letrangerdelest

Tokyo – Part 4
It was our last day of Tokyo . . . our Last Day of Tokyo . . . we started out going to Akihabara, partially because we had seen a Denny’s there the day before and wanted to go there for breakfast and partially because Kim wanted to find Inu Yasha toys and had didn’t come with us to Akihabara the day before. So we went to Denny’s for breakfast where we discovered that the breakfast menu was mostly Japanese-style breakfast but they did have French toast and caramel pancakes with Ice Cream, which were delicious. Also there the tables had a little button that you pressed whenever you needed service, we all thought that that was pretty cool. So then as I mentioned earlier we did a little more shopping in Akiabara and got some cool stuff and found A KAIYODOO STORE! Which probably means nothing to most of you but I thought it was really really cool even if Id didn’t buy anything because it was all way too expensive. So we did some shopping and then we went to Tokyo Tower, which we didn’t go up because it was really expensive not to mention I don’t particularly enjoy that sort of thing, but it was cool and stuff and we had crepes at the Baskin Robbins there (because, awesomely enough, EVERYWHERE in Japan has crepes. The ubiquitous crepes, as it were) So we hung out there and in the arcade and then we went to the station where we got bagel sandwiches with wasabi tuna on them (DELICIOUS!) and grabbed snacks for the eight hour bus ride home, and then we hung around the Tokyo station area until our bus left. The bus ride home was pretty uneventful, even if it did stop way too many times, and I think the snoring guy from the hostel was sitting about two rows ahead of us.

Tokyo – Part 3
The next day of Tokyo was slightly different. We couldn’t leave our bags at the hostel so some of us dropped our bags off at a different building in the complex to store our bags and the others (including me) carried our bags all day because we were going to be on the opposite side of the city from the storage place and didn’t want to have to spend a lot of time and money traveling across Tokyo and back. So we started out eating breakfast at a little café called “Pronto” which was really too expensive for its own good. Then we decided to go to one of the many parks in the Yoyogi area, which was absolutely beautiful, and there we were faced with one of the stranger aspects of Japanese weather – there was a five minute hail storm that started out of the blue completely without warning and then ended just as suddenly. The park was just like every other park we’ve seen in Japan – incredibly beautiful, but nothing we hadn’t already seen in Kyoto.

So for lunch we went to Akihabara, the place where all the Otaku hang out, and ate at Mos Burger, a Japanese burger joint where the burgers have “Mos” on them,. Whatever that was, it tasted good though. This was partially where we realized why stuff was so expensive – a busboy at this restaurant makes 950 yen an hour – minimum – usually more. So when a busboy at a fast food restaurant makes almost ten dollars an hour, it’s understandable how things might be expensive. The thing is that the reason it might not seem like Japan makes a lot more money than the US is that the head of a company in Japan only makes about twenty times what the average worker makes, and in the Untied States the head of a company makes about two hundred times what the average worker makes. So after lunch we went shopping in Akihabara and saw a whole bunch of really crazy stores. But aside from that it was shopping for toys and electronics exclusively there’s not that much more to say.
After getting back and checking into the new hostel (and watching an Anime about a baseball player who – apparently – is cursed so that if he doesn’t play well his family members die) which was much more standard hostel – 12 person rooms and all that – we headed out to dinner where we ate at a Japanese restaurant which was very cheap and I had fried tofu and egg and cheese crepes and it was delicious, if not quite as good as what we’d had the other night, but it was a very cool ambience – we took off our shoes and wore slippers and watched one of the customers who was so drunk that he could barely order his food. It was fun and we headed back to the hostel, where there was a guy who was sleeping so soundly and snoring so loudly I thought I’ve never be able to get to sleep. But I did, until I was awakened in the middle of the night to see the really impossibly loudly snoring guy’s bed surrounded by four people all trying to wake him up because nobody could sleep. So they eventually managed to wake him up and everybody was all polite and Japanese and apologise-y and asked him to be quiet, which he agreed to, and everybody went back to bed, and he started to snore again. At which point somebody went downstairs and got an employee who moved him to another room. And that’s the story of our third day in Tokyo. Tune in next time for: Tokyo! The romantic destiny!
Swag count:
CDs:
Def Tech – Def Tech
The Pillows – Another Morning, Another Pillows
Various toys

