After a morning spent relaxing and talking with our Airbnb host, Tomo, and his family, we boarded the train Saturday and rode to Tokyo. We arrived almost as soon as Typhoon Halong did, which curtailed our sightseeing somewhat, but we still managed to hit most of the sites we wanted to. After grabbing some Udon near our new Airbnb in Tokyo, we traveled to Asakusa, a big souvenir district and home to the Sensoji Temple, the oldest in Tokyo, though large parts needed to be rebuilt after the war. We bought a lot of souvenirs for ourselves and as gifts, and then headed back toward our apartment for a yummy Sushi dinner followed by drinks at a whiskey bar.

Sunday was the bulk of the typhoon, so although we were able to spend some time outside in the morning at the Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden - a huge park reminiscent of Central park with a traditional Japanese Garden and formal French and English gardens, as well as a large greenhouse - we got rained out pretty quickly and needed to head inside. We decided to check out the Edo-Tokyo Museum, which focuses on the history of Tokyo. By the time we'd finished that and grabbed some Ramen, the rain had temporarily broken, so we jumped on the train and went to Shiboya Station, Tokyo's version of Times Square and one of the busiest intersections in the world. It's a huge, fashionable shopping district, and every time the light changes, people flood the intersection to cross to different areas. It's a famous spot for movies and sightseeing. After doing some browsing at a cafe/bookstore, we headed back to the apartment to get ready for dinner at a Spanish restaurant, after getting thoroughly drenched by a big rainstorm.

Although the days weren't quite as packed as they were in Kyoto, we enjoyed Tokyo. It's definitely more of a westernized city and just so huge. Things that looked on a map like they were walkably close, really weren't, and trains/subway became a requirement from moving from place to place. Though I'm glad we visited - a necessity, since we're flying back to the states from here - I'm much happier that we spent the majority of our time in and around Kyoto.

Warning: This post contains a lot of pottery.

Today, we bid a fond farewell to Kyoto and headed north to Mashiko, for the last day of three we devoted to pottery towns (read: the last day I felt comfortable dragging Tom from pottery shop to pottery shop). Mashiko is a small town about an hour by Shinkansen (bullet train) north of Tokyo, and was the home of Hamada Shoji, one of the paramount figures in bridging the gap between Eastern and Western pottery traditions in the 1900s and also one of the formative figures of the Mingei school of folk art. With our Airbnb host, Tomo, we toured his old estate, including his home, workshop, and kilns (lots of photos of these three) and then wandered to the Mashiko Museum of Ceramic Art to take in the current exhibition (photos not allowed here, unfortunately). 

We were pretty tired after waking up early to finishing packing up our things and leave Kyoto on an early train, but not too tired to go out with Tomo and one of his friends to a restaurant featuring okonomiyaki, or Japanese pancakes. These were savory pancakes, really more like an omelette, that you cook on a hot griddle in the middle of your table, a la Hibachi style grill in the States. We had a good time making the food, and only minimal screaming when the pancakes needed to be flipped.

Tomorrow, we head to Tokyo for the last two days of our trip. Can’t believe it’s almost over! Japan is magical.

When I'm in a new city, I strongly prefer walking to taking the subway or even the bus. I feel like you get a much better sense of the city when pounding the pavement. While Tom and I wandered around Kyoto during our days there, and also in the evenings after getting back from our day trips, I snapped pictures of the houses that caught my eye. Call it scouting for homes for when we move here. Kidding, but seriously. Kyoto is magical.

Warning: This post contains mostly pottery.

Today, Tom and I ventured to the small town of Bizen, famous for its wood-fired, unglazed pottery. After hitting a few local sightseeing recommendations (a creek, several walls made with broken pots, the Amatsu shrine, and the remains of a very old kiln), we wandered through several shops, buying pots for ourselves and for gifts. Then, after a lunch that was entirely forgettable (unfortunately so), we toured the Bizen historical and contemporary pottery museum - entirely focused on Bizen pots. It was really lovely, and I took many many photos. So much to digest - I'm very interested to see what impact this trip will have on my pots once I get back in the studio. So many new forms I want to try out, and alterations I want to try in my existing rep.

Today, we started our day at the beautiful Miho Museum, a breathtaking building in Shiga Prefecture, designed by I.M Pei (the same architect behind the Pyramid entrance at the Louvre and the National Gallery East Building in DC). The Miho holds a variety of Asian and European art, with a particular emphasis on those countries and regions involved in the Silk Road. As such, the building itself (the only part I could photograph, unfortunately) is a modern-day Shangri-La with a magical tunnel through a mountain leading to the picturesque museum building itself. So great.

