The Love Stones

The Kiyomizu-dera temple had many charming little shrines.  Here are a few...including our favorite one, the "Love Stone".
But first, the photo below shows a Japanese god of love.  The gentleman to the right would be the god.  The rabbit, to his left, is his messenger.  There is a small box at the foot of the statue in which believers can slip a small prayer...normally a prayer by the unmarried to find a good and happy match.

The god below is not so specialized.  He is a kind of a one-wish-genie.  He will answer any prayer, but only one prayer.  Believers write down their wishes on a slip of paper and drop it in the box at the foot of the shrine.

And now, for the famous Love Stone.   Actually, it's a pair of stones.  Stone #1 is pictured below, followed immediately by stone #2.  The stones are spaced about 20 yards apart in a small courtyard.  The story goes, that any person who can find their way from one stone to the other with their eyes closed will be guaranteed to find love in the coming year. 

Pictured below is a young lady who is just a step away from finding the second stone.  It took her about 10 minutes to find her way, and only then with the help of the lady in black standing behind the stone.  The task is made all-the-harder by the fact that half the population of Japan was streaming through that little courtyard on this particular day.

Kiyomizu-dera

Kiyomizu-dera is a Buddhist Temple located on the East side of Kyoto, between the Silver Temple and the train station.  It was our last tourist stop in Kobe, and we got their in late afternoon as the sun was beginning to set.  This was the site that Theresa wanted most to see; she had gotten a Facebook message on the "100 places to see before you die", and the Kiyomizu-dera was on the list along with the Golden temple.  We were a bit worried that the temple would be closed, since everything in Kyoto, it seems, closes at 4:00 pm.   We felt a lot more hopeful when we saw the throngs of people trudging up the narrow road towards the entrance.

Kiyomizu-dera hangs on the side of a mountain.  It appears to be suspended in mid-air.  To me, the mention of "Buddhist Temple" has always conjured mental images of Shangri-la or mountaintop retreats in Tibet.  Kiyomizu-dera fits that stereotype.

 

The temple complex is old;  the site dates back about 1400 years.  The current structures are not that old - most were built about 400 years ago.  Though not ancient, that still makes them pretty darned old. 

Though it was January 7, most of the temple's visitors were still celebrating their New Year rituals.  People were getting their fortunes told, and rubbing statues for good luck, and throwing coins toward the temple's altars.  The temple has evidently built up a lot of it's own, special rituals over the years.   It has an assortment of little shrines, each with a specialized purpose of bringing luck of finding fortune, finding love, or improving one's love-related skills.

I'm not really sure what the photo above shows.  I believe these little wooden tablets contain prayers of some sort.  The photo below shows the "thousand stone Buddhas".  These, and any other image of a Buddha, were all dressed in their colorful New Year's garb.  (Again, I'm not sure what this symbolizes.  It looks as if they are all wearing baby bibs.)

Some of the visitors, too, were traditionally dressed.  You can see a group of young ladies below in their kimonos.  They are in the process of obtaining their fortunes for the year.  The lady in the white-dotted-blue kimono is shaking a wooden cylinder filled with sticks.  Out will come a numbered stick.  The stick will be traded for a likewise numbered piece of paper.  Whatever fortune is written on the paper will, supposedly, be her's for the coming year.

The temple site was originally chosen because of a natural, and now sacred, waterfall - the Otowa waterfall.  The waters are now channeled to a pavilion where the visitors can catch them in tin cups and drink for good fortune.  You can see these water-catchers in the photo below, at the left-hand side.

Gold and Silver

After Nijo Castle, our next two stops in Kyoto were the Golden Temple (Kinkaku-ji) and the Silver Temple (Ginkaku-ji).  The Golden Temple, above, is a quick visit - you go there, you see the famous view, and then you leave.  Well, there is more to do there than just that.  But it was raining and the spot was crowded with holiday visitors.  Theresa took the time to throw coins at the "good luck" bowl. (see below)  There were also a few little shops to visit.

A cross-town-bus-ride later,  we were at The Silver Temple.  The Golden Temple is something you go to look at.  The Silver Temple is someplace you go to visit.  Our Japanese friends said they actually prefer the Silver Temple because of it large, traditional gardens and mountainside paths.  It is a place you can go to again and again, and still see something new with each visit.

The temple itself is shown above.  The dark brown wood doesn't have the sex-appeal of gold, but it blends well with the surroundings.   Rather than a single, iconic image, the temple provides different views from different angles as you wander through the garden.

The Silver Temple belongs to Zen Buddhism.  A typical feature of "Zen gardens", we learned, is dry landscaping with rock and sand.  The sand is teased into elaborate geometric patterns using rakes and trowels.  Zen is all about meditation and contemplation.  The raking of the sand is a meditative exercise which, to master, requires technical skill and deep concentration.  The finished product also provides something for others to meditate upon.  The patterns are a bit like an ink blot or modern art - everyone sees something different in them.

You can take a virtual tour of the Silver Temple gardens, thanks to Bowdoin College.  You can also take a  Golden Temple virtual tour.