Tokyo – Part 2
So our first actual day in Tokyo, after the first night which made planning stuff interesting because this hostel was all single rooms and we had (1) one alarm clock between the four of us and there was no common area and it was gender separated, but once we actually met in the hallway and figured everything out we were okay. We went to McDonalds for breakfast (because apparently people had been craving McDonalds breakfast . . . no comment on that one because I for one am not in a position to make fun of that) and then we set out to Harajuku, which you may or may not know as the place where the photographers from the book and magazine “Fruits” take all their pictures, and we set out to see the sites. We started uot perhaps going the wrong direction from the station because not only did we not really see anything particularly interesting (although it was still pretty early and there was a store called “Condomania” [pictures forthcoming]) we pretty quickly ended up in an area with lots of Louis Vuitton and similar stores and then after that the signs all said Aoyama instead of Harajuku. But we still explored anyhow and found a pretty interesting Toy Store where I did my best not to spend huge amounts of money, and then we met for lunch. Lunch was at a Hawaiian Burger restaurant with some Hawaiian sounding name, it was great fin because it was the only place I’ve seen in four months where you can get a half pound burger and instead of the standard “irasshaimase” the clerks greeted you with “aloha.” But it turns out this Hawaiian Burger joint in fact actually exists in hawaii and I have a flyer for it that lists the location and it looks something like this:
Japan
Japan
Japan
Japan
Japan
Hawaii
Hawaii
But it was really good actually, it was nice to have a good burger for once. This was the thing about Tokyo, there wasn’t really any Japanese food, it was kind of strange but given how little variety there actually is to Japanese food (sushi, soba, udon, ramen, okonomiyaki, tempura, and tonkatsu – essentially all of Japanese cuisine) it was nice to have a change for once. But after lunch we headed out again, and on the way back to Harajuku we encountered a cogal, a sign that we were actually headed the right direction (not to sound like a gawky tourist or anything, actually . . . well you’ll see later) and then this cool thrift store called “Chicago” (and so far our experience with thrift stores is that they are often MORE expensive than regular stores, just selling a higher percentage of things with words written on them in ballpoint pen) but this store was really really cool and it was the first really affordable thing we’d seen all day aside from lunch and the toy store.
So Chicago was really the turning point – after that we found all sorts of fun shops and things that I really really wanted to buy except these shops had no items cheaper than 100 dollars for the most part. We went to one store that sold made-to-order clothes, but most of the rack looked like what would happen if a French made with an obsession with Shakespeare went to a rave during Carnivale. It was really exciting and fun and we saw all sorts of stores like that, which really made me wonder how people had all this money. So we went back to the hostel after far too long looking at clothes that were far too expensive (aside from these awesome red sneakers that were only ten bucks and unfortunately didn’t come in my size) Brittany and I headed to Shinjuku, where we went to a pub called “Frigo,” whose symbol was the Mannequin Pis. Understandable, it was a mostly Belgian place, that served “Belgian Style” fried potatoes which were really more like standard French fries in the US except they served them with mayonnaise. Japanese mayonnaise, which is quite different from mayonnaise anywhere else - I may bring home a bottle later. So for dinner I had mussles steamed in a white wine sauce and Brittany had baked eggplant and we both got to listen to the foreigner sitting next to us unashamedly hit on his Japanese friend who was much younger than him and listen to her increasingly embarrassed attempts to fend him off. The food was absolutely delicious, one of the best meals of Japan definitely, and so we headed home and went to be, ready for another day of Tokyo.
Swag count:
Kilt – one
Leather pants – one
Assorted gifts for family members – assorted
Gandhi T-shirt – one
Other stuff I can’t remember right now?

