Photo Update: Kyoto, Japan

You travel around Japan on the Shinkansen – the bullet train. It’s a train service that’s not rubbish, so is a refreshing alternative to the likes of us. In fact, it’s bloody brilliant. Trains leave major stations every ten minutes or so and can have you up the other end of the country in a few hours. Here’s one of the posher-looking ones:

When the train pulls into the station, the platform conductor or cleaning staff that’re waiting there bow to it. We tried to get photos of this but couldn’t. Whether it’s the train or the drivers that are being bowed to, I’m not sure. When the ticket collector comes around he enters each carriage, bows, and says ‘tickets please’ (or whatever the equivalent in Japanese is – ‘Kippu, o kudasai minna-san’ or something. Only much more polite.) On a country branch line, we saw station staff salute the little local put-put-put train as it rolled in. The staffs’ uniforms could pass off as being for the military, and have to be kept just as clean and neat.
Here’s some of the cleaning staff scurrying around the under-platform walkways:

Notice how flash and expensive the track looks. That’s the very stuff that lets the Shinkansen go very,very fast.
And here’s the effiency in effect:

You find where your carriage is on the platform and wait for the train to thunder in and stop at exactly the right spot in front of you.

Here’s the kind of scenery that whizzes past the train window:


A Kyoto backstreet:


Ad (or public information poster) we kept on seeing on the subway:

I sincerely hope whichever advertising executive came up with this idea got an award, ‘cos whatever that rabbit’s selling, I’m buying.

In the concourse at Kyoto station:

Did somebody mention… Juice..?
This was more or less next door a fantastic little place that did banana waffles.
There’s another popular dessert café franchise called ‘Beard Papa’ that did Cream Puffs, and their mascot was a little old cartoon sailor guy with a wooly hat, pipe and long grey beard. Yes. Tim’s dessert weakness was well catered-for in Japan.

I dragged Tim to a place called Takarazuka outside nearby Osaka, to the Osamu Tezuka museum, a museum dedicated to Japan’s most famous cartoonist, manga/comic artist, animator, storyteller, doctor and insect collector, Osamu Tezuka. This is me engaging in a hands-on exhibit activity with a bunch of Japanese children where your drawings get turned into a little animation before your very own saucer-sized eyes:

I am actually trying to look insanely happy on purpose, but it worked too well and I just look strange in this photo…

Back in the centre of Kyoto, there’s a street ‘event’ promoting the fact that pirating anime films over P2P networks is evil:

That’s Tetsuwan Atom - Astro Boy – one of Osamu Tezuka’s creations, along with a Gundam robot’s head.

That’s a corner of Nijo-jo castle, just outside the centre of Kyoto. Actually, it’s a bit of the wall, not really the castle. Ho hum.


We went on a day-trip to Hiroshima. Annoyingly, the Manga Library I went to see was closed, and it was pissing it down. We gravitated towards the Peace Park. Here’s the Ganbaku Domu – the ‘Atomic Bomb Dome’:

Which was a civic building – and more or less the only building left standing in the city after an atomic bomb exploded about 600 metres above it. It’s preserved by metal supporting struts which keep it standing, and has rubble from that day at the bottom, untouched.
The Peace Park also has a large mound where all the ashes of thousands of unidentified people are buried, two bells for you to ring for world peace and the souls of the dead, a display of the thousands of paper cranes that children make to commemorate the disaster, an eternal flame, a few monuments including one to all the Koreans who died there (about 10% of the toll) and an education centre.

As the park is quite large, in the centre nearly all the traffic noise is drowned out. It’s quite quiet, which gives it an atmosphere of either serene silence or quiet foreboding.
Looking around the town, you’d have no idea of what happened there.


Off to Kyoto’s temple trail in the hills we went:


Some flash get’s house among the wooded hillsides and ancient temple sites:

The one temple where we paid the admission:

Those are worn stone images of Bhudda. At least once a year, every one on the site has a candle placed on or inside it.
There were fantastic patches of bamboo here and there, but by random luck we’d entered the one place that had an amazing bamboo grove I’d seen a photo of in a guidebook:

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, anyone..? No? Alright, House of Flying Daggers then.

