Saturday started out badly with me running late – I’m not good at mornings. I met Kikko-chan at Asakusa station to catch the express to Nikko. The train took a couple of hours, through the suburbs of Tokyo into the countryside, then the hills to the north of the city. The train itself was unremarkable except for the seats, they swivel around such they can face the other way, meaning everyone gets to face forwards for the journey, or, if so desired, can sit in a group around a table.
The walk up through the town to the national park took about twenty minutes. Over the river at the top of the town there are two bridges, one encased in a ‘house’ – a traditional bridge currently being relacquered, a process that takes years.
Crossing the road into the park itself was somewhat hit and miss, with the traffic lights taking no account of pedestrians.
The first building we encountered was the huge ‘Hall of the Three Buddahs’, I’ve seen pictures of this building before, it is a classical image of the east. There is a trail around the temple passing an umbrella rack hidden behind a small statue down some stairs to the feet of the pedestals supporting the three buddahs, then back, past statues of the twelve holy animals. I was born in the year of the rat, but she might have just made that up…
Past the hall to the next courtyard there is a pole, sponsored by one of the early emperors, with an inscription describing hopes for peace. Behind this theres another hall, where there was a ceremony happening, little signs requested silence by the entrance, but the girl following us managed to drop everything she was carrying about as noisily as was possible.
The courtyard lead on to the main road to the central Toshogu shrine and burial chamber, we followed it up the hill, through the steel gate, past the mossy lanterns, into the temple courtyard. There are a number of warehouses around the courtyard, containing sake mostly, but one had a plaque explaining that it contained something from the tower of london, but that wasn’t open. Behind these, apparently, there is a toilet for the gods, I guess they gotta go sometime.
Opposite the warehouses there is the hall of the three monkeys, with a series of carvings showing the birth, growth and death of a monkey. Noone could resist the ‘see no evil…’ pictures infront of the hall. At the moment the building is home to a white horse, a gift from Belgium.
Up some more steps to the shrine itself, through a building with a structure made of twelve tree trunks – each carved with the same pattern, but with one upside down, representing the imperfection of nature.
We came back down the hill in search of lunch, since the noodle bar we’d intended to go to was closed for construction. The restaurant we found was upstairs in an old trading house, and the food gorgeous.
Returning to the temple complex for the other two shrines we found a ‘hope loop’ at the first, a loop of dried grass six foot tall through which you walk in a particular pattern if you have some hopes you wish realised in the future. The instructions were too complicated for me to remember while I was walking around left then right so I figured I’d be better to give it a miss rather than get it wrong. No hope for me.
To the left of the shrine is the hall of the crying dragon, a building with a dragon painted on the ceiling. There was a man demonstrating the dragons wailing, clapping together two blocks of wood – if they’re clapped under the dragons face is wails, anywhere else in the room there’s no reverberation. Its a trick of physics rather than anything spiritual, but its effective.
Kikko-chan bought me a fortune on the way out, which was somewhere between good and bad, good enough to not tie to a tree, but nothing to get excited about.
Out the back of the temple I spotted an unusual lamp, it looked similar to the other stone and steel lanterns but lived in its own shelter, it must be special We entered the courtyard at the back of the hall, where the description explained that the lamp was a lamp of changing, it is supposed to ressurect spirits somehow, to change the fortunes of those who do something to it, what they need do I forget now.
We crossed the symbolic bridge between ‘manworld’ and ‘godworld’ to another little shrine, where I was shown some praying hammers (well, they were more like maracas to use, but looked like hammers), I chose the hammer of good romance and prayed with that, since it seemed the most appropriate of the selection available (money, luck, babies, friendships, and one anonymous one, a kind of lucky dip prayer hammer I assume).
Further into the niche there was a ‘spring’ of clever water, drinking from this fountain is supposed to make me more intellegent, I must come here more often.
This was the finale of the tour of the temple area, a lovely little corner of the compound which was quieter than the rest of the complex, somehow very welcoming.
All the time we were there the weather was misty and slightly raining, not enough to be wet but enough to remind you it could at any time, should it feel the need. Somehow this leant the place the air of the temple scene at the end of Apocalyse Now, with the top of the pagoda and trees disappearing into a shroud of fog.
Down the hill to the river, we got lost trying to find our way across, and had to loop around. We found the bridge and walked up past a memorial to a power plant – the first hydroelectric plant in Japan was on this site. It has now been replaced with another plant, but its memory lives on. Is it unusual to find such a beautiful tribute to infrastructure touching?
Further up the bank we walked up the row of a thousand graves to the waterfall. They weren’t really graves, just statues keeping watch over travellers passing on the dangerous journey past the waterfall, they just gave that impression to my western eyes.
I love sitting by waterfalls, they’re such powerful, yet peaceful things. We clambered down to the rocks by the main channel of the river, but didn’t sit down there, it had been raining.
A little further upstream we found a shelter designed for watching the waterfall, a little more civilised, but that, somehow, destroys the closeness to nature. We were thankful for it, though, since it chose this time to start raining proper. We waited, watching the flow, until it looked like it was easing up. Then made a pact to find coffee before heading back to the city.
After a couple of minutes the rain came again, and we didn’t both fit under my umbrella, so we ended up rather damp around the edges by the time we’d found somewhere that might give us coffee. Sadly they didn’t have any, what kind of a hotel is that? But they did call us a taxi to get to the station.
Where we found caffeine in an alpine style restaurant by the end of the railway tracks, we opted for the table in the far corner of the upstairs. There were some tables overlooking the cables powering the trains, but they were occupied when we arrived, and I think my companion was getting a little bemused by my insistance on photographing infrastructure.
A little wait for the train, then, once it arrived, we found ourselves in the middle of a group of Korean securities traders and molecular biologists, who were pretty cool and near fluent in Japanese. They all made the effort of speaking English for my benefit, though. They seemed like good people, but all rather tired after the company onsen outing.
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