After touring the collections and buying a few souvenirs (museum gift shops are the best!), we headed into Shigaraki, one of the major pottery towns in Japan. It was absolutely amazing to be surrounded (literally!) by so many makers. We walked through several stores that I'm fairly sure had more hand-built pottery in a single shop than most American towns have. And such variety of surfaces from rough wood-fired to meticulous enamels and painted ware. Also, a lot of Tanuki statues, Japanese Raccoon-Dogs, which Shiga is famous for and which are said to bring luck to the owner. We also toured through the Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park and met some of the really friendly local and international residents who were loading up a woodkiln, but were happy to take a few minutes to say hello and show us their work and the grounds. Refreshing to be surrounded by makers and my art form again!

After we returned to Kyoto (a much longer train ride than I'd expected), we stopped for dinner at Shishin, a self-proclaimed Samurai Cafe, only about two blocks from our Airbnb. We had a yummy dinner, Japanese style for the first time: sitting crosslegged on the floor on tatami mats and thin cushions. Midway through our meal, we were joined by a Japanese man (we both forgot his name unfortunately) who had studied in England for the past few years and was really friendly and interesting to talk to. All in all, Japanese Food Culture 201 went much more smoothly than 101 had!

Tuesday, we took a long (two hour) train ride to Miyajima and Hiroshima. Although the day was marked by rain, which interrupted some of our plans - we had wanted to take a hike up Mount Misen - we still had a good day. Miyajima means “shrine island" and has been recognized as one of the top three views in Japan.  We spent some time exploring the souvenir and food district before heading into Itsukushima Shrine, another UNESCO World Heritage Site, which features a massive Torii gate in the tidal waters in front of the shrine. Oh, and there are tame deer here too, so we spent some time looking at them, and luckily they weren't nearly as aggressive as the deer at Nara.

After walking through the shrine, we decided to head to the Miyajima Public Aquarium to try to wait on the rain. It was a very nice little aquarium featuring mainly animals found in the seas around Japan. Then, after a tea and coffee break to recharge, and a brief stop at Senjokaku Shrine, “the hall of 1000 tatami mats” built to remember the war dead, we headed back to the train to go to Hiroshima. 

It’s hard to put Hiroshima into words. It’s incredibly sobering, and was more so because we were there one day before the anniversary of the bombing, and the yearly peace festival. Seeing the monuments to the destruction and to promote peace, rendered me a little speechless. We walked through the Peace Park and then toured the museum. By then, it was getting quite late, so we grabbed some ramen, took a streetcar back to Hiroshima Station, and headed back to Kyoto

As I mentioned in my previous post, today's itinerary was flexible, and when a couple of Americans we met on the bus said that they'd really enjoyed Arashiyama earlier in the week, we decided to take a trip there. It was a really cool experience. After a short but steep 20 minute hike up the side of a mountain, we found ourselves literally surrounded by a troop of Japanese macaques. There's a sanctuary up on the mountain where the monkeys can run free - no fences for them of any kind that we could tell - and instead, the people are put in cages (it's where it's allowed to feed the monkeys, probably to keep them from surrounding the tourists a la the Nara deer). After finishing up with them, we strolled around Arashiyama - including over the famous Togetsukyo Bridge (originally built sometime between 800-1200 AD, rebuilt around 1900) and walked down another famous bamboo street; that's a street lined with bamboo, not made of it. All in all, a pleasant closing to a good day.

Because of some travel screw ups (turns out there's more than one place in Japan named Mino, and I had us scheduled to go to the wrong one - oops!), we had a free day to play with today. Tom had read about and seen some information about Nara, and on a whim, we decided to activate our rail passes anyway and travel an hour south of Kyoto for the day. On our way there, we met a couple from California also visiting Kyoto, and they recommended we also check out Arashiyama, a suburb of Kyoto, so we decided to split the day and spend the morning and early afternoon in Nara, and then shoot over to Arashiyama for the later afternoon. I'll blog about the latter later.

Nara Prefecture borders Kyoto Prefecture and it is known quite famously for the tamed deer that live in the large central park, Nara Park. The park contains several more temples and shrines, and all collectively, it's another UNESCO World Heritage Site. We arrived not really knowing what to expect, but the deer were pretty awesome, if a bit aggressive. The second they see you have "cookies", you can expect to be surrounded by 4 or 5 deer, pushing to get a cookie, and biting your clothes, backpack, or whatever else they can get their teeth into in the meantime. Check out the photos below for a funny sequence of Tom feeding the deer, running out of cookies, and running away. 

