June 25 - Nijo Castle, Kinkakuji, and some rocks

So this was a pretty packed day for me. Having finished touring the Imperial Palace a bit after noon, I decided to walk down the street to Nijo Castle, because I think there were several paintings about it that I had to memorize back in the day.... a lot of good that did me, you can see. ^^;;



The front entrance! This bridge goes over the first moat.


It's a pretty big moat. Again, notice the non-mortar using stone walls with concave curvature! Or, you know, don't...


And the moat was filled with really colorful koi fish, though I suspect slightly more sinister wildlife inhabited the moat back in the day.


Hark! It's the castle!


Anyway, here's one of the main castle buildings, and the one that's open for tourists to go look around in. Unfortunately, this place is entirely made of wood and the walls have valuable kano school paintings on them, so photography isn't allowed cause it'll damage the wood/paper/paint. Anyway, you have to take off your shoes when you go inside, which is a bit dark to protect the paintings. The first thing you notice is that the floor squeaks quite loudly when you walk. See, this castle was built when the Shoguns were in power, and you know how military people can be a little paranoid, especially when they way they gained power was by killing the people that had it before... anyway, the guy that lived here had the floor made so that it would creak loudly whenever anyone came in, that way he would know if anyone was trying to sneak up on him. I think it's called the nighting-gale floor.



Here's a close up of the gate - the intricately carved set of birds and flowers up there is carved from a single piece of Japanese cypress/ceder (I keep forgetting), and it's pretty big actually, over a meter long. Anyway, these elaborate carved panels of wood are one of the decoration motifs inside the castle, including the Grand Reception Hall, which I was pleased to recognize from my art and architecture class! Everything is set up very strictly according to rank - the Shogun sits on an elevated part of the room, with a beautiful painting of a tree against a gold background on the wall behind him, the branches painted in such a way that they frame him. Two doors off to the side with a red rope hanging from them conceal bodyguards, who are ready to jump out at a moment's notice is anyone tries to threaten the shogun. The celing is amazingly detailed, and these wooden block things decorate the upper part of the walls. The room extends outward from where the Shogun sits, and they had dolls set up to show how everyone would be seated. Those closest to the Shogun were sat on either side of the wall facing each other inside of straight ahead at the shogun, because he was too important to look at directly. Behind these guys were lesser ranking nobles, who got to face the shogun sorta, if they weren't bowing and facing the floor really.


A side view of the castle building. Anyway, what's said to be the real treasure of this castle are the paintings. Kano School paintings adorn most of the walls; cranes, trees, birds.... Really quite nice, for Japanese art. (My horrible secret - I don't actually like Japanese art that much, and I'm terrible partial to French and Italian Renaissance art. Don't tell the EAS department that though...) . Anyway, the extravagance and boldness of the paintings in the reception rooms and such are very different from the paintings on the walls of the Shogun's private quarters. Those paintings are in very subdued shades of monochrome and brown, and very Zen and subtle. This room also had dolls of the Shogun relaxing, while about 3 ladies in waiting sat around him getting grapes or what not. To quote Mel Brooks, "It's good to be the king." I have yet to understand how this society can be in some ways so conservative (noble women were not even allowed to be seen by people not especially close/related, and were kept behind curtains), and yet in other ways so strangely not (blatant polygamy).


Anyway, after looking around the castle I went to go see some of the gardens. Apparently this part of the castle grounds featured a Western-style garden and a Japanese-style garden. This is the Western-style garden, where they tried to utilize the West's preference for large expanses of grass..... either our gardens are really really boring, or they just suck at it.


Japanese gardens on the other hand, usually have water as the centerpiece. I think the gardeners where a little better at this type...




The secondary moat.


I went now into the inner palace grounds, but these buildings weren't open for tourists to walk through. The guard tower was open though, so I climbed up there and snapped a bunch of cool aerial views.


The steps to the guard post.


The inner moat and drawbridge.


The inner castle grounds.


More of the inner castle.


