Fall, Finals, and Bunnies!

Hello out there!

Sorry again for yet another inexcusable delay.  Life here has been busy getting ready for finals and the rather unexpectedly impending return home.  Due to financial situations that I won't bother to bore anyone with, my trip to Japan has been cut to just one semester.  While at first I was very upset about this change of plans, I've come to terms with it and I'm actually alright with going home.

In the meantime, let's talk about fall in Nagoya, Japan!  You see, things here move a little differently for whatever reason, so while back home in the mighty Midwest, there's already been a spattering of snow, here, the leaves haven't even all fallen off the trees yet, and it's only been the last week or so that the temperatures have started to fall below freezing.  The week before, I went on a few different leaf viewing trips, but both to the same place Zen garden.  One was at night, so that was kind of different.

  

A few of my favorite pictures from the nighttime leaf viewing
outside of the Tokugawa National Museum.  I especially
enjoyed that even though it was dark, you could see the
reflections of the leaves in the water.  It was very serene.
These pics were taken on the 23rd of November, long after
the leaves at home had fallen and the weather turned nasty.

  

These pictures were taken a few days later on the 29th.
We were there right around dusk, and it had been cloudy
and rainy all day.  We also went to the Tokugawa
Museum that day, but we weren't allowed to take many
pictures, unfortunately.

Also, I spent an evening with a few friends unwinding at bunny cafe.  It's exactly what it sounds like.  You go into this cafe and you get to play with bunnies!  It was a weird reminder that pets are a luxury item to the extreme in Japan.  If I recall correctly, the cheapest rabbit was a few hundred dollars.  I've seen kittens and puppies in pet stores that go for literally thousands of dollars.  You don't buy a pet here in Japan unless you've got money to burn, apparently.  That could be one reason why places like the cat and bunny cafes are so popular.

  

I made a few new friends at the Bunny Cafe!
The little guy on the left was really sweet and
very friendly.  He was only four or five weeks old.
The one in the other pic was the most inquisitive
about the camera, so I got the best pictures of
her.  The bunnies were exactly what I needed
to wind down and try to relax a bit before finals!

I'm afraid to say that this blog will be winding down in the next few weeks to a month.  I do have some more content to put up, but I don't know how many more posts it will take to do.  Before I go home, my friend Sara and I are going to Tokyo for a few days to do some sightseeing.  That should be fun, and I plan to take a ton more pics.  That'll probably be enough material for a few posts.  I also want to do one for my art classes, kind of summarizing what I did and looking at the art I created while here in Japan.

If anyone has any last minute things they'd like me to check into or write about while I'm still here in Japan, they'd better be sending me questions quick!

Vacation Day 6, the End of the Line

One homework assignment down, a 2000 word paper and a test left to study for for tomorrow.  Taking a break to write another blog post seemed like a good idea to me.  The paper is at least over something I find interesting, and it doesn't have to be much more than a reflection paper, so it should be easy enough to knock out.

Anyway, the 6th day on break was a very busy one.  We started off the day in Hiroshima.  We visited the Peace Memorial, where I didn't feel comfortable taking a lot of pictures of the interior, but there are some to share from the rest of the site.  After that, we went to Hiroshima Castle, which wasn't far away.  It was more of a museum than the others, and I have a few pictures where I was allowed to take them I think.  It was also the only castle I've been to that has an exterior walkway around the main keep, so that's pretty cool, and allowed for some great pictures!  After the castle, we went to Miyajima, which is an island renowned for one of it's shrines, Itsukushima Jinja.  It's a very beautiful place!  There was also a cable car up to the top of the mountain, which we took and had time for a few quick pictures before having to rush back down.

As stated, we started off at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial, which is situated near the epicenter of the nuclear bomb that was dropped there at the end of World War Two by the U.S.  It was a very moving site.  The museum has a lot of artifacts from the blast, and includes very graphic details of the resulting injuries and deaths, as well as the fall out that occurred after.

 

Some exterior shots of the Hiroshima Peace
Memorial and the park around it.  It was very
beautiful, and somber.

 

These are the only pictures I took of the interior
of the Memorial's museum.  The one on the left
represents the blast of the atomic bomb 1 second
after the initial explosion.  The rest of the model
shows what was destroyed by the blast, including
marking out some of the significant landmarks of
the area.  There were a lot of before and after
pictures of some of the surrounding buildings to
highlight the destruction.

 

This is Hiroshima Dome.  It was directly under the
blast of the bomb, and somehow the forces of the
explosion didn't level it.  It has been left mostly in
its original state after the bomb, and a park put up
around it to make it a part of the memorial.