Nijo Castle

Our first stop in Kyoto was Nijo Castle.  The castle is located near the center of the city - an easy stop on the way to those sights farther afield.  The castle dates back to around the year 1600, when it was built by one of the Edo Shogun.   It's certainly not a castle in the European sense.  True, the castle grounds are surrounded by a moat and a substantial wall.  But the castle itself is a wooden structure.  And, where the castles of Himeji and Hiroshima towered five or six stories into the air, the Nijo castle was just a cluster of simple, one-story buildings.

But though not Cinderella's castle, the Nijo Castle still had a Disney like feel to it.  The castle was surrounded by Japanese gardens that were incredibly beautiful.  Every directly you looked, every angle, was a picture perfect moment made by Kodak.  (Or at least it was at the time of our visit...prior to Kodak's declaration of bankruptcy.) 

Inside the castle buildings, it was just as magical.  The castle was a series of rooms - very large rooms - that progressed from the reception halls for guests, to the grand hall of the imperial court, all the way to the living quarters for the Shogun.  The floors were covered in bamboo mats and the walls and ceilings were decorated with masterful paintings.  Unfortunately, there were no photo's allowed inside.  So you will have to take my word when I say it was impressive.

Ok...two things that struck me.   One is shown by the photo above....specifically, the Japanese use some really big stones to build their walls.   We've become used to seeing Chinese walls.  Though impressive, the Chinese walls are almost all built from bricks of modest size.  The walls of Nijo Castle are made with stones of Herculean size.   You can't  look at these walls without wondering...."how the heck did they do that? ".

A second thing that was really interesting:  what they call the "Nightingale Floors".  Nijo Castle is built with all the main rooms at the center of the structures.  All are tied together through a main hallway of wooden planks.  The hallway runs along the perimeter, with the outer wall on one side and the interior rooms on the other.  The floors of the hallway are purposely built to squeak....to chirp like nightingales.  This is the 9th century version of a burglar alarm.  It's impossible to walk the floors without creating a squeak.  These squeaks, or the chirping of the nightingales, provided warning of unwelcome visitors in the night.

The final photo, above, shows the New Year's decoration at the door of Nijo Castle.   Note the typical mixture of evergreen, and bamboo, and of cabbage flower.

Kyoto

Our two weeks in Japan was scheduled to end with an early morning flight to Shanghai on January 8.  January 7 was a Saturday, and more importantly, a day off of work.  So Theresa and I finally went to Kyoto.

If Tokyo is the heart of Japan, then Kyoto is the soul.  Kyoto is to Japanese culture as is Xian to China, or Rome and Athens to Western Culture.  Kyoto was the primary city of Japan for nearly 1100 years, until the emperor moved to Tokyo in 1868.  You can't walk a block in the city without tripping over history - either a temple or a palace or a artifact of some sort.  Even in Chinese, the spelling of Kyoto, 京都, means the "capital of all".

Thanks to a quirk of fate, the historical beauty of Kyoto is well-preserved.  You see, during World War II,  Kyoto was chosen as one of the original targets for the atomic bomb.   We learned this when we visited Hiroshima.  With Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Kyoto was placed off-limits for conventional bombing.  No one knew how destructive an A-bomb would be.  So these cities were preserved to serve as true test cases to measure the power of the bomb.  It was only through the insistence of  Henry Stimson, the Secretary of War, that Kyoto was taken of the list.  Seems he was familiar with the legacy of Kyoto and thought it would be a travesty to destroy the city.

Kyoto is nestled inland, up in the mountains.  (See top-most photo...the city of Kobe lies in the valley below the setting sun.) The location betrays an origin in times when defense was more important than commerce.  If you drew lines between Kyoto and Kobe and Osaka, then you would have an equilateral triangle of 40 miles or so for each side.  From Kobe, it is about an hour by commuter train.

Today's Kyoto is very much a modern tourist city.  The second photo shows the Kyoto Tower looming over the train station in the city center.   This is the first site seen by the thousands of tourists that arrive each day.  Luckily, Kyoto is tourist friendly.  There is a huge tourist information center in the train station.  When we arrived, a very nice older gentleman gave us a map and laid out our travel plans for the day.  He even sold us a bus pass for the day.

Anywhere there are tourists there are bound to be lots of tourist shops.  Kyoto has it's share.  Nothing could be more touristic than a shop selling Japanese fans, like the one shown above.  Many of the tourist shops are bakeries for Yatsuhashi - the famous cinnamon cookies of Kyoto.  The third photo shows a woman hard-at-work making the Yatsuhashi.  She rolls the dough into thin sheets, cuts rectangles of about one inch by three inches, and then cooks the pieces on the griddle under the weight of wooden blocks.  When cooked, the cookies are still pliable.  She then places them on a cylindrical mold until they cool hard in the shape of a roof-tile.  The resulting cookie is like crunchy ginger-bread...except the taste is cinnamon instead of ginger.

By the way, the making of a Yatsuhashi is remarkably similar to the making of a Chinese Fortune Cookie....both are shaped while warm and only become crunchy upon cooling.   Truth-be-told, the Chinese fortune cookie has nothing to do with China.  It actually comes from Japan.  The baking methods of Kyoto were brought to America by Japanese immigrants and then co-opted by Chinese-American restaurants to produce the fortune cookies.  It's the same dough but with a lot less cinnamon.  And also a piece of paper twisted into the center of the cookie before it cools.