A cool side-view of the drawbridge.


I just took a picture of this cause I thought it was funny - usually signs for the bathroom say W.C. (for Water Closet), or 手洗　(手= hand, 洗=wash).　But this sign said 便所 where 便= convenient and 所=place. I suppose that's a perfectly reasonable name, I just found it kind of funny. ^^


More gardens.


I was getting hungry around this time, and so decided to look for the snack bar. Unfortunately, though they had a place at the Imperial Palace, there was none here. However, they did have a tea ceremony thing going on, and even if it was a bit pricey, I think the fact that it's at Nijo Palace kind of makes up for it.


The teahouse. You can see the open walls from here where the people sit and look out at the garden!


Fake hand-washing area.


To roads diverge in a wood...


Anyway, it turned out it wasn't so much a "tea ceremony" as a 'eat some traditional tea-ceremony food and enjoy the beautiful view' thing, which was fine by me. Real tea ceremonies take forevvveeerrr and are boring and hurt your legs. Anyway, traditional tea house fare is a bowl of very thick green tea, made by whisking a bunch of green tea powder and water, and a sweet.


The sweet is supposed to help make drinking the tea easier, since it's a bit strong. Though I just think the Japanese can't deal with strong flavors (which makes them great at mastering subtle flavors), cause I don't think it's strong at all. Then again, I drink straight espresso on a regular basis, so I'm probably not the most reliable gauge of strongness in caffinated beverages... Also, they drank tea in bowls. I don't really know why, they totally had cups... There are basically three types of tea bowls though: Chinese style (steep angled sides, thin, elegant), normal bowls (the one pictured here, made by Japanese people that didn't want to listen to crazy-tea-man), and Ugly bowls (very thick, deliberately uneven). The ugly bowls came into style because people were pissed off that they were too much like China, and wanted to be more different. So this one guy that redefining the tea ceremony at the time (I want to say it was Sen-rikyu, but I might be wrong) was good friends with this failed roof-tile maker who suddenly decided he wanted to make bowls. The bowls were of course, ugly and imperfect. So crazy-tea-guy totally marketed it as creative, "seeing the process of creation in it's imperfection," etc. They were a huge hit. I consider this an early example of Japanese consumers willing to embrace anything.


Buying tea also gets you into this exclusive little garden, which you can gaze at while sipping.


Little stream.



The view from where I was sitting


The tea room. Note the flower (flower-arrangement is a legitiment art here), and wall scroll on the elevated alcove. And the posts on the borders of the wall that are supposed to look like tree trunks, and therefore 'natural.'


Anyway, an American couple honeymooning in Kyoto volunteered to take a picture of me with the garden. ^^



Afterwards, it was off to Kinkaku-ji!! Also known in English as "The Golden Pavilion. You'll see why in a second.


Cute meandering little path in the woods....


...entrance gate...


...AND A BUILDING MADE OF SOLID GOLD!!!


Okay, not really. It's gold-plated/gold-leaf. But wasn't the dramatic effect awesome just now? Anyway, after going through moats and inner gates and such, I was a little surprised to just turn the corner after paying the admission, and have a shining gold building accost my eyes. It was spectacular. My favorite site in Kyoto. ^_^


Me and my future residence.


Look at it!! Just sitting there, almost floating in the water, amid a gorgeous lake and islands of bonsai trees... isn't it beautiful??


Almost.... TOO beautiful. ::omninous music:: So anyway, the story goes that after miraculously surviving fires and wars that destroyed most of the surrounding buildings, the original Golden Pavilion was burned down in 1955 by a crazy monk who thought that such a thing was "too beautiful to exist on earth." I guess he was burning it to try and send it up to heaven?


Did I mention that it's made out of GOLD?!?! (ish)


But really, how could you burn this thing? It's AWESOME.



