed. I thought it was a natural for Evelyn who is small, thin, and definitely in need of enlightenment. She started to try to fit through the hole but chickened out. I guess she is not as supple as she used to be.
Near the temple are rickshaws and the tourists get rides. Something goes against my grain about having another human pull me. The Chinese were right to ban them. Of course I feel guilty riding an elephant.
We headed off for the next temple. On the way I got a cold milk cocoa out of a machine. We are used to cocoa being hot, but you can find it either way in machines here. I had tried making cold cocoa at home, inspired by cappuccino and found it to be very refreshing that way. And you don't have to worry about burning your tongue.
We continued on to the Kasuga-Taisha Shrine. This shrine was every 20 years from the time the shrine was founded by the Fujiwaras before 800 AD up to the 19th century. That's a lot of rebuilding. What the shrine is best known for today--besides gangs of deer chasing tourists--are the stone lanterns numbering probably more than a thousand. The shrines are starting to all look pretty similar to me, I am afraid. This one has a nice woodsy setting.
On the way out we saw a man urinating on a tree pretty much in public. This is one thing the Japanese have in common with the people of some other Asian countries we have visited, notably India. But the Japanese enjoy a reputation for being fastidious. This one habit seems like an ironic exception. I guess it is just one little piece of culture shock.
You see telephone cards for sale with thematic pictures. At a tourist site there will be a vending machine selling phone cards with pictures of some aspect of the site. It seems a good idea. It makes the phone cards have souvenir value. We headed back to the train station. For lunch we stopped into a restaurant and ordered from plastic food in the window. We had curry udon; soba with soy sauce, onions, and wasabi; and soba soup. On the way we see two girls hauling a box of facial tissue with ads. That seems to be a thriving industry.
We had to take a train to Horyu-ju station and then a bus through narrow streets to get to Horyu Temple. Horyu Temple is the oldest temple in Japan, dating to 607 AD and founded by Prince Shotoku who instituted Buddhism as the state religion. Shotoku fought the decline of the Yamoto court by giving the people a constitution, but at the same time reserved the right to declare an official state religion. It was Prince Shotoku's articacts we saw at the National Museum on October 8th. And they came from here.
The temple had survived several fires and reconstructions. It has some of the oldest wooden buildings in the world and is a World Heritage Site. It is divided into a west and east temple complex. It is reached by a tree-lined walk that could be well-appreciated by people who had not been on their feet all day as well as fighting off ravening temple deer, of whom this temple is mercifully free. They are many temples for which the visitor is allowed not to enter but to look in windows. What is seen is not very much since the buildings are dark inside. But one can make out old statues and other religious relics.
There are things that manifest a self-evident greatness. I would class in this category Niagara Falls and the Pyramids of Giza. There are other things that one has to accept on faith that they are great in some way that someone else understands. In this class I would put fossilized ferns, most religious relics, and Marilyn Monroe's film performances. These temple are full of great religious relics that nonetheless have a greatness of dubious self-evidence. There are some nice ceiling paintings of dragons and some interesting roof gargoyles, but the really great artifacts show Buddha in various unnatural positions. And even those are hard to see. These are, I am sure, really important to Buddhists, but to those not versed in Buddhism the value of the site is moot. Much of what is to be seen is poorly lit and repetitious. For myself, I have determined I must learn more about Buddhism or see fewer Buddhist sites.
Following the visit we went to the bus station looking for bus which would take us to the train station. We asked a attendant in a uniform if this was the proper place to wait and after he looked at a table told us no, we should wait across the street and some distance down at a bus stop. OK, so over we went. After about 10 minutes sitting there we saw the same guy running down the street motioning us over. Apparently he had misdirected us. He said that a bus in the station would take us. Well at least he wanted to make good on his error. We came running back. Part of the problem was that getting across the street takes a long time. Traffic lights seem to take a long time to cycle. We were delayed just a few minutes getting to the train station, but that meant missing a train and the problem propagated to one from train to the next at Nara. It was dark by the time we pulled out of Nara.