By the way, I've never seen a fortune cookie ANYWHERE in China.   Never.

Camp Zama

Theresa spent a good deal of her teen-age years in Japan, when her father was stationed at the U.S. Army Base, Camp Zama.  For as long as I've known her, she has wanted to get back to Japan and visit her old home.

With that in mind, we bought a Japan Railway Pass before coming to Kobe for Theresa to use.  The Railway pass entitles you to ride almost any train in Japan for a 7 day or 14 day period.  We bought the 7 day pass, and it pretty much paid for itself with just the one round-trip to Hiroshima.  On top of that, Theresa used it to go to a Osaka and Himeji and other nearby spots.  It was only on the last valid date of the pass that she worked up the courage to try to get to Zama

Now, keep in mind that Theresa had no idea how to get to Camp Zama.  All we knew is that it is located on the other side of the island, between Yokohama and Tokyo.  All of the on-line travel information was aimed at servicemen flying into Tokyo.  So, she had to rely completely on the nice people at the ticket window of the train station. 

Also keep in mind, that the two week period around New Year's day is the heaviest travel period of the year in Japan.   Of course, we didn't realize this beforehand.  But we soon came to realize that the whole country was traveling toward or in return from a family visit.  So in her quest for Camp Zama, Theresa had to take her chances.  She went standing-room on the train out, and only got a seat for the last hour of the three hour Shinkansen leg.  After that, she took local trains to get to the Soubudai station, near Camp Zama (see photo above).

To tell the truth, she didn't get to see much.  By time she arrived, there was only about an hour's worth of daylight left.  And when she got to the base, the guards would not let her pass without valid military ID.  Security and all that stuff.   Theresa doesn't look all that crazy, but in this day and age we are all presumed to be security risks.  So, she had to settle for walking around and looking through the fence (see top photo).

But just getting back to Camp Zama after 35 years was a victory.  She got to see a few things that stirred up memories.  And then she got back on the train and headed back to Kobe.

New Year Rituals In Hiroshima

January 2nd was scheduled to be a working day, but just barely.  Luckily, we were able to work a little late on January 1st and complete all the tasks for the next day.  So January 2nd became a day off.  Woo Hoo Hoo.

By the Shinkansen bullet train, it is only 1 hour and 15 minutes from Kobe to Hiroshima.  So, Theresa and I grabbed a couple of tickets and went.  Our first stop was the Peace Park.  After that, we walked the 5 or 6 blocks up to Hiroshima Castle. 

Due to the New Year's holidays the castle was closed to entry.   So the photo at top is the best we can do.   There has been a castle on this site since the 1500s.  The previous version of the castle was incinerated on August 6, 1945.  The current version of the castle was built shortly after that.  It is a great reconstruction and, from looking at it, I couldn't tell if it was 50 years old or 500 years old.

Adjacent to the Hiroshima Castle is a Shinto temple, the Gokoku Shrine.  On January 2nd, the people were still in full-on-New-Year mode.  Tons of people were headed to the shrine to obtain their good luck for the year.   Once again, we encountered a throng of people that self-organized into a line for entry to the temple complex.  Once again, it was a bit like the state fair ....with all the food vendors flanking the path.

The line snaked its way through booths that were selling food and smelling wonderful.  Above, you can see a meat-on-a-stick vendor.  I'm not sure exactly what all the meats are, but I know the meat to the right is octopus.  Below you see a new-and-improved version for sale....meat on a stick with egg.

Many of the booths along the way offered fortune telling of all sorts.  Below is a photo of one of the palm readers.

The line moved steadily but slowly.  The photo below shows when we finally arrived at the temple gates.

The line led up the steps of the temple itself.  The photo below attempts to show how people were throwing coins as offerings....and how the temple keepers had built temporary catch basins to pick up the coins.   I suspect that the New Year Holiday must fund the majority of the yearly operations.

The photo below is a fortune-telling booth.  Basically, people would shake a container full of randomly numbered sticks to extract a single stick.  They would then give stick to one of the ladies who would retrieve the fortune associated with the number on the stick.

Below is a photo of people tying their wishes to a wish-line.  I call it a wish-line because it looks like a clothes-line.  I am not sure what the offical term is for this.  But at the temples you can see hundreds of paper wishes tied to lines like this one.

In the photo below, visitors to the temple are buying a ritual drink of hot sake to start the new year.

The photo below shows the booth were they are selling lucky "arrows".  In the Shinto tradition, the arrows are said to have powers to ward off evil spirits.   But supposedly, the arrows are only good for one year.  With the new year you are supposed to start over by turning in your old arrow (for burning) and buying a new arrow for the new year.

Theresa had to buy one of the arrows.  Below is a photo showing her with her fine selection of purple color, of course.

The photo below shows another one of the New Year rituals.  Visitors are washing their hands in the temple fountain. 

The New Year holiday also brings out a lot of people in traditional dress.  The photo below shows a young girl in her kimono.    Many kimonos were seen out and about during the holiday period.