Dazaifu

It was a really nice, sunny Sunday today so Ena and I rode our bikes all the way down to Dazaifu, the ancient capital of Kyushu. I cycled down there by myself last fall, but Ena has been pretty excited to give her new bicycle a spin so we made the big trip.

It is actually not a particularly nice bike ride to get to Dazaifu, through a lot of ugly urban sprawl, but once you get there it is a great place to go for a bike around.

We stopped at the ruins of the old government headquarters from the 7th century, its in a really beautiful setting with a lot of trees and flowers:
There isn't much left of the buildings, just the foundation stones. Ena thought the lotus flowers were the best part:

After that we went to the two neighboring temples, which are really nice and also date from the 7th century. Because they are a bit off the beaten path they get spared the crush of the tourist buses that hit the main shrine in town and are pretty pleasant, quiet places even on a beautiful Sunday:
Our bikes out front:
We also stopped at a little hilltop shrine:
After that we went into central Daziafu and stopped at Komyozenji, a really beautiful little Zen temple with one of the most beautiful gardens I have ever seen. Its a pretty quiet place despite being in central Dazaifu and you can just sit and enjoy the tranquil garden:
Wouldn't you like to have a room with a view like this in your home:

One of my favorite things about Dazaifu is that everywhere you go there are these tremendous ancient camphor trees with massive trunks. Some of these must be close to a thousand years old. This is Ena in front of one of the bigger ones:
We made an obligatory stop by the main shrine, Dazaifu Tenmangu, which was packed with people. I really like the gate to the shrine:
Through which you can see the main building at the other end of a big courtyard:
This guy is in the gate's guardhouse:
There are some picturesque arched bridges on the way in to the shrine:
After a day cycling around Dazaifu we came back to Fukuoka and decided to have dinner in town. We stopped by Canal City, which we hadn't been to in a while. We went in through an entrance we hadn't used before and saw something really cool: 200 TVs displaying a bunch of random crap:
And we had a camera, AND we had sunglasses! Oh the fun we had posing for pictures:
Great way to end a great day!

Dazaifu by Bike

I went to Dazaifu yesterday by bicycle. I have been twice before but both times by train so I hadn't previously been able to see some of the sights in the areas far from the station.

The First stop was the Mizuki water fortress. I had seen an exhibit about this at the Kyushu National Museum when I visited with my parents in March and had been kind of interested in going to take a look. It was built during the 7th century at a time when the Japanese were worried that the Tang dynasty in China was planning to invade. In order to protect Dazaifu (the capital of Kyushu at the time) they basically built a huge moat stretching across the likely invasion route. With the excavated earth they built a wall behind the moat.

Today the moat has long since been filled in but the wall still exists. You wouldn't know what it was without the signs explaining because it just looks like a forested area:
The heavily treed area is where the earth wall is.

This is another picture of it, its quite pretty:
One weakness which the Tang Chinese were never able to exploit is that the Kyushu Kokudo expressway runs straight through the fortress wall, creating a weak point that could have been disastrously exploited had Japan ever actually been invaded:
After the water fortress I went to the ruins of the ancient seat of government at Dazaifu. Nothing remains of the buildings except for the foundations, which were unearthed by archeologists after the war. Still its a nice site on an open plane in front of the mountains:
Unlike the water fortress, the government building ruins have a small water feature:
After that I visited two neighboring temples which were quite pretty and almost deserted at the time I visited:

Dazaifu

Yesterday we went to Dazaifu, which is a big shrine not too far from Fukuoka. These are some pictures of it above. It is dedicated to Suguwara no Michizane who was a member of the Imperial court in Kyoto exiled to Kyushu by some of his political enemies about 1200 years ago. He died a couple of years later and thereafter a whole string of natural disasters hit the country. Opinion at the time was that the disasters were the result of Michizane's spirit's wrath, so they dedicated the shrine to appease him.

Anyway, its an interesting enough place, though as the Lonely Planet guidebook says its only got about half a day's worth of stuff to do. We went on a Sunday, so it was quite crowded, though it would probably be a lot less so on the weekend.

There is also a Zen temple near the shrine that we visited called Komyouzenji. Its got one of those gardens with the finely raked gravel. This is a picture of it below. There is a funny story about this picture. While I was taking it I started backing up trying to get all the scenery into the frame. I'm going back....going back....going back....and then all of a sudden I hear the one sound that you do not want to hear when you are walking in a Zen garden: "Crunch".



Yes, you guessed it, I had trod upon the gravel, leaving a size 10 and a half footprint for all to see.

Fortunately though I hadn't stepped on one of the really finely raked parts of the garden, where every little pebble has been painstakingly placed into the right position. I think they deliberately refrained from putting much effort into this portion because they knew it was the part that idiot tourists were most likely to step in when trying to take pictures.