Japan Day 4 - Nikko

Once we knew when Cackett would be joining us on this trip, and that we'd have 4 days in Tokyo before he arrived, I started looking into day and overnight trips from Tokyo. I ended up booking a 1-night trip to Nikko, which is a city about 2 hours directly North of Tokyo by Shinkansen and train. While looking for breakfast in Tokyo station to take on the train, we were lucky enough to stumble on a store selling fresh onigiri (rice balls), which had been on Charlie's list of must eat items in Japan, and are one of my favorites as well. Charlie had one with grilled eel and one with tempura shrimp, and I had two with grilled salmon, my absolute favorite.

Nikko is a historic area, and its main attraction is a national park with a number of shrines and temples. It is now most famous for Toshogu, which is the resting place of Tokugawa Ieyasu, the founder of the Tokugawa Shogunate (this was the final shogunate before the Meiji restoration, and reigned over 250 years of peace in Japan), but was a major center of Shinto and Buddhist mountain worship many years before that. Note: pictures here are a little difficult to place to a particular temple so they might be out of order. Needless to say there are a lot of spectacular temples in the area, and they all have similar but really interesting buildings and features.

      

When we first arrived, we looked into sending our luggage to the hotel from the train station, as the hotel had suggested, but the luggage delivery folks were luckily looking out for our best interest and assured us that taking a taxi would be much cheaper - about $12 total rather than $15 per piece of luggage (we had 4 to send). So, we hopped in the taxi and dropped off our luggage in person, then caught the hotel shuttle down to our first temple of the day, which I believe was the Rinnoji Tayuin Mausoleum, the resting place of Tokugawa Iemitsu, the third shogun of the Tokugawa shogunate. From there we tried to find our way onto a tourist path, visiting Futarasan shrine next.

   

 

From those two large complexes, we embarked on a route around the national park that would end with us at the Toshogu. We started with a climb up a sizable hill, following a map we had gotten at our hotel that had 15 or so sights of interest with short explanations of each. At the top of the hill was a small shrine for mountain worship with a sort of creepy wooden statue in it, but down the other side we started running into a bunch of interesting things, starting with a pretty waterfall. It was quite hot and humid, so we were happy to be in the woods instead of in sun.

   

As we descended the mountain back towards the main shrine complexes, we encountered shrines dedicated to so many interesting things. Some were related to childbirth and fertility, like the rocks that you were supposed to touch for fertility, and the shrine filled with Japanese chess pieces. All of the pieces were rooks, which can only travel straight in one direction, and in this case have come to symbolize a straightforward and easy childbirth. As is often the case in Japan, this meant many copies of the pieces donated by different folks, which made for an interesting and impressive sight. Even more so when you consider that you kind of have to hike to these places, or at least park along the road and walk in, since they are quite small and don't exactly have parking lots.

   

The path we were trekking was a kind of cobblestone, with large rocks set into the ground. It wasn't the most comfortable path to walk, but it looked really pretty, and it was so refreshing to be surrounded by green after our 3 days in Tokyo. We hiked for a few hours, and every 15 minutes or so another shrine or other feature would pop up. Not all the sights were shrines, some were statues or even in one case a giant rock that apparently conferred upon the person praying the gift of better handwriting (Charlie made a stop at this one). Another fun one was the little Buddha statues set under this cliff.

We did finally make it back around the loop to the larger temple complex and visited the Toshogu temple, seeing the grave of Tokugawa Ieyasu, some of the most famous "hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil" monkey carvings, and a plethora of other carved and painted buildings. They also had some cool buildings like one covered in metal plating designed to be fire resistant and protect important government documents held within. Hearing about how many times the wooden buildings in Japan burned down and were rebuilt, this seemed prudent.

After the Toshogu, we finished our loop by heading down to a famous bridge, known as one of the more beautiful bridges/spots in Japan. It really is quite picturesque, though, like many of these famous sites, somewhat minimized by being next to a pretty large road. We made our way up the hill to a bus stop to call for and await our hotel shuttle. I was glad my Japanese skills were still strong enough to make a phone call; it's much harder when you don't have facial expressions and gestures to go with your speech.

Our hotel was a traditional style inn (ryokan), with dinner and breakfast included. The best feature though, was the private onsen bath on the balcony, which overlooked a beautiful garden, of course. When we checked in we had tea with a mochi-type sweet, then headed to our room and had a nice soak in the bath before dinner, soothing sore feet and muscles from our walk all day long. Dinner was its own experience, shabu shabu again but this time half water and half soy milk, which was reeeealy weird. There were also a number of little dishes of who knows what, some were pretty tasty and others got "polite bites". Really, eating at a ryokan is often more of an experience than a real meal in my opinion, but definitely interesting and worth a go.

After dinner I of course had to get back in that bath. It was truly idyllic and worth the splurge. I considered it an anniversary gift to get to stay here, for sure.