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Published: August 31st 2014
So when we were planning our Japan trip we had a huge list of places but had to be quite ruthless when we were deciding what we could and couldn’t manage. One of the things on our list, a day trip to Nara was sacrificed so we could have more time in and around Kyoto. Our last blog was about the sights we saw in Kyoto centre and this one is about the little trips we made to the outskirts of Kyoto to see some interesting places.
Taking invent-torii…Fushimin Inari Taisha Fushimi Inari is a shrine located to the south-east of Kyoto city; we hopped on the JR line (free again with our passes!) and 5 minutes later we were there. Fushimin Inari Taisha (taisha=shrine) is the most important Shinto shrine (and there are several thousands of these) dedicated to Inari, the Shinto god of rice.
There is a small town at the entrance to Fushimi Inari Taisha but we’ll admit we didn’t look around it, it was too bloody hot! On the day we had chosen to visit, the temperature managed to top 39 degrees celcius and although we are used to the heat, it was still
very oppressive and difficult walking around!
Fushimi Inari Taisha has ancient origins, a lot of buildings and shrines in Kyoto are very old, this shrine actually predates the time when Kyoto was capital of Japan (the year 794). It’s mainly famous for its thousands of different shades of red (the technical colour is vermilion!) torii gates. These torii gates straddle trails going up the sacred Mount Inari, through wooded forests and link several shrines and buildings together.
Inari shrines are unique in that there are statues of foxes everywhere. These kitsune (Japanese for fox) are thought to be Inari’s messengers, so this is why there are loads of statues of foxes here. Some kindly person has even put some scarfs around their necks to stop them getting cold 😉.
The main shrine area has the Hondon (the main building) and a few smaller buildings dotted around. Right at the very back we saw a little offerings area, where there were miniature torii gates placed. We assume these are offerings made by ordinary people for a small fee to the shrine; we say this because the torii gates going up Mount Inari were all donated by individuals and
Train driver
watch the video for his little routine!companies. The torii gates are all different sizes and apparently, the cost starts at ¥400,000 (£2298) for a smaller sized gate and the price increases to over ¥1m (£5747) for a larger gate! We had noticed when studying the gates that there were inscriptions in black Japanese characters on them. We had a romantic notion that they may be the wishes, dreams or prayers from the people who donated them…erm, nope! They were just the donators name and date of the donation 😞. Isn’t it funny how not knowing the alphabet of a language makes everything seem a bit more mystical!
Walking the trail was lovely, it was particularly nice under the torii gates because it was a tiny bit cooler! We soon came to the ‘Senbon Torii’ (literally ‘thousands of torii gates’) which is where the path splits into two parallel and densely packed rows of (slightly smaller) torii gates. We looked on in amusement at people doing their ‘selfies’ and headed along the left hand path…walked for a while away from the crowds, stopped and took a couple of our own selfies 😉
Even though there were a lot of people visiting Fushimi Inari it still
Zen garden at Tenryu-ji
Donna would love to rake that gravel :) (like so many other places in Japan) managed to stay quite peaceful and serene. We had large sections of the trail to ourselves and loved studying the gates closely, we noticed some were missing and we assumed they had been taken away for repair. A few minutes after making that observation we saw two employees with a clipboard (no hard hats, only caps…tut tut) and that’s where the title of this blog came from. Groan worthy yes, they were taking ‘invent-torii’ of the gates!
We were very glad we had kept Fushimi Inari on our must see list, as on our travels we really haven’t seen anything else like it. Rice also is our favourite grain, it’s a staple of our everyday diet so it was probably appropriate we paid our respects to the wonderful rice! 😉
Coming over all Zen in Tenryu-ji Heading to the north-west of Kyoto now to the famous Arashiyama area. We used our JR pass again for free train travel to Saga-Arashiyama station and had a wander through the lovely streets of Arashiyama town. We were very upset to learn that a large part of Arashiyama was flooded by the recent heavy
Romon Gate - entrance to Fushimi Inari
this was donated in 1589 by the famous leader Toyotomi Hideyoshi rains that Japan has experienced and we hope it has started to recover.
