Toooourist

This weekend, I got my tourist on, ohhh yeah. I own no Hawaiian shirts, but I was wearing one in spirit as I tramped around various ancient and not-so-ancient Places of Interest. Those in question this weekend were Nijo Castle and Enryakuji. Both were really built around the same time.. Enryakuji was founded in the 8th century, but Oda Nobunaga totally ruined the sweet thing they had going in the 1500s by razing it to the ground. It was rebuilt after that, as a bunch of monks had scampered off with the most holy/sweetest stuff, and Toyotomi Hideyoshi saw it as one of the things to do to re-establish a sense of 'peace and normalcy' after, you know, almost 200 years of incredibly destructive civil war.

After Hideyoshi's death, and a few more years that did not remotely approximate peace or normalcy, Tokugawa Ieyasu proved his sword was longest and set out to similarly rebuild and basically wave that big ol' sword around. A bunch of the buildings at Enryakuji were constructed by him or his successors, and he also build Nijo Castle to be his home-away-from-home when he was visiting the Emperor here in Kyoto (he had set up shop in Edo, which was later re-named Tokyo). As such, it's not really a CASTLE.. I mean, there's a moat, and walls, and gates, but the vast majority of space is garden, and all the buildings are decidedly more palacey than castley. There used to be a keep, but it never saw battle; it was built basically to tower over Kyoto and remind everyone that while the Emperor was technically a God and waved his hands around to keep heaven and earth in balance and whatever, it was the Tokugawa Shogun
who had the biggest 'sword' or 'castle tower' in the realm. The keep burned down in the mid 1700s, and as this was a pretty bad time financially to be a Samurai, they never rebuilt it. So. All that's left is two palaces and hella gardens, which initially disappointed me when I realized it.

I was un-disappointed when I actually saw them.. They are some sweeeeet palaces, lemme tell you. You couldn't take pictures inside, but it was really incredible. This is also the palace where Tokugawa, ever paranoid, included floorboards that make squeaking noises whenever any pressure is put on them. Having a million tourists walking around means that you hear mooore than enough evidence of this.. I cannot say enough how incredible the inside of that place is, though. There were painted screeens and carved wooden relieeeefs and colorful tiled cieeeelings and just every damn thing. Great! I also took basically the best picture ever on the gate over the inner moat:



Anyway yeah, I am SO GOOD. The next day, I went to Enryakuji! First, a short Kyoto Geography lesson: my host family's house is in the faar west of the city, and a little south. Enryakuji is on a mountain, (Hiei-zan), which is past the northeast reaches of the city. This means it took a little more than about two hours, all told, from my doorstep to the first sweet Buddhisty temple I could take a picture of and gawk at. I had to take: A commuter/electric train, the subway, walk 20 minutes, take another commuter train, a cable car, and a ropeway (you can apparently walk/hike the cable car/ropeway part, and it's supposedly really nice, but it takes 5 hours all by itself), then walk about 20 minutes to the temple itself over the mountain. The temple used to basically cover the whole thing, with over 3,000 buildings, but after that whole 'burned to the ground' thing it was only rebuilt back to about 300. You think at first, 'Jeez! 10 times less! And they have the cheek to still call themselves a temple! That's nothing more than a templet! A mini-temple!' and then you realize that's still 300 goddamn buildings. They're very spread out, too (clumped into three major areas, one is really far away and I got templed out after a few hours so I left it for next time), and spread out on a mountain means that there's a lot of distance to cover both horizontally and vertically. This led to me realizing yet another thing one must get used to in Japan: they have terrifying old people. I am climbing some stairs carved into the living rock of the mountain at about an 80 degree grade, sweating like a pig, struggling along, and this gang of obaa-sans (grandmas) with their floral print blouses and goofy fisherman's hats just MOTORS past me. Not even kidding. I mean it's been a while since I was on track, but have some pity, old Japanese ladies! Jeez. Anyway, there were some really great buildings there too, as well as some very old spiritual things. It is the head temple still of the Tendai sect, and many of the other Japanese flavors of Buddhism were founded by monks who studied there, so there's a little bit of everything around in addition to Tendai. For my BA, I think I'm going to have to translate all the signs around.. there were very many that were only in Japanese, though they had the Japanese-Korean-Chinese-English for the important explanations of what was an Official Cultural Artifact and so forth. Pretty cool, though!

That's all for now, Folks At Home! Don't worry, I won't be hanging up my metaphorical Hawaiian shirt any time soon, and you won't have to wait too terribly long for the next installment! Now I will go because I am at an internet cafe that charges by 15-minute intervals. Stay classy, America!