I’m quite proud of this photo:


Another bit of a large temple complex:


And Finally:
At Tokyo Narita Airport there were video monitors around the place showing this cartoon:

Yes! It’s a bunch more of Osamu Tezuka's characters (proof of the man’s profile in this country) in a public service film all about HIV and AIDS! I’ve never seen cartoon characters and un-ironic health issues together in such a way before.
Listen to the doctor, kids.

With that, goodnight. We’ll post a few choice pics from Oz for you sometime soon.

Thanks for reading,

- Lee.

Photo Update: Bandai-san, Japan

We climbed up a mountain and everything. The dormant volcano of mount Bandai, in the erm, Bandai region, central-Northern Honshu (the main island)… We’re gonna to boast about this to anybody who will listen, including you lot.

This is town of Inawashiro,. It’s a slightly run-down ski resort – not sure if the Japanese recession made people stop taking ski holidays – we were there in the off season anyway:

That’s Mount Bandai in the background.

Arrival in our hotel – a ‘Resort Ryokan’, which is a bit of a an oxymoron as Ryokans are small Japanese Inn – is an excuse to drink the complimertary o-chai (Green Tea):

Mmm. Also, there were little complimentary biscuits with poppy seeds in, and a chesnut set in sweet jelly each.

They’d stuck us in one of their ‘Western Style’ rooms – to be honest I’d rather have stayed in a Japanese room with futons and tatami wicker mats on the floor – but we had a television:

Japanese telly is to be avoided at all costs, as it seems to be formulated to either really annoy you or drive you slowly insane.
That said, there is a samurai drama (of varying quality) on at least every night.

Without further ado the next day, we went off to climb the mountain, if we could. We were gonna play it by ear and see how far we could get up, see how much snow there still was around and so on. Ended up going all the way to the top. These are the bare ski fields at the base near the hotel:

Yes, that mountain Tim’s pointing out. It was MAN VERSUS MOUNTAIN.
(We also spent the entire time going;
“Alright, Day one…”
“It’s gripped!”
“Sorted!”
“Let’s Off Road!”)

Tim embracing Samurai tradition:

Notice the chairlift. These were everywhere all up the slopes.

Japan is hikers’ paradise:

There’s no hills, only plains and mountains.

The path to the top ran along the ridge of two smaller peaks, and for a long stretch was picturesquely rocky and wooded like this:


The snow was still around on the flatter parts of the higher areas. Here’s a photo of a little ice lake in the depression next to the main peak:


And up here, the rock was orange and there was sand on the ground, different to the dark volcanic rock down below and above:


Near the summit there were a couple of pipes sticking out of the hillside gushing springwater, with communal enamel cups placed alongside. The water was crystal cold and very good:


We ended up making it to the top. Here’s all the views.
There were some people hang gliding around the summit on the thermals coming off the mountain. It looked like great fun:

There was a little sulphurous lake to the left of the one here:


Snowier ski fields that way:

The summit. 1819 metres above sea level. There was a small shrine here, the second one we’d seen on the way up:

(I had a quick ol’ pray before we went back down again.)
Shack for hikers next to the summit:

They all had proper gear and there we were in street clothes and Action Shoes™…
We got some Japanese folks to take our picture, and half of them dashed into shot, pulling the dog along:

Gawd bless ‘em.

On the way back down, my ‘walking stick’:


Tim’s “arty” photo of a pwitty flower on the ski slopes:


Me in my yukata robe and overcoat, (supplied for every guest by the hotel, per national preference, for lazing about in) supping more green tea:

After the exertions of the day I headed off to the hotel’s Onsen communal hot spring bath to get nekkid with a bunch of strangers. More about that later.

And finally, a relief map of the area that was at the local railway station:

The high bit in the middle is Bandai-San, the mountain wot we climbed. You can see all the lakes in the photos above.

Next: Kyoto!

- Lee.