The first photo opportunity presented itself on the main road…now it’s a photo of Neil next to a poster of a monkey. Some people will know instantly what Neil is doing – he’s calling Cloud! When we saw the poster of the monkey we just couldn’t resist the photo as it reminded us of the cult Japanese TV series Monkey we watched as kids, and later as students in university! We
would explain the concept of the story but it’s so bizarre and downright weird, involving monkeys, a human pig, a guy that travels by cloud and a princess; so we’ll just let you look it up 😊.
We found our way to Tenryu-ji which is the head temple to the Rinzai Zen sect of Japanese Buddhism, apparently it was ranked first amongst the city’s five great Zen temples. Tenryu-ji’s buildings (unfortunately) have been repeatedly lost in fires and wars over the centuries from when it was first built. Most of the current buildings in the complex were rebuilt relatively recently during the Meiji Period (1868-1912).
The Zen garden of Tenryu-ji has survived all
this time in its original form – it was a lovely landscaped garden with a central pond (with a tiny waterfall and loads of different types of koi carp!). Pine trees and rocks surrounded the central pond and over the other side was a short walking trail where you could see the trees stretching back up the Arashiyama hillsides. Tenryu-ji had two different levels of entry ¥600 (£3.44) for the temple and gardens and ¥500 (£2.87) for just the gardens, we opted to pay only for the gardens and Donna got very excited seeing the raked stones. Anyone with slight OCD will know why she loves those raked stones 😉. The gardens were designed by Muso Soseki, who was Tenryu-ji’s first head priest, but he was also a famous Zen garden designer and designed a lot of other temple gardens in Japan. A particularly nice touch in the gardens was that all the plants had little labels showing their names in both Japanese and English – we spent a nice hour or so wandering the grounds before heading to the main attraction.
The big bamboos of Arashiyama Bamboo Forest! To be honest, the calling it the ‘Bamboo Forest’
Kitsune (fox) at the entrance
Foxes are seen as messengers and are often found in Inari shrines is being a tad generous, realistically it’s a bamboo grove…that doesn’t sound as impressive but the bamboos are big 😉. We entered the
forest grove from the side entrance of Tenryu-ji and (ignoring the large numbers of shouty Chinese tourists) it was a bit eerie! It was like a scene from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon or one of those films…the wind gently whistled through the bamboo creating a weird whistling and swishing sound.
There was a dirt man-made path through the
forest grove, with pieces of halved bamboo as fencing so we couldn’t actually stray from the path. We walked through the
forest grove to the other side, took a few selfies (of course) and other pics and decided to head back to the station. It was definitely worthwhile seeing Tenryu-ji and the bamboo
forest grove together, we had decided to skip the nearby Monkey Park as we really don’t like monkeys…they are very evil animals 😉.
We wandered completely aimlessly around Arashiyama backstreets, Donna managed to get us lost following the road signs (seriously, her sense of direction is terrible) but on the plus side us getting lost helped us see lots of pretty Japanese houses and
gardens and make a cooling pit stop in Lawsons convenience store!
Food glorious food! Our budget food find of Japan was the Saizeriya chain. Apparently, it started as a single Italian restaurant in the 1970’s and the owners decided to experiment with very low prices. It turned out to be a huge success and it’s now a major chain in Japan. We read that it runs its own local farms and imports food from both Italy and Australia! Anyway, what’s so marvellous (employing a very British word there) about Saizeriya is how cheap it is…when we say cheap, let’s explain. We had minestrone soup and baguette, a shrimp salad, a Margherita pizza, a pasta dish, chicken, tomato and parmesan sizzler and 500ml of white wine (ok, we were hungry and the portions aren’t huge!). The cost? Around ¥2300 (£13.21)…yes, we were giggling when we paid the bill and not just because of the wine! Ok, the wine wasn’t the best (you can get a glass for ¥100) but the food was a surprise….it was actually ok! We ate at Saizeriya a couple of times because we knew there was a good selection at a cheap price and we
could get a lot of food for our money. If you want a look at the menu, it’s here
http://www.saizeriya.co.jp/menu/v2/#page=1.
The morning we went to Fushimi Inari we discovered the wonderful breakfast donburi! A big bowl of rice with a thin chicken omelette on top with a bit of miso sauce and a salad…all washed down with a nice cup of coffee. Yum, we could eat this for brekkie every day!
We noticed that the Japanese have a real love of coffee…they are very serious about it. Even the 7-11’s have a machine that freshly grinds the coffee beans before dispensing the coffee freshly pressed! We have to say we never had a bad coffee in Japan.
