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Friday 25 July 2014

Uji and Fushimi Inari

Last Friday was my last exam so I celebrated the next day by throwing myself into tourism whole-heartedly. We still had class on Monday, though, so I couldn't go far out of town. In fact, that's probably for the best, because there are still so many places inside Kyoto that I haven't gotten around to visiting yet, and the time I have left to visit them is diminishing rather quickly...

Uji is a town south of Kyoto famed for its green tea. Some parts of the town are full of the scent of the green tea wafting out of the tea shops. There is also a temple called Byodo-in that is famous for being the temple on the 10 yen coin! Until my friend told me this, I hadn't even realised that there was a temple on back of the coin...

 Can you see the design? It's exactly like the temple!
 The temple itself was created in the Heian period, and is said to represent Paradise (it belongs to the Pure Land Buddhism sect, which is all about getting to Paradise). There are lotus flowers all around the gardens, which are also linked to paradise. Inside the main hall of the temple, surrounding the statue of Amida Buddha, there are intricate carvings of what paradise might look like. Actually they just finished construction works on the main hall, so we got to go in and see it for ourselves. The tour groups filing in and out of the hall may make it hard to take a good picture of the outside, but it was exciting to go inside when it was our turn, all the same. The paintings in the hall are quite faded (in some areas non-existent). However, there's a really good museum on the grounds where you can see a stunning full-colour replica.
 They've had a lot of trouble with fires over the last 1000 years (the building is made of wood after all) so a lot of tiles on the property have symbols for water carved into them, as a protection charm.

After the temple we stopped by this lovely tea hut.
 Matcha tea, Uji Green Tea, and mochi.

If that wasn't enough, Uji is also the setting for the last 10 chapters or so of the Tale of Genji (the 11th century novel, if you remember way back I went to the grave of its author, Murasaki Shikibu). So we also managed to fit in a trip to the Tale of Genji Museum. It's a good little museum, displaying various items from the Heian period and pointing out where each part of the story takes place in the town. The highlight was possibly the 20 minute film of the Uji parts of the Tale. Very dramatic, lots of weeping on verandas. Also the little cinema itself is a fun design- you enter over a bridge, with dry ice creating a mist around your feet.

In the evening we headed over to Fushimi Inari shrine for the yearly festival. The actual festival was the next day, but the night before red lanterns line the buildings and the red Torii corridors. People also buy papier mache fox masks and run about looking awesome.

 We got there in time to see the lights turn on!
 It was a gorgeous red sunset to go with the red lanterns. Also it's hard to see here, but what's happening in the picture is that the people on the stage are playing traditional music and singing, while old ladies in kimono dance around them. Slowly more and more people started to join in too. The music continued all through the evening (and possibly the same guy was singing the entire time!).



 There's a section where two "corridors" of torii (i.e. lots of red torii built really close together) run parallel, and this is what you could see of the other one through the gaps in our own corridor.
 As we were leaving we noticed this swallow nest under the eaves of a tourist shop! I think they have some kind of special protection here, or maybe people just like them and tolerate the mess, but there are swallow nests all around the city. There's a nest under somebody's balcony near the tram station, and they've put up a whole bunch of nets to catch any chicks that might tumble out.

I'm so glad I got to see this festival, it is quite magical.

And after that, my term finished, and I went to Tokyo! So expect more pictures of the trip very soon, it was fantastic also.

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