I wrote a little on the train and napped a bit. When we got to Kyoto I suggested we have dinner before retreating to the room. In the center of Kyoto it is difficult finding someplace quick and cheap. We settled on a little Chinese place where we effectively ate in the kitchen. I had gayoza and raman. Evelyn had Mar Po Dofu. I had a hard time communicating to them that I wanted to order a second order of gayoza. I asked for a second order and they thought I was saying I had not gotten the first. Eventually the guy behind the counter got the idea and put '1 + 1' on the check.
Back at the room I wrote. At 9 PM I tried for what was supposed to be a bilingual movie. There was none, but they had on a dubbed into Japanese version of RUMBLE IN THE BRONX. (In Japan it is called RED BRONX.) It just played in theaters in the US within the past year and Evelyn of all people wanted to see it. I don't always understand her taste but I guess she likes Jackie Chan. Chan is an incredible daredevil, but stunts do not make a film for me. I didn't care for the film then. She decided to watch it again. The problem with these dubbed American films is they do such a bad job of dubbing. The words never fit the lips.
|
10/20/96 Hikone and Nagoya: Disappointing Feudal Castles
|
We played it a little laid back on a Sunday morning. We did not leave until 8 AM. We stopped at both the Lawson's for pork buns and at the bakery. Well, I was hungry, what can I say? I got two pork buns, one curried. Evelyn preferred the bakery and I gave in to temptation and also got what I thought to be a Katsuiyu bun. It turned out to be more a falafel bun, like a big patty of falafel, wrapped in bread with tomato sauce. It was very strange as a type of pastry. We got our reservation on the Bullet train for the first part of the trip to Hikone. On the train I see a see a woman apparently praying. She has her legs folded under her on the seat and who sits with her eyes tightly closed holding the pole that people use to steady themselves when the train starts up. I wonder if she is just taking the moment to pray or if she is terrified of train travel.
We have to change trains and there is some confusion but we get to Hikone. Again the castle is high on the main street so you can almost see it majestically commanding the town from the train station. People are playing Pachinko at 10 am on Sunday morning. I knew the game was popular, but it seems to be like gambling in Nevada. The Pachinko parlors must be hugely popular and profitable. I think the way it works is that you cannot win money with Pachinko, you can only win prizes. But then you can sell your prizes and get hard cash for them. At night you can pass a town on a train and easily pick out the Pachinko parlor which is lit like a Las Vegas casino in a town that otherwise looks like a sleepy little hamlet. Or perhaps the inside of a coal mine.
As we get to the castle we can tell that there is something special today. A lot of people are showing up. One group carries TV station video cameras. It turns out to be a bicycle race and the track is around the grounds of Hikone Castle. There are green dividers all around the track the bicyclists will follow. We will be walking along peacefully and a motorcycle will come barreling down the track followed by twenty or thirty 10-speed bicycles and another motorcycle brings up the rear.
As I get the ticket the woman shows me the route we should follow in looking at the castle. In her broken English she reassured me that only the main tower was closed. (Gee, thanks!) I understand only about every third word of her English. My ear is not as good as Evelyn's at understanding heavily accented and even malformed English. I am a little more intrepid in trying to express myself in other languages, she is better at understanding the response. There actually may be some biological basis to this I know. Women perceive by recognizing patterns, men by seeing movement. If a bird in a tree is standing still a woman will see it faster if it is still, a man will recognize it faster if it is moving. Evelyn and I have very similar minds, but I tell her it is like she has Word for Windows and I have Word for the Mac. On the service they are very similar, but underneath they are very different. Other people are like Framemaker (a product that competes with Word and behaves quite differently). Evelyn and I have similar minds, but perceive things with different hardware. Vive la difference.
A little history of Hikone Castle. Naomasa Ii, a top general of Tokugawa at Sekigahara, was given Mitsunari Ishida's castle, spoils of war. The castle was located elsewhere and his son Naotsugu moved the castle here. |
|
| Copyright © - "Mark Leeper" |
|
 |
| Other travelogues by the same author: |
|
|
|
