This Mission Was A Success
Japan! It was awesome. Uncharacteristically, I'm not going to be lazy and just point you all to akiko's inevitable huge posts on the subject, but actually write something up myself. With pictures! Bold stuff in the post refers to the pics, which will be thumbnails linked to full-size images.
Oh, yeah, my previously-mentioned mysterious foot injury from some presumed unseen insect did eventually heal; it was only really bad for 2-3 days, though it took a week to go away completely. Annoying, but not debilitating enough to stop me from doing much,
So, starting at the beginning. Direct flight from Atlanta to Tokyo is like 14 hours long, but uneventful. Finished several chapters of Revenant Wings on the DS. Arrive in Tokyo, crash, immediately on the Kyoto the next day. Kyoto, being the ancient capital of Japan, means temples, shrines and palaces. Lots and lots of them. But they're pretty awesome, so that's ok. First we wandered some palace grounds and saw Nijo castle, which has the cool nightingale wood floors that squeak melodically to warn of incoming ninjas. It also had some pretty gardens.
Then on to the eastern hills full of temples. Starting off is the impressive Kiyomizu Dera. Next to it was a little Shinto shrine where if you can walk from one stone to another with your eyes closed you're supposed to have good luck in love. More temples and shrines on the walk included Kodaiji, Chion-in, and Nanzenji, a big Zen Buddhist complex.
Also seen along the way was this strange statue by the city waterworks that totally (and probably not coincidentally) reminded me of something from Okami. At the end of the day we hit up the iconic gold-plated Kinkaku-ji.
Speaking of iconic, the next day started with Fushimi Inari shrine with its hundreds and hundreds of orange Tori gates along paths up the hillside. The other theme for the shrine was kitsune (foxes) and wolves, with lots of shrines that appeared to be dedicated to the Okami herself, Amaterasu. Actually living at the shrine, though, was a sizable colony of cats, like these kittens who we first worried might be dead but were in fact just taking a nice nap.
From Fushimi it's a short trip to Uji, where we saw Byodo-in. Interestingly we'd seen a near-exact replica of this temple in Hawaii, though that one was relatively recently built and done up in the bright orange color that's worn off of the centuries-old original. We saw a few other shrines in Uji and had a nice picnic lunch on an island in the river.
Next was a day-trip to Osaka, where we visited Osaka Castle. This one is actually a fairly recently reconstructed ferro-concrete replica based on the original design, but inside is a nice museum with lots of artifacts and scrolls from the period when the first big castle here was destroyed in the battle between, I believe, Toyotomi and Tokugawa. Also some old Japanese dude on the grounds let me hold his pet iguana. Afterwards we met up with Ben Lawsom (hat-Ben from old Coup) and had an awesome Okonomiyaki dinner. Teh yums.
Then we went on to Nara, where we stayed in a really cute little Ryokan where we were the only guests and were served sumptuous traditional meals by the owner. Nara is full of very tame deer, which are seen here accosting akiko after she bought some deer treats.
The other main attraction in Nara is the humongous Todaiji temple. Pictures do not adequately convey the scale of the wooden Buddha, which is over fifty feet tall. That's pretty much ridiculously huge for a statue in a building. There's also some more temples nearby, and then the big Kasuga shinto shrine, which dates from way back when Nara was the capital of Japan (before Kyoto).
One cool thing akiko did at most of the temples we visited was to collect Goshuin, which is calligraphy of the temple's sect, name, and date with official stamps. Also in Nara was the infamous Taiko no Tatsujin machine where I managed to give myself a blister drumming to Gundam music.
After the end of week one, it was on to Tokyo. The first two days were concentrated geeky shopping at Nakano Broadway and near Sunshine City in Ikebukuro; I'll comment on the resulting loot in a separate post. The next day we had reserved tickets for the Ghibli Museum, which is small but totally awesome. The designers have a great sense for how random passageways and twisty stairs make everything cool; there's at least three ways to get anywhere. We got to see "Mei and the Kitten-bus" at the little theater, and a bunch of nifty exhibits of Ghibli sketches, storyboards, and paintings. And of course there's the Laputa robot on the roof. If you follow a narrow bath from there through some greenery, you can find a Laputa control cube too.
Next we went to Harajuku, with its crazy fashion shops. It is entirely David's fault that we spent way too much money on awesome and weird clothes from Putumayo and BPN. But they're awesome. Afterwards we hopped down one station to check out the neon glory of Shinjuku at night.
The day after that was geek mecca Akihabara (pictured: Animate and Comic Tora no Ana, containing more floors of merchandise and doujinshi than you can shake a stick at). Some local ex-pat geeks helped us track down a few of the more obscure stores including Asobits and Super Potato (which sells pretty much every ancient video game cartridge you could think of; I played a demo Virtual Boy there). Again, more on the resulting loot later, as well as one the Zeon and Federation bars that we managed to locate.
Having been pretty much shopped-out for a while (and nearly out of cash anyway), we returned to temple-hopping the next day, starting with Sensou-ji. This is the big one in Tokyo, where many thousands of people show up for New Year's offerings, as seen in the winter episode of the Genshiken manga. After that we went to the much quieter Meiji-Jingu shrine, which put us right back next to Harajuku for some more people-watching.
The last day we decided to pretty much chill, taking a quick look at Ginza before returning to home base in Ikebukuro for a little karaoke. Much Fire Bomber and Gundam was sung, plus the original Yamato theme song and completely hilarious engrish of the Red Fraction opening to Black Lagoon. We wrapped things up by spending pretty much the last of our money at the Zeon bar. Then another delightful 12-hour flight and home. Time to start unpacking toys...
