Japan 2006 - Kyoto and Nara

Second and final entry in my trip report from Japan (at least, I haven't been able to find any later emails in my archives).

Well, I've been staying with Lisa in Osaka for five days now and have had an action-packed time. Turns out Kyoto has enough fascinating stuff to fill a six-week visit, let alone a one-week one. Anyway, I may have been raving enthusiastically about Tokyo in my last email but that was nothing compared to how much I'm loving Kyoto. Seriously, after coming home on the first day I went there I was so excited I couldn't nap properly.

Kyoto is a gorgeous city. At least, the shrines and temples, and there are a lot of them, are gorgeous... the modern part of the city is pretty much like the modern part of Tokyo or Osaka but on a smaller scale. Also beautiful is the historic part of town, where the streets are lined with tea-houses and inns, these two-storey wooden buildings that have little red paper lanterns outside to indicate their presence. Everything in that neighbourhood is very discreet... you can't see into the places at all,you're stuck admiring their quiet, elegant facades. Also there are a few streets with canals running along them, and now that the cherry blossoms are exploding everywhere it's an absolutely magical kind of place, especially at night. I've spent one full day in Kyoto, doing some intensive temple-hopping, and two evenings, eating and walking around.

Yesterday I went to Nara, the first capital of Japan, which has a multitude of shrines and temples as well, all set in an expansive park overrun with deer. The deer are cute but they harass people for food, and they eat all the greenery, and they're national treasures so they won't be leaving anytime soon. I think I read that there are about twelve hundred of them. Nara was nice, too, but not as nicely landscaped as the shrines in Kyoto. Although there is one shrine there with the largest indoor statue of a buddha. That building is enormous, and the buddha, equally so. Really impressive. Although the grounds of that temple (for your reference, temples are Buddhist, shrines are Shinto) are a little overrun with tourists. Kyoto's sights are equally touristy, but for some reason the gaijin seemed more prevalent in Nara than in Kyoto, and they make it seem more annoying. Possibly because the Japanese tourists tend to actually be visiting the shrine, with at least an inking of religious motivation, while the white tourists are just slightly bewildered or else loud and obnoxious.

On Sunday Lisa and I went to a town west of Kyoto called Arashiyama, a quaint little tourist town on a river, in the mountains, that is big stuff on the Cherry Blossom circuit. This country is obsessed with cherry blossom season, it turns out -- there is seasonally inspired everything. The kimono fabric on display features cherry blossoms, there are cherry-blossom-flavoured limited edition beverages for sale, cherry-blossom-flavoured chips, cherry-blossom-flavoured street food... it's bizarre. People go so far as to put up posters in the Kyoto subway every day, rating the dozen or so most popular spots for Hanami (cherry-blossom viewing) on a scale from zero to five blossoms. Anyway, luckily for us, Arashiyama was not on the list of must-see sites for Sunday, although unluckily for us this is because the blossoms there were mostly not out yet. But because it wasn't busy we were able to get on a river cruise that would have otherwise been sold out for days. A nice, scenic jaunt through the mountains... of course, with the thousands of trees planted along the route I could see how it might have been more spectacular in a week or two. At the end of Sunday, we met up with a couple that is friends with Lisa, and went for a nice dinner in Kyoto, and then to an onsen (naturally-heated hot spring, although in this case it was naturally heated hot tubs on the sixteenth floor of a hotel near Lisa's house). Today I'm going to attempt to get to a more rustic onsen, in the mountains north of Kyoto, where you sit ouside and look down a mountain valley. We shall see. For those of you who have seen Memoirs of a Geisha, I'm also headed to the shrine that has the path lined with the hundreds and hundreds of bright red gates (torii) that the girl runs along to pray with the coin the Chairman gives her.

Anyway, I'd better get a move on.

Take care, all, I'll see you in a week (sigh).