Anyway, I'm sure you're all tired of my million pictures of Kinkakuji (and the sad part is that these are just my favorites, there's more), but I can't stress to you enough how awesome a sight this is. Seeing a golden building in person just can't compare to seeing pictures. ^^


Anyway, after Kinkakuji I decided to go down the road and check out Ryoanji, which houses the most famous rock garden in the world. On the way some kids (guy from England, and a guy and two girls from Australia) asked me for directions to "the rock place" and I told them I was going in the same direction, and that it was just straight ahead about a kilometer. The British guy offered me a ride on his bike, which would've been really cool if by 'bike' he meant 'motorcycle,' but alas it was the free rental bike that came with his hostel. We got about two feet before I was like "Um, maybe I'll just walk and meet you guys there..." Yon picture above is the steps up to the temple that houses the rock garden.


And here it is!! The rock garden at Ryoanji, world's most famous rock garden. Really, if you only know one rock garden, this is it. The stones were all hand selected and places by the gardener, and for some reason people have decided that the placement of these stones somehow holds some deep secret of enlightenment or something.


There has been tons of speculation about what the rocks mean - from the simple "they represent islands in the ocean," to "it's totally a mother tiger and her two cubs " (don't worry, I don't see it either." The coolest feature of the garden though, in my opinion, is that the 15 rocks are arranged in such a way that at any angle you can only see 14 at a time. Anyway, the pamphlet invites guests to sit and stare at the rocks, pondering the mysteries of life.


I think the real mystery though, is why so many people came out here on a rainy day and paid five dollars to stare at a bunch of rocks. ^^;; Ponder THAT.


Right beside the rock garden is this room, and since there were no signs prohibiting it, I took a picture of the wall paintings.


It's hard to tell in the picture, but the gentle drizzle/mist combo made this moss garden (totally ignored off to the side of the rock garden), beautiful. I also met the English guy again here, and he said that he thought this one was much prettier than the rocks.


The rain started to fall a little harder, and I walked to the exit with my bike-riding acquaintances. They all came seperately, but knew each other because they were staying at the same hostel (which sounded much worse than mine. Mine is awesome.). The English guy (he looked really young, like 18 or something) was traveling Asia for three months, and Japan was the last (and his favorite) stop on the trip. I didn't get a change to ask what the other were doing here, cause we made it to the bikes now, and I had to go ask for directions back to the bus stop (I had practically walked across the entire city, and wanted a nice relaxing bus ride all the way home). It had started to rain a little harder, and it was 5pm, which meant all the temples and stuff were closing, so it was time to call it a day.

Whew! 4 attractions in one day!

June 25 - Kyoto Imperial Palace

Day 1 in Kyoto! After raining really hard on the day of my arrival, the weather finally cleared up for a day, so I decided it'd be a nice day to see some castles. Well, that, and I had a reservation for a tour of the Kyoto Imperial Palace at 10am. Anyway, I paid $5 for the hotel breakfast and made my way over to the spiffy guest lounge that looked so good in the pictures, and trust me, the pictures did not disappoint. This is super-sweet.


Me chillin' and eating some breakfast. By the way, if anyone has an explanation for me about why milk tastes different in Asia, please tell me. The milk here tastes somewhat like the milk in the Philippines!


And view of my breakfast and the alcove with the hanging scroll. There's totally a name for it that I had to memorize when I was learning about shoji architecture, but it escapes me now.... just know that the inlet thing with a scroll is a feature of traditional Japanese architecture.


Cool sliding doors and mats and drawers. The wood floor back there leads to the kitchen/the food.

This room is actually really big. Another view.


Trays for eating. ^^


Annnnnd, the room opens right up to the gardens! You're supposed to stare at nature and quietly contemplate while sipping tea. This was another cool feature about Japanese architecture that I learned about in class - space is often very malleable, and usually walls open up, to either the outside or to enlargen a room.

Decorative water-thing.


Another view of the garden, with stepping stone path.