Oh, yeah, my previously-mentioned mysterious foot injury from some presumed unseen insect did eventually heal; it was only really bad for 2-3 days, though it took a week to go away completely. Annoying, but not debilitating enough to stop me from doing much,
So, starting at the beginning. Direct flight from Atlanta to Tokyo is like 14 hours long, but uneventful. Finished several chapters of Revenant Wings on the DS. Arrive in Tokyo, crash, immediately on the Kyoto the next day. Kyoto, being the ancient capital of Japan, means temples, shrines and palaces. Lots and lots of them. But they're pretty awesome, so that's ok. First we wandered some palace grounds and saw Nijo castle, which has the cool nightingale wood floors that squeak melodically to warn of incoming ninjas. It also had some pretty gardens.
Then on to the eastern hills full of temples. Starting off is the impressive Kiyomizu Dera. Next to it was a little Shinto shrine where if you can walk from one stone to another with your eyes closed you're supposed to have good luck in love. More temples and shrines on the walk included Kodaiji, Chion-in, and Nanzenji, a big Zen Buddhist complex.
Also seen along the way was this strange statue by the city waterworks that totally (and probably not coincidentally) reminded me of something from Okami. At the end of the day we hit up the iconic gold-plated Kinkaku-ji.
Speaking of iconic, the next day started with Fushimi Inari shrine with its hundreds and hundreds of orange Tori gates along paths up the hillside. The other theme for the shrine was kitsune (foxes) and wolves, with lots of shrines that appeared to be dedicated to the Okami herself, Amaterasu. Actually living at the shrine, though, was a sizable colony of cats, like these kittens who we first worried might be dead but were in fact just taking a nice nap.
From Fushimi it's a short trip to Uji, where we saw Byodo-in. Interestingly we'd seen a near-exact replica of this temple in Hawaii, though that one was relatively recently built and done up in the bright orange color that's worn off of the centuries-old original. We saw a few other shrines in Uji and had a nice picnic lunch on an island in the river.
Next was a day-trip to Osaka, where we visited Osaka Castle. This one is actually a fairly recently reconstructed ferro-concrete replica based on the original design, but inside is a nice museum with lots of artifacts and scrolls from the period when the first big castle here was destroyed in the battle between, I believe, Toyotomi and Tokugawa. Also some old Japanese dude on the grounds let me hold his pet iguana. Afterwards we met up with Ben Lawsom (hat-Ben from old Coup) and had an awesome Okonomiyaki dinner. Teh yums.
Then we went on to Nara, where we stayed in a really cute little Ryokan where we were the only guests and were served sumptuous traditional meals by the owner. Nara is full of very tame deer, which are seen here accosting akiko after she bought some deer treats.
The other main attraction in Nara is the humongous Todaiji temple. Pictures do not adequately convey the scale of the wooden Buddha, which is over fifty feet tall. That's pretty much ridiculously huge for a statue in a building. There's also some more temples nearby, and then the big Kasuga shinto shrine, which dates from way back when Nara was the capital of Japan (before Kyoto).
One cool thing akiko did at most of the temples we visited was to collect Goshuin, which is calligraphy of the temple's sect, name, and date with official stamps. Also in Nara was the infamous Taiko no Tatsujin machine where I managed to give myself a blister drumming to Gundam music.
After the end of week one, it was on to Tokyo. The first two days were concentrated geeky shopping at Nakano Broadway and near Sunshine City in Ikebukuro; I'll comment on the resulting loot in a separate post. The next day we had reserved tickets for the Ghibli Museum, which is small but totally awesome. The designers have a great sense for how random passageways and twisty stairs make everything cool; there's at least three ways to get anywhere. We got to see "Mei and the Kitten-bus" at the little theater, and a bunch of nifty exhibits of Ghibli sketches, storyboards, and paintings. And of course there's the Laputa robot on the roof. If you follow a narrow bath from there through some greenery, you can find a Laputa control cube too.
Next we went to Harajuku, with its crazy fashion shops. It is entirely David's fault that we spent way too much money on awesome and weird clothes from Putumayo and BPN. But they're awesome. Afterwards we hopped down one station to check out the neon glory of Shinjuku at night.
The day after that was geek mecca Akihabara (pictured: Animate and Comic Tora no Ana, containing more floors of merchandise and doujinshi than you can shake a stick at). Some local ex-pat geeks helped us track down a few of the more obscure stores including Asobits and Super Potato (which sells pretty much every ancient video game cartridge you could think of; I played a demo Virtual Boy there). Again, more on the resulting loot later, as well as one the Zeon and Federation bars that we managed to locate.
Having been pretty much shopped-out for a while (and nearly out of cash anyway), we returned to temple-hopping the next day, starting with Sensou-ji. This is the big one in Tokyo, where many thousands of people show up for New Year's offerings, as seen in the winter episode of the Genshiken manga. After that we went to the much quieter Meiji-Jingu shrine, which put us right back next to Harajuku for some more people-watching.
The last day we decided to pretty much chill, taking a quick look at Ginza before returning to home base in Ikebukuro for a little karaoke. Much Fire Bomber and Gundam was sung, plus the original Yamato theme song and completely hilarious engrish of the Red Fraction opening to Black Lagoon. We wrapped things up by spending pretty much the last of our money at the Zeon bar. Then another delightful 12-hour flight and home. Time to start unpacking toys...