Nikko

On Friday I went to Nikko. It is very far away! Takao-san felt like it was out in the country, but Nikko really is. There were farms everywhere on the way there! It’s 90-something miles north of Tokyo, and it took about 3 hours to get there (2 hours from Asakusa Station, but unfortunately Asakusa isn’t the easiest station for me to get to, so it took almost an hour to get there and only then could we actually start the getting-out-of-Tokyo part of the trip). It took tons longer to get back home because the train we ended up getting was weird and slow. There were only four trains an hour or something, since it’s so far away, and two of them were expensive reserved-seat-only trains. One was a local, and the other looked like it was a rapid (which was how we got there). But it was so slow! I thought the schedule had lied to me and that it was a local, because we were stopping at every stop for a while, but as we got closer to civilization, it sped up and skipped more stops. It was apparently some weird local/rapid hybrid. IT WAS CRAP.

Anyway, enough about trains. Nikko! I liked it! It was very pretty there, and I liked seeing all the famous stuff at the Toshogu and Futarasan shrines and Rinno-ji temple. Most of my pictures are from Toshogu; Rinno-ji was probably my favorite, but you weren’t allowed to take pics inside. But it was very cool; I was most impressed by the Sanbutsudo (or Three Buddha Hall) that holds three huge gold-plated statues of Amida Buddha, Senju-Kannon and Bato-Kannon. Beautiful!

Toshogu was awesome too; it is dedicated to Tokugawa Ieyasu, who founded the Tokugawa shogunate and who built his capital in Edo (now Tokyo), and his remains are entombed there. No expense was spared in building the place, and it is ridiculously elaborate and very different from what Shinto shrines normally look like. There is also a lot of Buddhist influence there, which is interesting; being both Shinto and Buddhist is the norm in Japan, but you don’t usually see them so mixed at a shrine or temple (shrines don’t normally have pagodas, for one thing). The most famous things there are a carving of three wise monkeys and a carving of a sleeping cat (the souvenir shops are filled with sleeping cats and monkeys). We saw the monkeys (see below), but weren’t willing to pay more money to see the cat. My personal favorite of the many carvings there is the bit where there are two elephants that were done by a dude who had never actually seen an elephant before. Hilarious!

I would like to go back again for more than a day trip. There are a ton of waterfalls and lakes and hot springs in the national park, as well as more temple-y stuff, and it would be lovely to have the time to see them. Maybe in the fall - it’s supposed to be gorgeous there then.

All the pictures here are from Toshogu except for the one of the stairs, which is on the way to all the sites, and the love prayers, which are from Futarasan Shrine.