Every single department store has restaurants on the higher floors (usually the top floors) and a basement supermarket-cum-food court. These basement areas are called ‘depatchikas’ and sell lots of fresh ready food (like rice boxes, sushi, ready cut fish for sushi, noodles etc) along with other bits and bobs and fresh fruit. We have to say we have never seen such perfect fruit and veg in our lives! It was very obvious to us that the Japanese like the finer
Neil and Monkey
he's calling Cloud :) things but this also has a downside. We saw a feature on CNN about a year ago which highlighted the real problems in Japan with the quest for perfection in fresh food. Nothing oddly shaped is sold, it’s either thrown away or, more recently, charities have been taking the food and using it to feed the less fortunate. The same as slightly dented tinned food or a slight label peeling off a bottle, these are just be discarded. We also assume that this ‘perfection issue’ is why the price of fruit and veg are rather high because consumers are having to pay for the produce which is thrown away! Crazy, completely crazy!
Observations... Being calorie conscious This first observation is somewhat unexpected every menu (including alcoholic menus) we saw in Japan had the calorie count for the dish or drink clearly displayed. We think this is a very good thing indeed and we think if this was done in other countries, it would stop and make people think and also educate people about what they were eating. We know McDonalds does this in some countries, but in Japan we are talking about calorie counts on everything –
even the posters in the restaurant window!
Inappropriate outfits! We saw an Eastern European tourist walking around Tenryu-ji temple in a white see through dress. Yes, a see through dress…no bra and a tiny little dental floss thong. Seriously inappropriate and what’s even more shocking is the 4 other people she was with didn’t tell her that! We sat in Tenryu-ji garden literally with our mouths open…we know that Japanese temples don’t have a strict dress code like, for example, Thai temples do but that was seriously taking the piss with exposing herself!
Scrubbing the pavement with a toothbrush 😊 Not quite, but almost! When we came out of Sago-Arashiyama train station, at the bottom of the stairs was a worker with his blue hard hat and matching blue bucket 😊 on his knees scrubbing the floor with a little brush. It all just fell into place then as to why Japan was so clean…people on their hands and knees scrubbing the pavement?! We don’t know how widespread an occurrence this on-the-knees-scrubbing-the-pavement is, but Japan is an unbelievably clean country and it’s all achieved without litter bins on the streets as well!
Put those Erm...which way
when in doubt follow the 'JR' on the sign! OAP’s to work!
Everyone reading this will know about Japan’s problem with its ageing population. We noticed everywhere we went in Japan that there were a large number of OAPs (Old Age Pensioners) working still, when in other countries like the UK, they would be collecting their pension. Not being able to speak to these OAPs, we are unsure whether they were working from necessity or whether they just wanted to carry on working. We would say though, the OAPs we saw working seemed very happy (and still sprightly might we add!) and seemed to be relishing the jobs they had been given. We saw a particularly sweet and super-happy old guy blowing a whistle in his uniform on a train station platform, he was really enjoying blowing that whistle…as we have said in the past, give a person a whistle and they WILL blow it!
We personally think if someone wants to continue to work, why not let them? It just seems silly to have an arbitrary retirement age, when some people would prefer to keep working. Saying that, the way it’s going in the UK everyone our age will be working until they are 80 years
old whether they want to or not! 😉
OCD…a requirement for being a train driver? We are convinced train drivers in Japan are OCD, every single one we saw had a special routine. We are going to detail this routine. First the driver had to have a cap on and white driving gloves (very important). Then he would point at the tracks in the direction we were going, point at his timetable and point at his pocket watch. Watch the video below! The funniest thing about all of this was all the station stops were timed using this pocket watch…not a digital watch, but one which winds up and has a second hand. But everything ran to the second of being on time!
Our time in Kyoto had sadly come to an end. It's a wonderful city and we only saw part of what it has to offer. Our next stop in Japan is a little bit more serious, thought provoking but fascinating at the same time...
Choo-choo - VIDEO!
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Rat on the Road
Kris and Kate
Budget food
They have that cheap Italian chain in Shanghai too. In a city where a beer usually costs over £5, that £1.50 glass of wine is a godsend! Looking like a great trip so far guys!