Japan!!

Asia » Japan
March 21st 2012

Published: March 21st 2012

<strong style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Sunday 18^th March 2012:

I don’t really know how to start today’s blog as our first day in Japan has been utterly stunning and I find it impossible to capture today in a few short paragraphs. We visited Osaka and Kyoto and visited 4 ancient temples: 2 Buddhist, 1 Shinto and 1 Zen Buddhist.

Our first temple of the day was a Buddhist one and it is the largest wooden structure in the world. We were allowed right inside the temple and having used the ritual pool to wash our hands and mouth we were then greatly moved by the wonderful smell of incense and the scale of the Buddha; it’s absolutely enormous. The temple, and its accommodation for the 50 residential monks, is set in a park with 1,000 wild deer who are very tame and wander in and out of the tourists without any worries. Quite bizarre really as you wouldn’t get close to any in England.

Our second temple of the day is high on the side of a mountain and is famous for its avenues of over 2,000 stone lanterns. This is the greatest number of stone lanterns of any temple anywhere on earth. Being Shinto, it has no shrine and no statues. The faithful believe all the gods come from and live in nature and the lanterns are there to light the way for the gods to get from the sea and the valleys up to the temple in the mountains. Japanese families take new babies at 30 days of age to be blessed by the monks and we were treated to seeing many families doing this today.

Our third temple was covered in gold leaf and is positioned by its own reflecting pool with little islands covered in bonsai trees. It was so beautiful it would be hard to describe in words. No wonder people would be moved to pray here. All I can say is thank goodness for a chap called Yoshimitsu. He was the Shogun who, in 1397, started building this amazing temple. I think I’ll ask Richard to upload a picture of it to Facebook because it really was spectacular and words can’t convey its beauty.

Our final temple of the day was up the steepest climb – how come we didn’t visit this one first? This place was nuts! The temple was filled with thousands of locals who visit on today’s Spring equinox to honour and bless their ancestors. It’s another Buddhist temple and they are known for being good businessmen so the temple is surrounded by shops. These were located up the steepest of streets and it was teeming with people. Many of the women wore kimonos as today is such a holy day. Utter madness and absolute fun.

But nothing was quite as much fun as our introduction to Japanese toilets today! And we have gone from one extreme to the other. At the temples, the toilets are exceedingly basic: little more than a tiled hole in the ground. But lunch was something else! Being Cunard, you can rely on them taking you for lunch to a very swanky hotel and they certainly achieved that today. The toilets here are the second photo I’ll ask Richard to put on Facebook. The seat is pre-warmed to a very pleasant temperature and then there is an ‘arm’ that curls round the bowl with several buttons on. These allow you to play the sound of a toilet flushing if you need to cover any embarrassing body noises, or you can have the sound of running water if you need a little extra encouragement to go, and then you can have your bottom washed with either a jet or a spray of warm water (that you can adjust the force of) and the piéce de resistance is – in the gent’s toilet only – a strong deodoriser should your activities need to have their nasal-impact on others reduced. I had to go both before and after lunch: first to use it and discover it and secondly to photograph it. Brilliant!

<strong style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Monday 19^th March 2012:

Not too much to report today – just another sea day sailing from Osaka to Nagasaki. We’ve attended 2 events on board today: one was excellent and one was awful. The awful one was billed as an advanced class in digital photography so we thought it might be a great place to pick up some additional tips on techniques. The presenters hadn’t checked their equipment in advance so, when we all piled into the room, the laptop wasn’t talking to the projector and never did either. So she talked to us about some nice pictures she’d taken and we just had to imagine what those pictures might look like. She also passed on some invaluable tips like if it gets dark and you still want to take a photograph, try using flash. Well, you can’t really go far wrong with advice like that can you?!

Fortunately, our second event was much better. It was another talk by the naval architect; this time all about the Royal Yacht Britannia. He had some great photos of the inside of the ship plus a lot of interesting facts and figures. Two struck me as particularly interesting. One is that it was the last ship in the Royal Navy to use hammocks – for the crew, not for the royals! The second fact is that the ship was used for four royal honeymoons (Princess Margaret, Princess Anne, Charles and Diana and Andrew and Sarah) and all four marriages ended up in divorce. Makes a good advert for land based honeymoons!

