Blog of Sean

Thursday, April 7, 2011

Kyoto the Trip! Part 4 - Shopping Arcades by Night

After spending the afternoon of our second day visiting temples, we headed back into central Kyoto to experience some of the city life.

One nice thing about Kyoto is that if you get tired of looking at the historical stuff, the downtown area has a bustling and vibrant feel to it. In the Kawaramachi area between Shijo and Sanjo where our hotel was located there are numerous arcades packed with interesting shops and interesting shoppers. We headed down into these in search of dinner and whatever else they had.

I love shopping arcades. Its a bit hard to convey the experience of walking through one in words or even pictures, so I made a 3 minute video of walking through the crowded and lively Nishiki Koji Dori arcade that you can watch here.

As you can see from the video, these arcades are a million times more interesting than the bland shopping malls that, regrettably, have been popping up all over the place here in the past decade or two. It is one of the things I'm kind of disappointed with Fukuoka about. We've only got one shopping arcade that is really busy -Shintencho - and it isn't particularly big. The other ones (like the one in Nakasu leading to Canal City) have a kind of dead feel to them.

Kyoto's shopping arcades though are brilliant. They stretch on in all directions for as far as the eye can see, packed with shoppers all the way. They have tons of independent little shops. Some good, some not so good, but all interesting. They barely get a passing mention in most guide books (if that) but I think they are one of the best attractions which Kyoto has to offer.

Bizarre features are not in short supply. Like airplanes being used as facades atop entrance ways:

Giant burritos, or Om-rices or whatever this is:

And mechanical crabs overlooking gift shops:

Some of the shops look quite old:

While others have a refreshingly "shiny" feel to them:

There are a number of tiny temples facing onto the shopping arcades here and there:

Enter their gates and you are transported in mere seconds from the hustle and bustle of the bright shopping arcade:

To the lonely and eerily quiet sight of an urban graveyard only metres away:

We ended up having dinner in a Yakitori restaurant that night. It was quite good, though I didn't take any pictures and can't remember the name of the place. Much merriment was had though. We actually spent quite a bit of time over the following couple of days wandering around the area.

Continued in the next post.

Related Posts:
- Kyoto the Trip! Part 1 - Tofukuji and Sanjusangendo
- Kyoto the Trip! Part 2 - Kiyomizu Temple and Maruyama Koen
- Kyoto the Trip! Part 3 - Ryoanji and Ninnaji
- Kyoto the Trip! Part 5 - Antiquing Kyoto Style
- Kyoto the Trip! Part 6 - Cute Buddhist Statues
- Kyoto the Trip! Part 7 - Ohara and the Wrath of Mount Hiei
- Kyoto the Trip! Part 8 - Kyoto Station vs. Kyoto Tower

Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Kyoto the Trip! Part 3 - Ryoanji and Ninnaji

The second day of our trip saw us hitting a couple more UNESCO world heritage sites in the afternoon - Ryoanji and Ninnaji.

First we hit Ryoanji. Its a spacious temple in the northwestern part of the city, not far from the more famous Kinkakuji (which we skipped this time around). Some of the cherry trees were in bloom in the gardens:

Ryoanji is most famous for its Zen rock garden:

Created in the Muromachi period by the monk Tokuho Zenketsu (I've got the brochure in my lap as I type this), its a pleasant place to sit and relax for a few minutes, assuming it isn't besieged by crowds when you go.

The temple also has a large, regular garden that features a surprisingly large pond:

We tried some tea near the gate:

After leaving Ryoanji we headed over to Ninnaji, which is nearby. Though not quite as famous as Ryoanji, I really enjoyed Ninnaji and would rank it as one of the better places to visit in Kyoto.

Its a bit different from most temples because it also served as an imperial residence at one point in the distant past and thus has a lot of palace architecture in addition to the usual temple buildings.

The main gate is guarded by some fierce looking deities on the right:

And the left:

After entering the main gate, on the left is the entrance to the old imperial palace:

This is the best part of Ninnaji, though apparently it is only open to the public at certain times of the year, so check ahead.

The insides feature winding external corridors that take you through some quite pleasant gardens:

The garden features what I think must be the best use of borrowed scenery I've ever seen in a garden, the top of the five story pagoda in the neighboring temple grounds:

The interiors of the palace buildings featured impressive paintings:

We sat outside and rested our feet next to one of the rock gardens:

While the roofs of adjacent buildings shaded the gardens beneath from the afternoon sun:

After enjoying the palace we headed over to the temple part of Ninnaji, which features a five story pagoda (my favorite kind of pagoda):

There are several temples in Kyoto that have five story pagodas (I know Daigoji and Toji have them as well) but Ninnaji was the only one we saw on this visit:

After that we headed to the gate:

And began making our way back towards central Kyoto, for our first real night on the town in the big city, which will be the subject of the next post.