So then it was off to meet my 10 o'clock tour. I was still on jetlag time, so I had woken up very early and, after a failed attempt at trying to figure out how to take the standing brake off the bikes that were available to guests, decided to just walk, since it wasn't really all that far. Maybe a mile or so. Anyway, with my map in hand, I make a rather well-timed departure, since I arrived onto the castle grounds at around 9:50. However, I neglected to take into account that the castle grounds were rather enormous, and I had no idea where the tour was meeting up.


This here is the inner wall of the castle (on the other side of the vast expanse of gravel are more gardens, some museum type things, gift shop, etc., which are all surrounded again by an outer wall), which I think I had to circle around for about half a mile before I found the entrance. Once arrived, I went through two check points where I had to present my passport (advanced reservations through the Imperial Household Agency are required to get into the palace, I'm assuming they run you through a background check or something before letting you in), and barely made it as the group was leaving. We had a nice Japanese lady giving the tour in English, to a group that was mostly older groups and families. I think it's probably a rare type 20 year old that would spend a solo vacation abroad seeing world heritage sites rather than partying in the city. Not that I ever found anything in Kyoto I'd deem "city," but then again considering my standard is Tokyo, this may not be entirely fair...


So first a little background on the Kyoto Imperial Palace: Kyoto was Japan's capital for about 1,000 years, and so this palace has quite a bit of history attached to it. I think they moved it to here from Nara in the 700s or so, and then moved it again to Tokyo when the Tokugawa Shogunate took over, and decided to move the seat of government to some swamp in the middle of nowhere, just to mess with everybody else. You know, kind of like what happened in America. (Really, the potomac? ::scoff::) Anyway, this is one of the gates into the palace that wasn't open - I think it may be where the emperor used to enter in his carriage/whatever. The empress had a smaller gate through which she entered, off to the side. The emperor needs his own gate I guess. Note here the roofing: it's made out of about 70 thin trips of Japanese Cypress, which works well to keep things cool in summer, though I don't know what function that would have in an outside gate. Probably to match the other roofs I guess. ^^;; It needs to be replaced every 20 years however, and these ones are getting a bit old. They were really just in the process of restoring a few things when I got there.


I'm not really sure what this building is, but I took a picture of it anyway.


And here's a snazzy door all decked out in gold. I think this is the door the emperor went through after he got off his carriage/horse/whatever.


Then we went and looked into a reception room. There are three rooms, and the more important you are, the farther into the building you get to go. Gorgeous Kano school paintings adorn the walls, and I think I've seen these in a textbook somewhere, but can't for the life of me pin down which Kano painter it was. I mean, they were all named Kano...


Anyway, the first room is the Cherry Blossom Room. The least important officials would be received in this room.


Slightly more important guests would be lead through the Cherry Blossom Room and into the Crane Room.


And the most important guests would be lead through both rooms and into the Tiger Room, which I guess was supposed to reassert the Imperial Family's authority over whoever was visiting, but intimidating them with scary pictures of tigers. I'm not sure how well it worked.


Further down, there was a display showing a cross section of the roofing I was talking about eariler. You can see all the many many layers required...


Wait, nevermind, I think THIS is the Emperor's carriage entrance. I have no idea what that other gate was. But anyway, this is definitely the Emperor's gate, because it leads straight to this:

Past the bright red arches, and well-roped off from us foreign visitors, is the most important building in the Imperial Palace. This is the place where all ceremonies are held, including the coronations of all the Emperors, which continued to be held here even well after the capital had moved to Tokyo. I think the Emperors of the Taisho and Showa periods were both crowned here.


A super zoomed picture of the crowning site.


And a random picture of some pretty gabling on the gates that surround the coronation area.


The raised floor in this building (forgot it's purpose, but really, they're all just for the emperor to hang out in) allows air to go under the floor and keeps the building cooler in the summer time. Also, the dark wood/whitewash contrast is stunning.


One of many buildings, I think this may be the emperor hang-out building, where the Imperial family used to stay when they visit Kyoto. Now when they visit they have a fancy modern room somewhere with aircondition and Nintendo Wii and all that other good stuff.


Steps that I just thought were pretty.