The Tokyo Trip (part 1)
A four day trip to Tokyo was in the cards and it ended up working out. I’m sitting here watching a cartoon about bunnies that fly by flapping their ears and travel between worlds to help little junior high school girls with their crushes on their music teachers, so I may have to split up this topic into several parts because seriously, how else am I going to figure out how to deal with a bossy older sister who complains because I’m practicing my violin to impress the music teacher while she’s trying to do her nails. So regardless of any distractions, we got tickets on the Nozomi Shinkansen (which is the really super fast one: it takes eight hours via highway to get from Kyoto to Tokyo and it took as two hours total to get there) and the train ride was fun. The train was all purple-y lookin’ and phallic, and the ride was really fast and quick. And now the little girl just sold her soul to the flying bunny while the cute pink bunny is talking with the bunny farmers in the bunny world about how she’s going to go to travel to the world of people (which she keeps repeating over and over and over) and rescue? This other person. Also she needs to collect the melody wand, box, and candy to be successful, but now she’s using her umbrella to travel into the world of people. Anyways, distractions side once again, (even if the portal between the worlds is actually a French horn) the ride on the bullet train was all fast and smooth and overall quite ridiculous. It was like riding a plane, essentially, only quieter and (the name of this show is “My Melody”) smoother and with a hell of a lot more leg room. On the train on the way over I noticed an advertisement for nikuman and anman that included a very Japanese looking person in “Chinese” clothing saying “hao chi!” in a weird weird script with really inaccurate katakana as furigana and for a minute I thought I was back in the Untied States. Okay, now the little girl is being approached by the pink bunny and she is mad because when she sold her soul to the flying bunny it didn’t make her able to play the violin it made her violin talk and play itself instead and fly. But anyways it did remind me a lot of the ridiculous cultural stereotypes you see everywhere in the US.

Okay, so the wand that this bunny has allows her to turn images of animals into real animals, like a backpack in the shape of a crab, and she gets all cute and says ”kanisan, onegai!?” and then it does whatever she wants it to, then she feeds it the melody candy and it turns back into a normal one. Also, apparently the principal of the music program or whatever is really overweight and really really flaming.

So once we got to Tokyo we realized we didn’t really know where our hostel was so we traveled to a police box and asked and got directions (which was fun because we didn’t really have an address even, nor know the name of the hostel) but we found it and I noticed that the Japanese people we’ve asked directions for who know a little English tend to explain really strange parts of things in English, for example giving elaborate directions to somewhere, and then explain that “sanjuuppun” means 30 minutes. It’s confusing how you would expect somebody to catch everything else and then not know the word for “minute.” But we checked into our hostel where we had single rooms and it was really nice but we could only stay there two of the three nights because of some _other_ things that had happened (which I’m not going to go into here) and move to a different hostel on our third night. So we checked in and then hopped a train to Shinjuku (only two stops away from our hostel) and met up with one of Kim’s friends from high school and one of her friends and went to this place called “Bee” or something for dinner and darts.

And this one is a commercial in French about two stuffed bunnies who cook a cake for a girl who wants to play the piano better and once she eats the cake (and do the stuffed bunnies give it to her?) she becomes a “marvelous” piano player.

Anyways, after that we just went back and went to bed because we were really tired from our journey.

And the next day . . . later.