After the Hiroshima Memorial, we headed towards Hiroshima Castle.  This castle was much more a museum than a historical site, since the original was leveled during the bombing, but that made it a pretty unique and cool experience.  There were tons of artifacts from the Edo period on display, including swords, armor, and various daily items of the time.  It was fantastic, and I really enjoyed getting to see all of it.  Sadly, most of the museum didn't allow for pictures, but I did get a few.

 

The outermost gate of Hiroshima Castle is fully restored.
It includes the Tycho drum used to signal the time, as well
as pending attacks.  The place had a lot of models of the
surrounding country side and descriptions of the various
types of castles that were built in Japan.  It was pretty neat!

Hiroshima Castle is gorgeous and the surrounding
area has been made into a park, since all of the
surrounding buildings and most of the wall were
also leveled in the atomic bomb blast.  The rebuilt
castle is pretty faithful to the original though.

 

Some of the views from the top floor's exterior walk
way!  The view of the city and the surrounding park
was excellent!  Of course, the whole area was pretty
crowded, so we didn't get to spend much time up there.

 

At the end of the castle, they had part of the proper
O-yoroi to try on and take pictures in!  I couldn't resist.
Sara's is worn more properly, on the chest, since she tied
mine and it didn't stay in place very well.  The armor
itself is shockingly light, while the kabuto (helmet)
weighs a ton, as expected!  The whole thing is lacquered
metal and wood strips bound together with heavy silk
cord.  It makes for very heavy, very resilient armor that
was easy to maintain and clean in the Japanese humidity.

After leaving the castle, we headed for the trains again.  The ride to Miyajima wasn't too long, but it was already getting late in the afternoon and we were a bit worried about catching some of the stuff opened.  We had to skip having a proper lunch, instead grabbing convenience store food along the way.  I'm sure I've mentioned it before, but if not, I will here, but convenience stores here are on a whole different level from back in the U.S.  The food is pretty good, and much more fresh than at home.  It's sort of part of the culture here, but I'll have to get into that deeper in another post.

Miyajima was pretty spectacular!  The island is home to one of the most famous O-Tori gates in the country, the Great Tori Gate in the water.  It's part of a big shrine complex called Itsukushima, and it's beautiful.  The rest of the island is home to a little tourist town, with lots of shops, hotels, and a few museums.  We went to a folk museum that was cool.  It was a lot like the pioneer villages at home, really.  There were displays of all of the tools used in the production of various goods.  A lot of hand tools and fishing and farming implements.  The shrine itself was very pretty, but hard to get a read on, from a spiritual perspective.  There were a lot of people, but it still had a good energy.

 

We had to take a ferry out to the island, which was kinda
cool.  It was the first time I've been on something like
that in a very long time.

 

The view from the ferry was beautiful, as expected,
and the ferry pilot did a nice job of passing near
enough to the O-Tori to get some good pictures of it.

 

Some random pictures from around the
island on the way to the shrine.  There was
so much cool stuff here it was hard to get
pictures of all of it!

 

I'm very proud of this picture.  I think it does a good job
to convey the feeling of the O-Tori and what the area
around it is like.  This is probably my favorite picture
I've taken of Japan in general.  Anyway, at low tide,
the area around the gate is dry, and you can walk out to it.
Tori gates such as this one are meant to mark the
boundaries of divine from the rest of the world.  The
entire island is said to be a holy site, especially the
area around the shrine itself.

 

I love the way these old shrines are built.  The foo dogs
as guardians, the stone lanterns around them, the buildings
themselves.  It is all amazing to me.  The second shot here
is of the interior of the shrine itself.  I'm not sure what was
going on, but the family and Shinto Priests there were all
in prayer in front of the actual shrine at the heart of the
grounds.

 

A few parting shots back towards Itsukushima Jinja
as we were headed off to explore the rest of the island.
the sun was going down and tide was headed out, so
we knew we didn't have a lot of time left.

 

One of my favorite things about the less
developed areas like this here in Japan is
that everywhere you turn, there's a shrine.
This was a random one we passed on our
way to the cable cars to head up the mountain.

 

A few shots of the first leg cable car ride up the mountain.

 

The view from the second car was much more
interesting!

 

Of course, that didn't have anything on the view
of the sunset from the top of the mountain!  We
were on one of the secondary peaks, but didn't
have time to actually go to the highest peak on
the island, since the cable cars stop running at
sundown.  We had to rush a little to catch it after
this as it was.

