Japan Day 10 Mt fuji

Day 10, August 20, 2010

Our penultimate day! Having sort of burnt ourselves out on the city of Tokyo, we had arranged yesterday to go on a day trip out of the city to the famous Mt. Fuji! Mt. Fuji is the tallest mountain in Japan, weighing in at about 12,500 feet. It holds significant cultural value to many Japanese as it is the residence of one of the major Shinto gods (a goddess, actually). We woke up at about 6:30 and made our way down to the southern part of the city to meet up with the tour group and they picked us up there. Our tour guide was really interesting – very serious about her job, yet quite funny. She talked a lot about Japan and its culture on the way there and back, which was actually really nice to learn about about.

Fuji is about 120 KM outside of Tokyo, so we had a little over 2 hours of a drive. Unfortunately when we got there, the mountain was just covered in cloud, so our view was limited to a few hundred feet! We weren’t too disappointed though, as the air quality was superb and it was actually nice and chilly there, an excellent break from the heat of Tokyo (and the heat of Seoul). There were a great many hikers who were starting off their journey up the mountain from our stopping point (we stopped at station 5, about 2000 meters up; the top is station 10, and it takes from 4-6 hours to get there by foot – cars cannot go past station 5).

Luckily our tour was by no means finished! We drove for about an hour to the beautiful mountain town of Hakone where we first had lunch and then took a gondola up towards the top of a beautiful mountain. There we found a bunch of hot springs – REALLY hot springs, one of the only examples of volcanism in Japan (although there are 3000 hot springs, perhaps this is the most visible on the surface?). It looks (and smells) a lot like portions of Yellowstone park, for anyone who has been there. In some areas the scent of sulfer is extremely strong. We walked up towards a little hut at the top of the trail and purchased “black eggs”. These are eggs that have been hard boiled in the hot springs, which turns them black. Legend has it that eating one will make you live seven years longer, two will make you live fourteen years longer, and three will make it so you’ll never see a doctor again. We bought a five pack and tasted one while still near the mountain (they were SO HOT); tasted pretty good actually!

From the volcanic, we took a “pirate” ship (a ferry) across the lake in the middle of the town. It was GORGEOUS, set right in the middle of the mountains. It is fed by a spring, which makes it so it does not freeze during the winter, which is pretty interesting. It turned out to be a really lovely tour and we’re glad we took it.

We arrived back in Tokyo around 8:45 and found a really funky Japanese-Korean food place (although it didn’t seem very Korean). A lot of different kebab dishes and our waiter spoke English and had some good suggestions for us. A fantastic last dinner in a fanstastic food country

We leave tomorrow early afternoon, so we are hoping to get one more sight seeing objective accomplished in the morning.

Japan day 7

Day 7, August 17, 2010

We started off the day at Sanjusangendo, having been told it is one of the best things to see in Kyoto. It is famous for the 1000 arms of the Buddha, so going in I was expecting literally a thousand arms. We had also been told that there are 1000 faces, and that people try and find a face that looks like their own amongst them all. So, I expected a Buddha image with a 1000 faces on it. What we found though was simply REMARKABLE. We entered this temple, and we couldn’t really get a scope of it from the outside (I wasn’t even sure it was where we were supposed to be as it was labeled “Worship”). We take off our shoes and go in, and we are greeted by literally 1000 almost life-size, 900 year-old, hand-carved statues. There were 500 on either side of a 3.3 meter tall hand carved Buddha statue. Each of the 1001 Buddhas have 42 hands, each holding a tiny symbol. They are all slightly different, but at first I thought they were all bronze casted statues, it was really hard to imagine 1000 nearly identical statues being hand carved. The scope was simply amazing, and the fact that they survived for so long is, as I said before, remarkable. There were no pictures allowed, but perhaps I’ll find some on the internet elsewhere.

Unfortunately there was very little air circulation within the temple, so it was sweltering hot (I think today was the hottest day yet of the trip and its been pretty hot). We decided to take it easy and made our way to the Kyoto station to purchase our return bullet train tickets to Tokyo. Our plan for tomorrow? Get back to Tokyo and head to Tokyo Disneyland! We’re very excited, they have an adult oriented park called Tokyo Disney Sea. We’ll see how it is!

Anyways, after getting our tickets we headed over to the Kyoto Manga Museum, which is part massive Japanese comic book library, part elementary school museum (its in a 100+ year Japanese elementary school), part art exhibit, and some typical museum fare thrown in. It was pretty neat; I particularly enjoyed the exhibit that explained manga and its history, I hadn’t realized it had been so important to Japanese culture and for so long (it has been enjoyed by youth and adults for over a century in Japan).

We then made our way back to Miho’s house for dinner, where her dad prepared a kind of “Japanese pizza”. Its sort of like Korean “pajeon”, a fried batter dish filled with vegetables and seafood. This dish also was mixed with soba noodles and a couple strips of bacon for good measure. Top it off with a hearty/sweet/spicy sauce, mayonnaise, seaweed powder, and fish flakes and your good to go! It was really good!

It was sort of an easy day (hey, it was hot!), but a really nice finish to our time in Kyoto. We’ve had a real blast hanging out with Miho and we’re just super lucky it worked out (one that she happens to live here, two that she took such good care of us, and three that the festival happened to be happening while we were here). We could easily stay a few more days and still have many a thing to do, but alas, our hotel is already booked back in Tokyo and Miho is actually leaving for Zambia in a few days. Well, good night and see you back in Tokyo!