Zen Temple Experience
So we finally went on what for me has been one of the most anticipated parts of the trip, the overnight stay at the Zen temple. The Zen temple in question was the Kyoto Kokusai Zendo, and what for me was the most surprising thing there was the number of Japanese people at this temple. That number, at least from what we saw, was an astounding two, the roshi, and one of the short-term visitors. The other long term-people there were all European actually, Swiss, German, and Russian. We started out with a brief introduction to the temple and all that, where we found out that the temple we were staying in dates back to the days of Columbus and some other random things about the temple and Zen. Then we had the afternoon service where we chanted sutras, something I enjoyed a lot despite the fact that at times it was very difficult to keep up with the other chanters. After that was dinner, which was one of my favorite meals of the trip so far. It consisted of plain rice, a vegetable soup made with soy sauce, a piece of pumpkin, and a piece of fried tofu. It was absolutely delicious, and we had a really interesting set of nesting bowls that we ate out of. The whole thing was done more or less in complete silence, with the sub-roshi (whose title I don’t really remember) occasionally reminding us on proper eating form in the temple. It was interesting how everything was so structured given the unstructured nature of Zen, but it kind of reminded me of how Japan has a tendancy to structure more fluid things, and also looking at the way martial arts (which were highly influenced by Zen at least in Japan) or even Tai Ji (not to separate Tai Ji from martial arts really) but it creates a very strictly structured form so when you are separated from the structured environment you can react in the same way you would in the structured environment and still have that reaction be the natural one. After dinner, we went and did zazen after the roshi gave a brief lecture on what zen is all about, which I found interesting partially because the way the roshi talked was in a way that I’d been told was mostly for formal writings, mainly because a lot of the words were derived from Chinese characters. So we did zazen and it was really cool, after which we went back to the other building and ate traditional Japanese snack foods and chatted for a while with the other people there, then we had a night sutra chanting time and then walked off to bed in a guest house where we rolled out our futons and went to sleep. The next morning we were awakened at quarter to five when we put everything away and went to the main building for morning service, to the zendo proper for zazen, back for some bokuto practice (with very strange bokuto if I do say so myself) and then breakfast, which was delicious if not quite as delicious as dinner the night before, and then we headed off back to Kameoka where we stopped at a little coffee shop for French Toast and ice cream.

Flea Market
The day after the Zen Temple we went to a temple Flea Market, where we were told many wonderful things could be bought. I was looking for a Shakuhachi personally (which I did find, even if it did cost 600 dollars so I couldn’t buy it) We did find a stand selling traditional Japanese clothing, and I got a yukata (with buttons, strangely enough) and a haori for 500 yen each, which was quite the ridiculously amazing deal. I was honestly kind of hoping for something more like the markets in China, but this was more like a flea market in the US with people just setting up shop in neatly ordered stalls and selling whatever it was they had to sell. What was interesting was when Brittany was looking at yukata and trying them on when we asked a nearby Japanese lady what she thought of how one of them fit, and suddenly we were swarmed by little old Japanese ladies helping and pushing and prodding and complimenting Brittany and pestering the stall owners with questions about what they had in stock and what colours looked good together and it was all crazy . . . until we found a yukata and obi combination that worked and then we said our goodbyes and the old ladies all left. While all this was going on they kept complimenting Brittany by saying that she wore it like she was Japanese, which I’ve noticed seems to be the highest compliment from a Japanese person: you write like you’re Japanese, you talk like you’re Japanese, you play video games like you’re Japanese . . . it was interesting. Also interesting was when one of the ladies made a comment in Japanese, probably to herself, but I replied and she was all shocked and started apologizing to me really earnestly, as if she had offended somebody. I thought it was really funny given that she was being very complimentary the whole time. Also at the market we met two westerners who were trying to buy yukata, the thing is they were both over six feet tall (probably, I’m a horrible judge of people size) and they didn’t speak any Japanese, so on two separate occasions at two separate stalls I ran into them and did my best to help them out and to explain that they don’t really make yukata for people that big unless (as one stall owner suggested) you get one made for a sumo wrestler. All in all it was a very fun day.

Hiro’s
Several times over the course of the trip, Hiro has invited us over to his apartment to play video games and/or eat dinner and/or watch movies and/or just socialize. It has bee a really interesting experience, not just seeing a real college student’s apartment (not like the apartments we are in are not real college student apartments) and see how people really live and eat. Which, apparently enough, involves very little actual cooking and a lot of buying pre-cooked food and bento boxes, which was what our Japanese text book kept saying all over the first chapter but I was all like “oh no it’s probably just the classic carrap that textbooks always pull and really over-exaggerate but people we’ve talked to for the most part don’t really cook for themselves, but doing grocery shopping has shown us that really it costs just as much to buy the pre-cooked food as it does to cook it yourself – almost exactly the same. We also briefly touched on how different video game tastes exist in the US and Japan. Apparently in Japan the popular games are games with lots of statistics, where you can look at things and see how the numbers line up and everything is very strategic, which makes sense given all the cultural crazily scheduling and numbering and ranking stuff we’ve come across this trip. So we played Halo, which is not particularly popular in Japan, and had a lot of fun.