Related Posts:
- Kyoto the Trip! Part 1 - Tofukuji and Sanjusangendo
- Kyoto the Trip! Part 2 - Kiyomizu Temple and Maruyama Koen
- Kyoto the Trip! Part 4 - Shopping Arcades by Night
- Kyoto the Trip! Part 5 - Antiquing Kyoto Style
- Kyoto the Trip! Part 6 - Cute Buddhist Statues
- Kyoto the Trip! Part 7 - Ohara and the Wrath of Mount Hiei
- Kyoto the Trip! Part 8 - Kyoto Station vs. Kyoto Tower

Kyoto the Trip! Part 2 - Kiyomizu Temple and Maruyama Koen

In the afternoon of our first day in Kyoto we headed over to Kiyomizu temple in the Higashiyama area. We've both been there a few times. It was one of the first temples I ever visited in Japan in fact, I rang in the millennium there way back on January 1, 2000.

Its always crowded. The big platform overlooking the city is the main draw:

We stood and enjoyed the view for a moment. Damn that double chin!:

We had lunch there at an outdoor vendor, sitting on fold up tables overlooking the valley:

We enjoyed our Udon. The coke was for me:

The best part of Kiyomizu isn't the temple itself but the winding alleyways leading up to it. They are one of the few places in Japan where you can actually see unbroken stretches of traditional looking architecture. They are crowded, have a mercantile atmosphere to them and are in no way indicative of what such streets actually looked like in the Edo era, but they are still quite fun to walk around. The shopping street looks quite nice with the cherry blossoms in full bloom too:

These eventually led us to Maruyama Koen, a park in the middle of the Higashiyama area of Eastern Kyoto. Cherry blossom season was just beginning and it is the centre of Kyoto's Hanami activity, so it was bustling.

We sat down for a snack amongst the colorful vendors:

After that we did a bit more wandering around before crashing exhausted at our hotel (on that, see future post on the hazards of choosing the cheapest night bus to Kyoto). The following day's activities are detailed in the next post.

Kyoto the Trip! Part 1 - Tofukuji and Sanjusangendo

Ena and I just got back from a 4 day trip to Kyoto, the city with 2,000 shrines and temples and a bunch of other stuff. We had a great time. 4 days is perfect for Kyoto - long enough to see and do a lot of stuff but not long enough to get bored by it all. We were genuinely sad to leave at the end, the sure sign of a good holiday.

I think I've been to Kyoto about 10 times and Ena lived there for a brief period, so we were both pretty familiar with the city already. The last time we were there was in 2004, just a few months before we left Japan so I could go to law school. We were pretty bummed (and scared) at the prospect of leaving Japan at that time and made a promise to each other that it wouldn't be the last time we visited Kyoto together. A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then, but we were finally able to make good on that promise.

The first day we arrived at about 7:30AM at Kyoto Station, having taken a night bus from Fukuoka. We were exhausted but excited and hit the road right away. Our first stop was Tofukuji temple.

We had never been there before, but its a really nice one which I highly recommend to Kyoto visitors. The approach leads you through a quiet neighborhood with attractive gardens and architecture on both sides. Then you arrive at a little wooden pedestrian bridge which provides a sweeping panoramic view of the temple grounds:

Unfortunately we visited about a week or so too early as the leaves on the maple trees hadn't opened yet. By the end of this month, the view there would be perfect.

The temple grounds are spacious. After entering you are faced with numerous large halls in the precincts to the right:

And the snaking, covered wood corridors leading through the garden to the left:

The corridor takes you to the Kaisando hall perched on a secluded little hill top. Its an interesting piece of architecture:

The structure forms a 3-sided courtyard, with the hills making up the fourth "wall". One side has an immaculately raked pebble garden in a checkered pattern:

And the other a more conventional Japanese garden:

Leaving the Kaisando, the route takes you down a path into the valley with the maple trees, from which you get a good view of the supports holding up the wooden corridors:

After that you can wander the grounds with the main hall and other large temple buildings. The Sanmon gate is very impressive:

Satisfied that we had seen everything Tofukuji had to offer, we then set out for our next destination: Sanjusangendo.

Sanjusangendo is one of Kyoto's more famous temples. It is basically a very long hall (120 metres) built in the 12th century whose claim to fame is that it contains 1001 statues of a Buddhist deity:

Photography in the hall is prohibited so I don't have any pictures of them, but I can assure you that it is a lot of statues.

This was our first time to visit the Sanjusangendo, and I have to say that it didn't live up to the hype. Its hard to get excited about looking at 1,001 copies of anything, and that is pretty much all the temple has to offer. I'm more of a "temples with pretty gardens that make for a nice stroll" kind of guy. Sanjusangendo has a tiny little garden, but you can walk through it in about 60 seconds:

I have to stop taking couple shots that expose my double chin like this:

It also doesn't help Sanjusangendo's case in my books that the entranceway is one giant sheet of asphalt:

About Blog of Sean

This is a blog. My name is Sean. It is my blog. Hence the name.

Its a blog mostly about Fukuoka, Kyushu and Japan. Because that is where I live. All three of them. They are very blog-worthy places. Hence my choice of subject matter.

I hope you enjoy the blog. Its got a lot of stuff in it, as you can see from the gargantuan list of labels just below. Look down, you'll find it. On the right of the screen. Yeah...thats it. Lots of stuff, eh? Yup.

Feel free to browse at your leisure.

NOTE: It has been a while since I updated this blog. Mostly because I left Fukuoka in 2012 and decided to wrap it up, blogs are so much more fun to write when you live in a place like Fukuoka (and have the time).