Go Golden Week!
Japan has a period in late April and early May where all of these public holidays line up together to give Japanese a taste of what the rest of the world know as a 'holiday' - a time when school/work does not feature on anyone's consciousness and they get to time to spend with their 'family'. This is known as "Golden Week", and is a time when many Japanese go travelling, both internationally and domestically (check out these satirical Japanese news articles on the concept here and here )
Anyways, having known about Golden Week (henceforth GW) for a while, I thought ahead and reserved time off work so that I could maximise my time on adventures. Claire had a similar idea and so we put our collective thinking caps on to create an absolute banger of a GW, spreadsheet and all. Opting for places we had either both or individually not been before, we had an excellent spread across the Tokyo and surrounding area.
Our first mission was to go to Toshogu Shrine in Nikko, Toshigi Prefecture. This place features a mausoleum and shrine complex to Tokugawa Iemitsu, the grandson of the guy who started the last big shogunate of Japan before they modernised - so a pretty important guy in 17th Century Japan. At this mausoleum his spirit is deified, and there is all manner of other shrine buildings and so on, built in an apparently Chinese style, meaning the colours are a bit more vivid than other Japanese shrines.
Toshigi prefecture is a wee way from Tokyo, with google maps giving a rough estimate of some 2.5 hours. Claire and I got up at a reasonable hour, having planned our journey the night before, and got some of the way before learning that one of the trains on our plan required a pre-purchased ticket, which were all sold out on account of it being GW...so we took some slightly later trains which went to more stops, making our journey closer to 4 hours, but as someone who spends almost 4 hours a day on trains, this was no trouble! In fact it was rather nice being able to see lots of the Japanese countryside from the window, and my ability to sleep anywhere meant I was well rested when we did get there (a good thing too as I was carrying I-don't-want-to-know-how-many-kilograms-of-camera in my bag).
Getting to the shrine complex, it was remarkable how serene the place was, even in spite of the tourist numbers, both Japanese and foreign. A UNESCO World Heritage site, the place felt much cooler than the city we had left, and being right in the mountains and forests, there was an abundance of running water from rivers without culverts (a mainstay of urban rivers here lamentably), and the birdlife could be heard from everywhere.
As I said, the style of many of the buildings was of a Chinese style, so many more vivid colours and expressive dragon/lion "gargoyles" were visible - it cannot be argued that this place is 'just another shrine', as can be argued about quite a few here I think (feeling jaded already)
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| It was quite a cold day as you can see |
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| Where are you from, nose city? |
The actual mausoleum is rather muted compared to the rest of the place; whether that was reflective of Iemitsu's character I do not know...
After looking around the mausoleum and surrounding gilded prayer halls, gates and such like, we followed a red wall up a hill to find some other shrine. I'm not sure that we found what we were initially looking for, but it was nice to be away from everyone else (except Claire obviously), and get some time in nature (which is easy to forget when you are in this mega metropolis). It wasn't entirely untouched however, as there were a massive number of little cairns around the place, some reaching close to a metre, and others at only a few flat stones high. If anyone was camping in the area, when they woke up they'd seriously think they were in that scene from the Blair Witch Project where the three hapless documentary makers wake up surrounded by piles of stones...
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| Made by a person, not a witch |
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| Disconcertingly headless buddha with rocks as replacements.... |
Finding our way out of the hills, having done a big loop around the other big shrine that's apparently worth visiting (next time), the last thing on the agenda was a famous bridge, called Shinkyo. As far as bridges go, it was nice enough, but honestly I was more into the river, as it was one of, if not the most, pleasant looking rivers I've seen in Japan, totally lacking culverts and concrete embankments - beautiful!
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| Claire and Troy GW Adventure Photo No.1 : Outside the Shrine I'll Get to Next Time |
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| Prayer tablets at a little shrine on the hill |
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| Look! No man made structures lining the banks! |
As the day started to turn into evening, we headed back to the station and got onto a train for which we had (wisely) purchased a ticket upon our arrival, and began our (not so long) journey back to Tokyo - and bed - before the next day of adventuring began!
As you can probably tell this is the first in (another) series of blogs that I will endeavour to churn out in reasonably rapid succession - the photos I took throughout the week have all been edited, so it's now just a matter of finding time between classes and getting some writing in!
But til then, stay frosty!
Troy :)
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