Flaming brushes/toufukuji
So this weekend Brian and his kids and I headed down to the Toufukuji, or eastern good luck temple (apologies for the inconsistent Romanization at this point – there’s no standard in Japanese like there is for Chinese and I just use whichever I feel like using at the time) and saw a ceremony where they bless the brushes of all the writers and calligraphers and things. It was quite exciting, because when they say “bless” they mean “throw into a huge fire.” I got to throw a few in myself when a middle-aged Japanese women gave me a whole bunch of brushes to throw in. I got a bunch of good pictures but they will have to wait until Ryan and Dan get back from their trip before I can send them out because I have no picture to computer uploady mono right now. So the ceremony was particularly amazing for a couple of reasons. SDHDDHDhDHDHHHDHHHDPHDPHDPHDPhDPHDPHDphDpHDPHDPHDphdpHDphDphDPHDPhDPHDphdphDphdpjdphdphdphdphDPhDPHDpHDPHDPHDPhDPHDphDphdphdphDPhDPHdphdphDPHDPHDphdpHDphdpHDPhdpDHDPhDphdphDPHDPhD
And now for something completely different:
First of all, it was interesting because it was an adaptation of an Indian ritual that was burning wooden plaques with prayers written on them so that the prayers would be heard. This ritual apparently skipped China and Korea and the other countries where Buddhism spread and took root in Shingon Buddhism in Japan. The thing was, the Toufukuji is not and was not a Shingon temple and is in fact a Zen temple, which goes to show you how much the different forms of Buddhism have combined in Japan. But the whole thing was exciting and what was hilarious about it was that there was a big line to see this famous bridge where you could see the maple leaves, and this line was literally a couple of hours long, but almost nobody came to see the ritual we saw. What made this even funnier was that the bridge that everybody was paying extra to go on and watch the maple leaves from? It was right next to the completely free, no-wait bridge that we took to get into the whole complex. Once again, an example of going to a place and doing what you do at that place instead of doing what is exciting or interesting there.

I have a LOT of updates to post all at once so I am going to split them up over several actual updates. Here's the first:

Nara
The trip to Nara was . . . interesting. It was a tour led by a tour guide on a tour bus which is exactly the sort of thing I had had enough of while we were in Xi’an and was even more done with after our first tour of Kyoto. Nara was an interesting place though. If Tokyo’s the modern city of Japan and Kyoto’s the cultural city of Japan then Nara is the really really old city of Japan. Seriously it struck me that most of the things that we went to see (aside from the Daibutsu, whose nostrils I could fit through [and there actually was a way to figure this out]) were mostly famous because they were the oldest wooden building in the world or something like that. We did see the Fujiwara family shrine which was mostly interesting, and a small museum where there were orders written by Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi and armor and weapons and such. One thing I thought was interesting and honestly made me somewhat wary of the armor on display there was that two separate gauntlets were displayed, and one of them was woven with the traditional Japanese kusari weave, but the other was done using the European 4 into 1 weave, something that to the best of my knowledge was rarely if ever actually used in Japan. But I’m not an expert on the subject so I’m not sure. On the way to the Daibutsu there was a park famous for its very tame deer, all of whom would even bow to you and you could buy crackers and feed them. It was interesting because we were there on the tail end of the tourist season so the deer were getting rather hungry and so were very aggressive, I’m sure at least one person came away from that experience with a newfound hatred of deer . . .
But otherwise Nara was an interesting trip, although I can’t help but feel that Kyoto has much more to offer and the temples and shrines that we saw there were much more interesting and moving.