Now this building I remember! It was built to house Amaterasu's mirror. The legend goes that the sun goddess (the most important of the gods back in the day), is the divine ancestor of the imperial line, and that she left the family three sacred relics to help in their rule: her mirror, a sword, and a gem/orb. This building was constructed specifically to house the sun goddess' mirror (which I don't think the public is ever allowed to lay eyes on), though the mirror is now located in the shrines at Ise I think, which is where the sun goddess was supposed to have lived I think.


And then after this they opened the gates to the Emperor's Gardens/private quarters area.


Here's a better view of the garden. The layout of the stones here was made to look like a natural beach - I guess cause Kyoto is pretty far inland and they wanted to recreate the feeling of the sea.

Directly opposite the garden is the Emperor's hanging-out building, where he can sit and watch the garden.


Here's an island in the garden's lake. I love how the trees are all cute and bonsai like. ^^


And a cute little bridge going over the lake. ^_^


A side view of the bridge, quite spectacular really.


Though I think this is my favorite bridge picture. ^^


Or maybe this one. I think there were two bridges actually.


Also, a lot of garden designers were really into the whole making it look almost like it could've happened naturally thing. This rock bridge for instance, almost looks like it could've just formed on its own. Also, this little river here (which leads to the pond) was often a source of amusement and games. I think they'd make very intricate boats and see who's won in a race, or place cups of sake on the boat and have people sit at different points in the river and have to compose a poem before the cup reaches them. I can't remember if they have to win or lose to drink the sake, but either way, I consider it an early precursor of coveyor belt sushi restaurants.


And here was a court for this one game where you hit a ball around. I'm not kidding, they're really all they do - no points, or goals, no teams, no score... I don't think this even qualifies as a game anymore. A form of exercise? Either way, throw-the-ball-around was a popular sport with the nobels.


Deteriorating roof!!! This is probably the worst case I saw here, and judging by the proximity of restoring, I'm guessing will be replaced quite soon.


Some more brilliant wooden contrast. All the colors - red, white, dark brown, gold! So pretty. ^^ Although you'd think they'd switch to a different material after fires destroyed the palace more times than Godzilla has destroyed Tokyo. This is why all the buildings were rebuilt as disconnected - so that if something did catch fire, hopefully only one building would burn down. Though the precautions against such a thing happening again are pretty good. I think if you light a cigarette within a mile of the palace secret police pop out of the bushes and scold you for your carelessness.


Pretty wood!!


Gorgeous gold-embossed doors.


And a close-up so you can see the intricate detail that goes into all the little decorations. I think this is a chrysanthemum in the center, which is also part of the crest of the royal family.


And here is the throne room, where the Emperor conducts his day to day business. It overlooks a garden of.... white rocks. I think it's supposed to be calming. O_o


His yearly schedule is up on that bulletin board there.


Throne room. There are fold screens on the left, his curtained chair in the middle, and I forgot what the thing on the right was.


Close-up of the throne. Not exactly grand, but oh well. It's on two thick raised tatami mats, just so everyone knows that the Emperor must have the highest place in the room.


Another room that opens up to the gardens/rocks.


And a picture of the paintings decorating the walls. Japanese people were never into wallpaper or whatnot, old palace walls and such are always decorated with paintings. Anyway, this one is of aristocrats hanging out. It's apparently all they do.


And the exit gate! This concludes our tour, blah blah blah. The gate leads out into a big open expanse, which used to house the servants quarters and kitchens. That way, if a kitchen fire started, only the servents would get burned. -_-;; They actually did burn down I think, but where never rebuilt because at that time no one lived in the palace anymore, and it became more of a historic place/tourist attraction.

And so this concludes the Kyoto Imperial Palace tour! I was determined to squeeze as many attractions as possible into my Kyoto stay, so after a quick look around the palace grounds (a few shrines, a bunch of joggers, more gardens, some official buildings, etc.) I decided to head out to Nijo Castle, which looked only about a half mile more away.