That was pretty well the last thing we saw.  After that, we caught the ferry back to the train, then the train back to the shinkansen, and from there headed back to Nagoya.  By the end of the trip, we were both worn out, exhausted, and ready to get back to the dorms.  We stopped for dinner in the train station and tried a local food that was recommended to us by one of my Japanese friends.  I'll write about that later, I suppose, when I do a food post.  That may be a day or two.

The trip was amazing!  There were a few places along the way I'd love to spend  more time, and could've spent an entire day on Miyajima alone.  Kyoto also could've taken the whole trip, but we rushed through things so we could see more in the time we had.  It was so much fun!  I hope to get to travel more over winter break, but we'll see how things pan out.  The next post will probably be a lot more boring.  Please forgive me!

Vacation Day 5

Sorry for another long delay in writing.  Things have been pretty busy and the Fall Semester here in Japan is drawing to a close.  I'm going to try to put up 3 posts today in between homework assignments and studying for a test tomorrow.  This post will be mostly about Day 5 of the vacation adventure, so lets dive in!

November 5th was also the fifth day of the vacation.  Hard to believe it's been a month ago!  In some ways it feels a lot more recent, and in others, even longer ago than that!  We started out in Nara, but quickly headed to catch the JR train towards Himeiji on the way to Hiroshima.  The first stop was Himeji Castle in Himeiji.

As it turns out, the castle is pretty historic, having gone through relatively few renovations or rebuilding since it was originally erected.  Most of the other castles I've visited have either been completely (relatively) new structures, or have undergone some pretty serious restoration efforts.  This one was just really well maintained from the look of it.

 

As it turned out, there was a major festival going on
when we were there.  Apparently it was a pretty big
week for that everywhere.  These are a few shots of
the approach to the castle from the train station.  As
you can see, it was pretty crowded!

  

One thing that stands out to me about Japanese
Castles is how similar they are to European
castles.  In many ways, they developed
independently, thanks to Japan's isolationist
policies before the Meiji Restoration period.
They feature the same style of "murder holes,"
similar layouts with overlapping fields of view
and ever increasingly high walls with each layer
of walls able to defend the next out out.  It's
fascinating to see the similar developments like this
worlds apart.

Well, those are all the pictures I want to share from Day 5.  The majority of the day was spent traveling, so it wasn't a lot of sight seeing.  After the castle, we did go to the Himeji Zoo, which was very close to the castle grounds.  I didn't take pictures though.  As it turns out, Japan is an island without much space, and so the zoo was very small and the animals seemed very cramped.  I'm sure it is very educational for the people that visit it, and it serves to get a lot of young people into conservation and related fields, but it was hard to take as an American.  Sorry for no pictures of it, but it was probably better that way.

Sorry for a relatively short post, but the next one that covers Day 6 of the vacation will be significantly longer!

Vacation Day 4!

Sorry for the delay in posting more of this.  I'm at least a week behind the schedule I was hoping to keep.  But the semester is winding down and I'm really working hard to bring my language grades up to ensure I get to stay a second semester.  Have to keep priorities and all of that, right?

Anyway, day four of the vacation was probably my favorite day!  Sara and I started things off by going to the Shosoin Exhibition, which is an annual event held at the Nara National Museum.  During the Shosoin, national historians make a selection of Japan's national treasures and prepares them for a public viewing.  It was an amazing exhibit, and there were items that predated what we think of as Western civilization by centuries!  It was also kind of funny to notice that Sara and I were the only foreigners in the museum that day, and it seemed like we surprised anyone that bumped into us.

The one pic I was able to take from the Shosoin.
I was very disappointed I couldn't take more,
so I bought the picture book at the shop.

Sadly, we weren't allowed to take pictures of any of it.  I think my favorite items were a set of three lacquered birds though.  They were very small, and very colorful.  The detailing on such small items was inspiring!  There was also a tool that I liked that's called a bukoto.  It's basically the same kind of a tool as a chalk line, used for marking long straight lines to use as guides.  The biggest difference is that it used black ink instead of chalk.  This one was interesting because it was very ornamental and stylized into a dragon's head.

There was also an interesting look into daily life of a middle management person at a monastery where Buddhist translations were done.  It was a complaint/request letter that the supervisor of a group of translators wrote requesting more time off and a sake ration for his workers.  It was pretty entertaining.

After leaving the Shosoin, we went to Todaiji Temple.  It is home to the largest statue of Buddha in the country, and is considered an international heritage site.  The Temple is in Nara park, and has some of the oldest Buddhist statues in Japan.  It was a really pretty place and the statues are amazing.

 

The outer gates of Todaiji Temple.  Home to a pair
of guardian god statues that are world renowned called
the Nio guardians.