After feeding the deer and taking (a lot) of photos of them, we toured Todai-ji temple, the most famous of the temples in Nara and home to the largest bronze statue of the Buddha Vairocana in the world. It was one of the largest temples, heightwise, that we've seen yet, and was pretty impressive. Following that, we walked through another section of Nara Park to the lovely Ukimido Pavilion, which is famous for its yearly paper lantern festival. Then, we had a lovely tempura lunch, and caught the train back to Kyoto to visit Arashiyama.

Tonight, we ate dinner in one of the oldest restaurants in the world. Our Airbnb host, Sean, recommended the restaurant - obligatory plug because his wife's family owns the place, but it was definitely high on our list after we learned that the restaurant has been around since the 1460s. Honke Owariya features mainly Soba and Udon noodles, the former made with buckwheat flour and the latter made with only wheat. Tom ordered their traditional Kake soba (Plain buckwheat noodles (soba) original "Owariya" soup.), but I branched out to order the Tanuki (Kake Soba, topped with deepfried tofu and long onions, in a thick soup with ginger). We also shared some yummy and beautiful tempura, and washed it all down with green tea, sake, and beer. Good comfort food - and the seal of approval of the Emperor. I'd go again!

Our second day in Kyoto was much more focused as we only did three attractions: Ryoanji, a zen temple, first thing in the morning; a formal tea ceremony at a local cultural center in the late morning, and Fushimi Inari-taisha, a sprawling temple complex with an approximately 2.5 mile hike up the side of Mount Inari. We also had one more pit stop at a temple we thought we hadn't yet visited, but when we reached the top of the (long, crowded) hill where the temple sits, realized it was Kyomizu-Dera, which we'd added to our list yesterday - oops! All was not lost though, as we had a yummy beef bun for lunch. And that was only halfway through an extremely wonderful day.

Ryoan-ji is a zen temple and very different from the others we've seen in Kyoto so far. Zen simplicity is known far and wide, and the temple was much more simple and unadorned. Its main public feature is a rock garden that is considered one of the best examples of the practice in the world. There was also some lovely calligraphy, and a walk around a lake filled with lilies and lotus. 

There's not a whole lot to say about the tea ceremony; it's really one of those things that just needs to be experienced. I'll caption the photos with some of the ideas shared, but the whole ceremony is about being present and focusing intensely on the action unfolding and the ritual. It was really lovely and our hostess was gracious in explaining the meaning and guiding us through the ceremony.

The first photo was taken at almost the exact moment we realized, hey, we've been here before. But in order to keep the detour from being a complete debacle, we ate some tasty steamed beef buns (the ones on the right in the second photo). Yummy!

Fushimi Inari is an amazing complex filled with Torii gates - which are symbols in Shintoism of the demarcation between sacred and profane. One of the symbols of the complex is the fox, or kitsune, who is seen as a messenger. The Torii throughout the complex, brilliant vermillion (orange-red) in color, have been donated by various local and international businesses, and they line the trails up to the mountain peak. They are blank on one side (the ascent) and include the name or a message from the local business on the other (the descent) in Japanese and very rarely English characters. We sweated through our t-shirts, so the number of "selfies" and portraits dropped dramatically after the first half mile or so. After we made it to the peak, we decended back to the main viewpoint station, and had the most delicious ice cream cones there ever were EVER! Or so it seemed - we were pretty sweaty. Then as we were finishing the final leg of the descent a rainstorm came through , so the camera had to go in the bag. 

While we were waiting for Nijo Castle to open, we stumbled into our first shrine of the day. It had a really lovely garden, and the Koi chased as around, begging for food.

Not technically a shrine, this beautiful strolling garden took both Tom and my breath away. Thanks to our friend Noriko for recommending this lovely spot, just a hop, skip, and jump from Nanzenji. We wouldn't have stopped without her recommendation, but we're both glad we did!

This one would be Anya's nightmare. We stumbled on this shrine walking to the bus for Kinkaku-ji. It's a shrine to a rabbit deity, and is supposed to bless women with an easy childbirth. Freaky albino rabbits everywhere!

The final shrine of the day was one devoted to Cherry Blossoms, which unfortunately don't bloom in August. We googled some pictures after the fact, and can see why this is a very popular shrine at certain times of the year. Mostly, the cicadas stick out at this one for us. I don't remember the songs being quite so loud when the broods were active on the East Coast last year...

As mentioned in my previous post, Nijō Castle was our first tourist spot of the day and is a World Heritage Site in Kyoto. It's a castle of the Shogun from the 1600s. The grounds were beautiful, even though we couldn't take photos inside.