Just one other slightly worrying hour today. The ship holds all passports unless passengers need to have them individually as we go ashore. Tomorrow we need them. But the Purser’s Office lost Richard’s! There were some very worried faces among the staff as 5 searches failed to find it. The supervisor promised she wouldn’t do anything else other than search for the passport and eventually rang to say she’d found it. The poor lady had been so stressed that when she handed it over she started crying and I’m sure it was because Richard was very nice about it all. No doubt some people shout if something like that happens but we were just glad to have everything in order. It was hugs all round!

Tomorrow sounds interesting for us: an 8½ hour tour including a 17^th century castle, a Samurai house, a village covered by a volcanic eruption and then the Nagasaki peace memorial. As we’ll be back in Japanese territorial waters, we’ll have no internet access again so we’ll blog once we’re back at sea.

<strong style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Tuesday 20^th March 2012:

If it’s Japan, you know it’s been another interesting day as time spent here is a photo opportunity at every turn and today was no exception. Our welcome to the port of Nagasaki was wonderful with a great band and fantastic dragon dances on the dock-side. We had an early start today as we began with a 2-hour drive to Shimabara, a peninsular out to the west. A long coach drive is a great chance to see some of the countryside and this is a very agricultural area with all the spaces created by volcanic flows now filled with farms and acres of crops being grown under plastic and paddy fields.

Once at Shimabara we went on a lovely walk through the old village and were able to go inside 3 old Samurai houses. The Samurai served the Shogun whose castle was easily in view from their homes so they didn’t have any chance of forgetting their place in society. The village was a delight with locals offering us oranges fresh from their trees and the street has a little mountain stream running down the middle. From there we went to the castle – think fat pagoda rather than anything with turrets. This one looked lovely but climbing 5 storeys to the top was a challenge – neither my hips nor my lungs found that much fun! Apparently the castles keep burning down so this one was actually a modern replica. It looked every inch the part from the outside but it was a bit disappointing on the inside. Lots of gorgeous Samurai armour nobly supported by lots of Japanese labelling and a lot of concrete. It may have been the highest spot of the day but it wasn’t really the highlight of it.

Lunch was amazing! Very authentic Japanese food with raw fish, a little table top burner with a bowl of soup cooking and lots of other dishes with fish, meat, veg, salad, pickles, rice and fruit . I don’t mind some raw fish but this lot I donated to Richard as it was a mouthful too far for my taste. The soups were lovely in the broth department but some of the things inside the broth stayed in my bowls and I noticed that was true for a great many of the passengers! White, pink and beige tofu may look pretty, especially when you cut it into pretty shapes but, supported by wall paper paste dumplings, did nothing to help my enjoyment. OK they were actually rice dumplings but they just melted into gluey gloop. But there was plenty that was lovely and it sure added a new experience in my culinary exposure.

In the afternoon we went to an amazing open air museum of a village that was covered in a pyroclastic flow in 1992. Much of the area has been redeveloped now but they have retained some of the houses just the way the volcano left them. Some of them are no more than roofs now at ground level. Others show the rocks nearly up to the ground floor ceilings and they just spill out of the windows and doors leaving total devastation behind.

And then we ended the day with the most important visit of all and that was to the Peace Park under the spot where the atomic bomb exploded in 1945. It’s a very moving place and they keep the car park underground so it doesn’t spoil the park. Lots of countries have donated different memorials but the most moving one of all is the remains of the prison that was wiped out by the bomb along, of course, with all the inmates and wardens. There is just one course of bricks left at ground level with reinforcing bars left utterly mangled by the bomb. Over 650 hectares of the city were totally flattened and you have to drive quite a long way before you find your first pre-war building. I’m glad we came. Places like this should be visited as a reminder of the awful things people do to people.

And then, on a lighter note, our sail out of Nagasaki tonight was great fun. There was a band playing, lots of people waving and there’s a great bridge we have to sail under. There is just 3m clearance between the bridge and the top of the funnel. The bridge was packed with people come to watch and the ship’s decks were packed with people checking we really did fit. So much cheering and waving. It meant we left this moving city with a wide smile. It’s been a good day.

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