One of my favorite places that we got to go back to was Fushimi Inari Taisha, the main Inari shrine that has over 30,000 daughter shrines across the country. It is one of the oldest Shinto cults in Japan, as the goddess Inari is the patron deity of rice, agriculture, and manufacturing. Inari shrines are characterized by bright vermilion gates and statues of foxes, which are considered guardians and messengers of the shrine. If you have seen Memoirs of a Geisha, this is the shrine where Chiyo goes running through the tunnel of vermilion torii, or gates.
Anyway, we returned to the Inari shrine on Thursday and walked the entire four-kilometer path on the hill/mountain, a good portion of which is enclosed in a tunnel of the aforementioned vermilion gates.
Friday: The Golden Pavilion
On Friday, we had initially planned to go to Sentou palace, another imperial property that requires you to sign up for a tour in advance. However, I walked into the living room on Friday morning to heat water for my instant coffee and saw snow falling outside. I ran back into the room and shook Joel awake.
me: Joel! Wake up!
Joel: Mmm.
me: Dude, wake up! It's snowing!
Joel: Mum? Wha?
me: Snowing! We're going to Kinkaku-ji today!
Joel: Huh - snow? Mm. Okay.
I finished my freelance work for the morning and we dashed out the door, in a hurry to get to the Golden Pavilion before the snow turned into rain and melted away.
Rokuon-ji, ubiquitously referred to as Kinkaku-ji (the "Golden Pavilion") is one of the most famous and popular attractions in Kyoto and probably the whole country. The temple's star attraction is a pavilion covered with gold leaf on an island in the middle of a lake. The pavilion is essentially a massive tourist trap, thronged with people of all races and nationalities trying valiantly to take pictures of themselves with the golden pavilion in the background, with no one else's face or umbrella in the shot.
Despite its super-touristy nature, the pavilion is said to look its best under a coating of fresh snow, which is why Joel and I had been waiting for a snowy day to visit. Kyoto has been unseasonably warm this winter, so we were a bit nervous that we wouldn't get any at all. Luckily, fortune smiled upon us on Friday, so we grabbed a quick lunch and jumped on the bus to the pavilion. By the time we started traveling across the city, though, the temperature had started to climb above freezing, so the snow on the pavement became a nasty, muddy slush. By the time I got on the bus, my boots were half-soaked; by the time we slogged through to the temple itself, they (and my socks) were completely wet. On top of that, somehow my phone's Bluetooth function got turned on, wearing the battery down and truncating our picture-taking window (my phone won't let me take pictures once the battery level has dropped below a certain point). Still, we managed to get a couple of fantastic shots before it ran out.
Saturday: Nara
I was super excited to go to Nara while we were here in Kyoto. I was sorely disappointed at not being able to go last time (Joel was sick for that visit, too...notice a pattern?) and it is only about an hour away by train, so we decided to take the day to explore Japan's first permanent imperial capital. Nara is most famous for the Daibutsu, or giant Buddha statue (cast of bronze!), in Toudai-ji, and for the deer of Nara park. Like probably every other non-Japanese tourist that goes to Nara to feed the deer, I had Snow White-esque visions of giving cookies to shy and bashful fawns.
The brochures in Nara even tell you that the deer "bow" to ask you for the deer biscuits. My theory is that the Japanese know better because they have clips from anime episodes to warn them about what it's really like.
Anyway, we grabbed lunch at a ramen shop and headed to the park. Nara got a lot more snow that Kyoto did, and most of the park is covered in gravel, so the ground was, once again, a wet mud-slush. My tennis shoes, which I wore because my boots were still wet from the day before, were almost instantly soaked. Aside from that, walking around the park started out well enough: we wandered into a temple and, upon exiting, soon saw one of the famed Nara deer. Much like when I saw my first monkey at the Monkey Park in Arashiyama, I squealed about the deer being right there and proceeded to take a flurry of pictures. As we wandered on, we caught sight of a stand that sold shika-senbei, or "deer biscuits." After watching a Japanese woman buy a packet of them and run away as she was chased by hungry deer, I decided that I would let Joel try his hand at feeding them first.
Alas, that did not save me.
As you might have guessed, I got bitten - on the bum - as I filmed Joel feeding them. You can see that they quickly move to accost a group of Chinese tourists after Joel runs out of biscuits.
We continued to make our way toward the famed giant Buddha and soon came upon another senbei stand. This time, Joel somehow persuaded me to buy some and try to feed them myself. What followed was nowhere the saccharine Disney-like experience I had envisioned. As soon as the vendor handed me the biscuits, I was surrounded by about six deer, most of them bucks, who proceeded to headbutt me, try to stick their snouts in my jacket pockets, and bit me again on the hip. Twice. One of them nipped me so hard it left a bruise (which Joel amusingly referred to as my "deer hickey" on Facebook when we got home that night). In the end, I dropped the cookies on the ground and ran, much like poor Tsukasa in the Lucky Star video embedded above.
We dodged the rest of the deer and headed to Toudai-ji to see the massive bronze Buddha (and let me tell you, it was massive), and then made our way to Tasuga Taisha, a Shinto shrine nested in a sacred forest with a wonderland of mossy stone lanterns.
All in all, I really enjoyed Nara, but I will think twice before getting friendly with any more deer.
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