Nikko

Day trip two was much more of a success than the Fuji one. I went to Nikko, a small town that’s a world heritage site chock full of temples and shrines. It’s also about two hours outside outside of Tokyo, depending on what trains you take. Time to get my money’s worth out of that rail pass. As it turns out, this trip is PERFECT for the pass. I took a bullet train to Utsunomiya, then a local line from there to Nikko. Without the pass, that trip costs $50 one way, but it’s free with it J

Once I got to Nikko, my first order of business was lunch. Everyone else was taking the buses up to Nikko National Park, but it was only a mile walk up the main drag, so I decided to hoof it and grab a bite on the way. About halfway there I saw a restaurant I read about that supposedly puts Japanese twists on Italian food. I decided to give it a go, and the results were quite tasty, if somewhat odd. No English menu, so I just pointed at a picture of some spaghetti dish on the counter. It turns out it was spaghetti in tomato, onion, and shrimp sauce. Normal Italian…except not quite. The shrimp were those teeny tiny dried shrimp I posted

photos of in Tsukiji. Once they were in the sauce they rehydrated…then kinda dissolved. It was good, but INTENSELY fishy. I also got a nasty surprise when I realized the ‘cheese’ on top of the pasta was actually yuba, the protein skin that forms on top of tofu as it’s solidifying. It’s a staple of the vegetarian Buddhist diet in the area, and actually not bad if you know what to expect.

After that, I continued meandering up to the heritage site. Not much to report about the trip up, other than that I was a little disappointed at the Shinkyo Bridge. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still pretty, but photoshop was apparently liberally used on the photos I’d seen of it.

One buddhist shrine, some assembly required. The entire structure
had been wrapped in a warehouse, then pretty much
entirely disassembled

Once there I tried to figure out what I wanted to see. That’s the weird thing about going to religious spaces for religions you have absolutely no common history with: a lot of it looks cool, but I just don’t know what’s important and why. For example, the first place I checked out was the Rinno-ji temple, which has basically been torn down and is being rebuilt due to rotting wood. We could still go inside to see their relics and treasures, and they had a collection of three giant buddhas, as well as dozens of smaller carvings and statues and relics. All of it was quite pretty, but I really just didn’t understand enough of what it was to know if it was significant or not.

I decided to save the piece de la resistance of Nikko—the Toshogu shrine—for last, so I hoofed it past the shrine to a smaller one, called Futarasan-jinja. I was REALLY glad I did, ‘cause when I got up to the shrine, there was some sort of ceremony going on at the main temple. It was really cool, even though I had NO idea

what was going on. I arrived halfway through, and on one side there was a group of older Japanese men in suits, on the othere there were the priests and nuns of the shrine, sitting in front of a wall of gifts and donations that I assume had been given over earlier in the ceremony. Lower priests would bring a wrapped prayer to the high priest who would bring it to the altar, say a prayer, have a moment of silence, then place it with an offering. A minute of silence would pass, then a crier would yell three times, and the process would repeat. This went on for a bit, then everyone stood up and proceeded to march out of the temple. Some priests grabbed a dragon costume, some grabbed staves with wooden with symbols on the end, others grabbed some incense burners, and others still grabbed…the altar? Didn’t realize that thing was mobile. Then everyone started marching out of them temple, bearing everything towards Toshogu, so I fell back.

Monkehs!

I wandered around the gardens, then up the hill to a Buddhist temple, where there were I saw a bunch of statues of Buddha’s different forms, along with several of Shinto gods. After that, I went back to see Tosho-gu. The Shinto shrine was founded to honor Tokugawa Ieyasu, Japan’s first shogun. The shrine was WAAAAAAY over the top, which I suppose is what happens when your family have absolute control over the country. As with everything else in Nikko, parts of it were under repair, but it was still quite cool to see. Pretty much everything in the shrine had been independently declared a national treasure of some sort, and I could see why. One of the buildings here is also the origin of the ‘hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil’ monkeys, which was cool to see.

After a few minutes there I was very much shrined out, so I started walking back to town, even though I had a ways to go before my train home. I got about halfway to the station and found a coffee shop that had free wifi as well as a patio, so I set up there to enjoy some sun, coffee, and sake. I killed time there and chatted a bit with one of the owners about our travels (and sports, oddly enough. Whenever I mention I’m from Seattle, people always get excited and ask about the Mariners. One of their top players for years, Ichiro, was Japanese, and last year he moved to the Yankees). I meandered the rest of the way back to the station, grabbed a train back to Utsunomiya, and had dinner at the station there. I got soba again, and had another confusing moment where the waitress brought something over, explained what it was in Japanese, and I just smiled and nodded and acted like I understood what was going on. I then caught my train back to Tokyo, then the metro back to my hotel.