Nikkō

On 3/21 Anne and I went to Nikkō. Nikkō is a small town near several mountains about 87 miles north of Tokyo and is very famous for tourism in Japan. It took about 3 hours to get there by bus. Normally it is quicker but we decided to go during a long holiday weekend. During this time we listened to our tour guide talk about various subjects. The most amusing was that she regularly loses people on her tours. I suppose this is important information to provide to the people you are guiding, but it is not something we wanted to hear. Our first stop was the Rinnō-ji temple, which was established in 766. After seeing several temples over the last several months it was interesting to see, but it was not one of our favorites. Part of this was due to waiting in long lines and listening to several different tour guides as the each gave their own (yet identical) description of the building and its interior. It took around 20 minutes to walk through a building that you would normally spend 5 minutes in.

The next area we went to was the Nikkō Tōshō-gū. The Nikkō Tōshō-gū is a Shinto shrine that was built in 1617. The shrine consists of several buildings that were all very impressive. One of the most famous buildings at Tōshō-gū is the Yōmei-mon, a gate that is also known as "higurashi-no-mon." According to Wikipedia that name means that one could look at it until sundown, and not tire of seeing it. I don’t know about sundown, but we enjoyed looking at the area for some time. The other 2 famous buildings involved carvings of a lazy cat and 3 wise monkeys. Unfortunately I don’t think I ever saw the lazy cat. One would expect our tour guide to mention or at least point to it, but she was too focused on trying to loose people. I mean this quite literally. She was maybe five feet tall and would walk quickly through the temples, shrines, and hordes of people without looking back to see if her tourists were following her. This did actually lose a couple people, but fortunately they were able to meet the group at the bus before it left. I was able to find the 3 wise monkeys which were more interesting than the pictures I have seen of the lazy cat. Together they embody the proverbial principle "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil". The three monkeys are Mizaru (covering his eyes, who sees no evil), Kikazaru (covering his ears, who hears no evil), and Iwazaru (covering his mouth, who speaks no evil). The building that the monkey carvings were on was not a remarkable building (it was originally a stable for the shrine's sacred horses) but the monkey carvings were quite captivating.

We ate a traditional Japanese lunch at a near by restaurant and then headed off to see the nearby Kegon Falls. This resulting in zig zagging up a mountain taking what seemed like 50 turns and scaring Anne multiple times as it looked like our bus was going to drive off the side of the mountain. On our way we stopped by Lake Chūzenji. This lake is 4,124ft above sea level and was created as a result of a volcano eruption. The Lake provided some pretty pictures, but it was too cold to stay outside for more than a couple of minutes (probably not by Minnesota standards, but we are now pansies who can’t handle the cold anymore). We reached Kegon Falls shortly after leaving the lake. Kegon Falls is roughly 318 feet in height and is quite beautiful. The tour ended with a painfully memorable never ending bus ride home (thanks to the traffic). It took us around 4 hours before the bus dropped us of in Ginza (Ginza being about another 15 minutes from home).