Nara and Fushimi

Thursday, May 13th- Christina

Today we spent our day traveling to Nara and Fushimi. Nara, which is about a 45 minute train ride from Kyoto, was the first permanent capital of Japan. Prior to its establishment, the capital was moved with each new emperor; the death of prior emperor would taint the city, requiring movement of the capital. Nara is now celebrating its 1300th anniversary. We took the express train to Nara. It is so interesting to see the mixture of “old” and “new.” We saw lots of roofs made of tiles giving houses a more traditional feel, while others had a more “modern” tar paper. There was also an unexpected superposition of agriculture and industry. We traveled past many rice patties, but also saw signs, I’m guessing for some development/engineering offices, belonging to Nintendo and Suzuki. I feel as though in the US we tend to try to segregate our time periods. We keep historical sites the same and try to preserve them; in Japan there is some of that, most temples and shrines have that rustic feel, but they aren’t afraid to rebuild their wooden buildings or renovate to bring things to be more functional.

When we arrived in Nara the train station itself was under construction, we caught taxi cabs to Tamukeyama Hachimaryu Shrine. On the way we got our first good look at Nara’s sacred deer. They are sacred because they are messengers of some of the gods. Tamukeyama Hachimaryu is famous for its large number of stone lanterns. Nearly every path was flanked by a row or tow of lanterns. They varied in size and construction. Some were solid carved stone with holes cut for the candle inside to shine through. Others had a stone base and top but wooden and paper screens in the middle. Nearly all of the lanterns had paper covers (unless they had been damaged). Some even had the mascot of Nara’s anniversary, a little horned baby Buddha on them. At the shrine the purifying water came from a scroll in a carved deer’s mouth. All of the buildings were brightly colored. Dr. Boss said that due to the time of establishment of the shrine, Chinese architecture was highly influential. As such, the gates and buildings were painted the bright orange we saw. At the shrine we also enjoyed the beautiful wisteria hanging from some trellises. They even had fortunes for sale that were rolled as a scroll and held in the mouth of a wooden deer.

Once we were finished at Tamukeyama Hachimaryu, we walked through a park and watched some more deer. Tray and Noel bought some deer cookies and essentially got mobbed by bands of the little animals. They are supposed to bow if you hold a cookie right above their noses, but most weren’t overly inclined to make the effort and just attacked those holding the cookies.

We walked through the park to the Todai-ji Temple. Though it hosts most elements of a standard temple, Todai-ji’s claim to fame is the Daibutsu- or the really big Buddha. The bronze statue is actually housed in the largest wooden structure in the world, which has windows built in so that on special days they can be opened and the Buddha can look out. It’s hard to just describe how monumental this statue is. Hopefully we can get our videos up so that everyone can see…it’s just HUGE! There were offerings all over in front of the Buddha, like fruit. Flanking him on either side were two “assistants” of slightly smaller size, but still pretty darn big; they’re kind of like saints or apostles in Christianity, preaching the word of the Buddha. Additional wooden statues were sprinkled around the hall. My favorite part was actually a very small hole in a supporting beam of the building. There was a long line of children waiting to squeeze through the hole. Initially we were very confused, but after it was explained I wanted to try my hand at making it through (the line was a little too long for it to be worth it though). The hole in the beam was the same size as the Buddha’s nostril. It is said that if you fit through that hole, when you die you will automatically be reborn in the Buddha’s paradise. We all joked that Trey and Ben should go stand in line, but in the end none of us tried, we just watched the elementary kinds make their way through.

After a little shopping and lunch we headed back to the station and hopped a local train to Fushimi. The route was longer due to more stops, but that way we didn’t have to retrace our steps since Fushimi is in between Kyoto and Nara. At Fushimi we visited the Inari Shrine, which is famous for its tori gates. Inari is also unique in that it has a different messenger, the fox. They even shape their prayer boards like the heads of foxes. The fox theme carried through in that instead of the regular guardian dogs at shrine entrances, there were foxes, one with its mouth open and the other closed. Again, the shrine was brightly colored, mostly orange and a little green. We saw a couple of prayer sessions occurring while we were there at different little shrines. For a donation priests will pray to the gods with requests for assistance or intercession for the donating party. For me it’s interesting to think that most of their ritual services are preformed as needed, not on a set schedule. The person being prayed for may or may not be present, and so may just be hoping the gods will listen and assist them. As I said, Inari s famous for its tori gates, each one doesn’t look overly remarkable, but the sheer volume is truly impressive. In sections of the shrine grounds there are two parallel tunnels of continuous gates, one right after the other. The result is Really impressive (again something I hope you will see in my videos eventually). Each gate has a sponsor, whenever the gates need to be replaced the sponsor can re-donate to the shrine (it’s kind of like advertising) or the spot will be sold to someone else. The last part of the Inari shrine that I really liked was the smaller shrines up in the hills. Families can pay for a shrine to be kept up for them; of the shrines we visited this seems to be a rather unique characteristic. They varied vastly in size, from just a little area for candles to walk in full scale mini shrines. I liked the fact that they allow people to be a little more involved, they allow people to take a little more active role in their religion. After Inari we hopped back on the train and headed back to our hotel before getting dinner and enjoying an AMAZING night with Peter Macintosh and a Geiko (dancing Geisha) named Miehina.