 

Sadly, thanks to the lighting and the protective cages
around them, I wasn't able to get very good pictures of
the Nio statues.  They're pretty interesting from a
craftsmanship perspective, too.  They're actually made
from dozens of pieces of wood, each individually
carved and then fitted into place with metal pins
to make the whole statue.

 

Some of the sights on the walk up to the inner gate
at the temple.  It was very pretty, and featured
is a perfect example of Buddhist architecture
in Japan.

 

The view from the front of the temple
and the walkway up to it.  There's the
traditional hand washing spot on the right
in the picture, and a stone lantern in the
middle of the walkway, as well.

 

This is the Great Buddha of Todaiji.  The statue is huge.
The statue itself is almost 50 feet tall and is the largest
bronze Buddha in the world.  The Temple itself is around
150 feet tall, and until around 2000, was the world's largest
wooden building.  The picture on the left is one of the lotus
petals from the Buddha's pedestal.  It's inlaid with intricate
Buddhist script and imagery in gold. 

 

The great Buddha is flanked on either side by
two other statues of Buddhist disciples.
The other statues seemed a lot more detailed,
but were also not as old.  Each statue had its
own prayer shrine, as well, since each one
is supposed to be used as the focus for a
different kind of prayer.

 

The two guardian statues of the Temple.
I love the influences of Shinto that these
kinds of statues show, or maybe its the
other way around and you can see the
influence of Buddhism on Shinto through
these kinds of things.  Either way, it is an
interesting variation of Buddhism,
which traditionally doesn't worship or revere
any gods.

Once we left Todaiji, we headed for the next shrine I really wanted to visit.  This is the shrine where the storm god, whom I've written about in a previous post, is enshrined.  It was a little bit out of the way, and we had to take a train ride to the town of Tenri, then catch a cab from that station to the shrine.  This was a much more rural shrine, and it was very powerful feeling, while the others had felt sterile as I put it recently.

The gate way into the Iso no Kami shrine.
This is where I opened up and felt the life of
this shrine.  I haven't felt anything like that
in a very long time.  It was moving.

 

As mentioned, the Iso no Kami shrine was much more rural
than the others we saw.  We were greeted at the gate's
stamp station by this rooster that was just hanging out.
There were other roosters and ducks hanging around the
entry area into the shrines as well.

 

For being the shrine of the God of Storms, this
is a pretty modest place!  The shrine itself was
beautiful, as was the building around it.
However, it was much smaller, and much less
opulent than some of the others that we visited
during the trip.  I think that's part of what added
to the power and feeling of the place though.
it didn't need all of that to give it the spiritual
weight that it had.

Supposedly, in the middle of the shrine there
in the heart of the building, is the broken sword
and soul of O-Sasunoo, the God of Storms,
Brother to Amaterasu the Sun Goddess.  I prayed
at the altar, and couldn't have felt better doing it.

 

The inner gate that led into the Shrine's grounds.
The second picture is where the remains of other
people's fortunes and prayers from last year hang.
I'm looking forward to taking part in this ritual
more than I probably should be!

This was the first place I've actually prayed in a very long time, and I'm planning to go back for the traditionally Shinto New Year's ritual.  The ritual consists of visiting a Shinto shrine such as this one and praying, then writing a script on paper that's basically a listing of all of the things from the previous year you wish you could let go of or move on with.  You tie the slip of paper up to a tree, or special place on the Shrine's grounds, and the weather destroys it, destroying the worries as well.  Leaving the stains of the last year in the hands of the kami and the world to wash away will feel good.

As we were leaving the shrine, we noticed that there was a waterfall on the map of some local hiking paths.  After a little discussion, we decided to try to make it there before sundown.  It turned into an adventure that was well worth it!

 

The hike led us past some Japanese fields,
into a much more rural hillside village area.
It was a huge change from the heavily
populated urban areas where I've spent most
of my time here in Japan.  I kind of liked it.

 

This Momoo Falls, near Tenri.  It was about
45 minutes or so on foot to get to the falls.
We found out afterwards that we probably
could've taken a bus up the mountain,
which thankfully we were able to take back
down to town instead of walking after dark.

After walking around the falls and taking pictures for a while, we were lucky enough to find a bus stop and catch a bus back to Tenri, then the train back to Nara for the last night there.  We ended up having another non-Japanese meal, this time burgers at a little touristy place right off of the main shopping area around Nara station.

It was a very busy, long, but exciting and fulfilling day!  I have two more days to write about, and hopefully I'll be able to get them down sooner than later.  Sorry to everyone that's reading that it's taken me this long to get the entirety of my vacation posted, but I hope you're enjoying the detailed accounts more than just a random picture dump!