Day 8 in Japan: Arashiyami



Just a quick note on our eighth day. Apart from one of the few truly terrible meals of the trip, dinner at a 'Chinese' restaurant at the railway station, today was great. We went on a longish bus ride to the Arashiyami district, where there's a beautiful bridge over the river, and forest covered hills that are indubitably stunning in spring or later autumn, but just now are like a Hayao Miyazaki backdrop, which is easily beautiful enough for me. It was Friday, which may have had something to do with the way the place was jumping -- all the shops near the bridge were full of people eating, looking, poking about, buying stuff, eating green tea ice cream and multicoloured shaved ice, as well as cold soba noodles and hot slurpy udon.



We went for a leisurely stroll along the river, through small bamboo forest, past many small shrines and museums, including a "Doll Museum" which consisted entirely of mass produced kewpie dolls wearing costumes of various cartoon characters, which I mention only as an anticipatory contrast to the two doll museums we visited in Kawaguchiko (if you and I both persevere with these posts, you can read about them on Days 19 and 21).





The district was like a slice of comfortable, very comfortable, suburbia with rice fields, temples and shrines.



There were little roadside shrines like this one:



And there were any number of big important shrines that charged 500 yen or more admission. We skipped all the big ones until we came to the one at the end of our chosen path, Tenryu-ji, which had been a palace for a very important person and became a temple after his death. As we walked along the verandas in the slippers that were supplied, the floor creaked terribly. The thought had just formed in my mind that it was as if the floor was deliberately constructed to creak like a ship at sea when Penny, who consistently studied the guidebooks more effectively than I did, said, 'This is the nightingale floor.' And sure enough, it would have been very hard to sneak up on anyone in that palace, with the floor singing a warning of your every footstep. I loved this place. You walk around its verandas, peer into rooms with tatami on the floor, paper doors (you could tell they were really paper because there were a number of tears and parches), and the most exquisite (a word we caught ourselves using a bit too much) murals on the walls -- my favourite of these featured maybe ten hares, each fairly bursting with personality. And the verandas go on and on, floating above an austere garden, opening onto small shrines, sporting bright red fire buckets full of water at strategic corners, and finally leading to the edge of a lake, all to the nightingale tune.









Posted: Mon - September 22, 2008 at 09:41 PM           |

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