Path of Philosophy
That weekend, we went to the Path of Philosophy, also known as testugaku no michi. It was an interesting experience, to say the least. We got to see some of the only slightly less well known temples in Kyoto. (If you can catch the movie reference there you get bonus points) These were all of course still influential temples, they had the advantage of being not nearly as crowded and much more free. The first temple we did at the thingar was very nice and had a pritty pritty art gallery inside. Everything was beautiful, especially the leaves. This temple was just a minor stop along the path though, after that we decided to eat lunch at an okonomiyaki place. This was a nice little hole in the wall place, where we sat at a table (on the floor, in traditional Japanese style) and had the owner mention that he didn’t have the ingredients to two thirds of the items on the menu. His Japanese was strangely casual compared to what the other store people we’d talked to had talked like, but the really funny thing was that his voice was so gravelly even Hiro had problems understanding what he said. We asked him to turn on the light above our table, and he claimed it was broken, but then he turned on the light anyway. It was all in all pretty strange, but the food was delicious as usual. After that we walked the rest of the way down the path and went to Ginkakuji, which was pretty much the exact opposite of the other temple on the path as it was incredibly crowded. Fortunately for us the garden was absolutely amazing, and the leaves have actually turned colours now so they are all quite beautiful. The leaves here have turned deeper and more vibrant colours than ever they do at home. Ginkakuji is the silver pavilion, and while Kinkakuji, the Golden Pavilion, is covered in gold, the Silver Pavilion is pretty amazingly dark. While we were there an alarm went off, it turns ut two elderly people had tried to get into the pavilion and ended up setting off an alarm, but while we saw them leave more people continued to crowd around the area to see what had happened. The bus ride home was an adventure, it took us two hours just to get back to Kyoto Eki, but we did manage to get seats on the bus so the wait became a nap and that wasn’t too bad.

I've got three entries here and I've given them each a little title so you can tell them apart.

As if the paragraphs didn't give it away already.

Momiji matsuri
So, we heard there was a festival at this place on this bridge on the second Sunday of Novermber, so we decided to check it out and went down to the place until we found out that in fact. . . we’d slept until after noon and thus were really late and the matsuri was pretty much over. It was supposed to be the momiji, or maple leaf, festival and there were still plenty of people around selling takoyaki and happi coats hanging about, but any Kyogen or dance was long over. We did have some excellent matcha ice cream, but then again matcha ice cream is generally want to be pleasant experience. Also, we did see some cool puppeteers hangin’ about dancin’ there cute lil’ hunchbacked puppets all around. Bunraku it was not but still definitely worth watching for a lil’ while.

Video Game Store
I told Hiro I wanted to by a DS after I saw them for sale at the momiji matsuri and checked the exchange rate to see that it was in fact cheaper in Japan than in the United States (for once) and so we planned one night to go to a video game store in Kameoka (meaning not having to pay for train rides, yay!) and get it. It was a huge store that not only sold video games (and toys! I’m going back there eventually) but also was a pretty large video rental place, with the largest selection of Masked Rider and Ultraman movies I have ever seen. Buying the game (the most recent Castlevania title)/DS was pretty much the same as in the US, nothing new there, but what was interesting was that when I was buying the game (which was used) they told me that they didn’t actually have a used copy of the game, so instead they gave me a new copy at the used price, which surprised me in that I’d expect that any video game store in the US that had the same issue would just say “so you get to pay full price” but they were nice enough to allow me to save the extra ten dollars on the used ones.

Ryoanji
Ryoanji is supposed to be THE zen rock garden to see in Kyoto, so a few of us including Hiro and Tomoki decided to take a trip there on a Thursday when we didn’t have class since the place is supposed to be crammed full of people on the weekends and hito ga ooi sugiru is not quite the proper environment for seeing a Zen freakin’ garden. So anyways, we went to the ryoanji garden and payed our 500 yen entrance price. We checked out the rock garden and found out that . . . honestly enough, the rock gardens we saw at the daitokuji were much more moving and powerful. Not to say that the garden at Ryoanji was bad, it was really cool and had a well deserved reputation, but still the garden was not as mind blowing as those others. The crazysexycool/famous thing about the Ryoanji garden is that there are fifteen rocks and no matter where you stand it is impossible to see all fifteen at one time. I’ll not go much deeper into analyzing this phenomenon because half the point of a zen garden is finding your own meaning and I think it’s pretty clear from my description already how I’d interpret it. But we did get some great pictures, and I think that Tomo and Hiro really weren’t as interested in spending as much time there as we were, but overall it was pretty fun.

sorry to bore you all with more descriptions of shrines, but it is what we've been doing lots of recently.

So, right after the trip to Ise the Fushimi Inari shrine was kind of a letdown, but once I stopped to think about it I realized that the shrine itself is in fact absolutely awesome, with literally thousands of torii stretching all the way up the mountain (which we climbed all the way up) and just really cool scenery. The Fushimi-Inari shrine is the head shrine of the more than 40 thousand Inari shrines in Japan, and all the thousands of torii gates are donated by worshippers (although many of them are in fact donated by worshippers in the form of businesses that seem to use the torii for free advertising) but still, climbing up the mountain was absolutely beautiful. Towards the top we saw some cats, two of which were busy being petted by middle-aged Japanese women but one of which was busy drinking from a small puddle of water on one of the many many shrines that were actually part of the Fushimi Inari shrine. We stopped and petted it for a while, it was very cute and healthy and all that jazz, and headed the rest of the way up the mountain, where there was a cool lil’ shrine with some older people offering a little meal and some sake to the kami. The Inari shrines are dedicated to the fox spirit which serves as messenger to the kami and also plays the requisite trickster role. The titular kami of the Fushimi Inari shrine is also a kami dedicated to success in business, so it is a very popular shrine. On the way back down from the top, the kitty we saw on the way up was sleeping on the altar of the shrine we’d seen hir at before. Definitely a kami-kitty if ever I saw one.

This is perhaps the most amazing day of my life. Not today, but the day in question.
A group of us decided to take a trip to Ise and the wedded rocks where Izanami and Izunagi are enshrined. This ended up being a lot more reasonable than one might expect. We took the limited express up to Iseshi which meant we had reserved seats, and the trip up there took about two hours, maybe a little more. Once we got there we had to ask all around about how to get to the rocks: one person said take the bus, another said the train . . . we ended up taking the train because it was probably cheaper. The rocks were . . . amazing. Absolutely amazing. You’ll have to see the pictures because words really can’t describe it. It’s something everybody really has to experience. We did the whole Shinto cleansing ritual (at least most of us did) and saw the rocks off the coast with the nice torii gate, but the thing is about the rocks that you don’t really notice in pictures is that . . . they aren’t really all that big. They are absolutely amazing to see however. The bird perched on the torii really gave you a sense of the actual scale of the things . . . see the pictures once I upload them onto wherever I’m uploading them. But the experience was one of two things that I’d have to say gave me a much more profound sense of what Shinto really is all about and a lot more respect as well. The other half of the day Brittany and I went to the Ise jingu, the largest and most important Shinto shrine in Japan (and, therefore, the world) so large that it has two “campuses” as it were, the outer (which we went to first) where there is a kami enshrined whose name I’ve forgotten and where all the foods etc offered at the Naiku or inner shrine where one of the three sacred treasures of Japan is enshrined, the mirror that houses Amaterasu. Both “campuses” (since the outer and inner are not in fact outer and inner but a fifteen minute bus ride away from each other) are absolutely beautiful, one of if not the most beautiful things I have ever seen, especially the inner shrine, where we did the whole tossing money and clapping and bowing spiel and the experience was absolutely amazing. It’s easy to understand the way Japanese religion has developed after seeing some of these absolutely mind-exploding face melting places. More on this later, as there’s been no shortage of amazing shrines in the area. I’d have to make Japan number 1 on the list of great spiritual pilgrimage stops.