So after fighting with my webhosting service for a while, I finally got this up and
running and I'm on my second post. I don't know if you can tell who the host is,
but if you can, don't use them as a host. Overall the experience was negative, and
they use pretty much every dirty trick in the book to trap you. I don't know if there is
a better option, but if there is, I'll try it next year.
A couple of friends of ours invited us to go to Miyajima, an island not far from where
we live. It's about an hour by car if you go on the side roads, or maybe forty minutes
if you take the expressway. Japan has an interesting set of tiers of travel: if you
want to get there, you can, and if you want to get there faster, you can pay more.
If you want to drive somewhere, you can do that, you just drive on the roads. The issue
is that all of the roads are what I would consider regular residential streets, so they
have traffic lights and traffic, and they are kinda a pain. However, if you don't mind
paying more, you can take the expressway, which has a toll road system and you pay for
it. Obviously, you only do this if you are going quite a distance, so short trips to the
store or the other side of town don't put you on the expressway, only longer trips. If
you rent a car, word is that you get expressway passes with the car, so it's easier for tourists to
get around that way. The trains kinda work the same way: if you want to go somewhere,
you can take a train, but they stop at every station, and you have to change lines if
if the train doesn't go all the way there. If you don't want to spend the time or the
hassle, you can take a Shinkansen, a bullet train, but you pay more for it. Again,
they have tourist passes for the Shin, but I'm not a tourist, so I don't have one.
So we went to Miyajima, which I've been told translates to "Deer Island" or "Shrine Island."
There are a bunch of deer there, and a bunch of shrines, so 50/50 which one it is.
There is a giant Torii Gate (think orange gateway in typical Japanese architectural style)
in the water near the dock, and that's what this place is famous for, but it was under
renovation when we went, so I don't have any good pictures. You can google it if you
want to see it. There are other things on the island that you might not be able
to google, but I think are really cool, like these statues.
So these are statues of monks, and I think they are supposed to representative of real
people in a quasi-impressionistic kinda way, like how a charactature cartoon looks like
you, but not actually. I vaguely recall a story about how someone didn't want them to
get cold, so they knit them hats, and now all of them have red hats.
Cough-cough-linux-joke-here-cough. But they are truely amazing if you don't know what to expect
because you see a couple and you think, oh, wow, ok, cool, and then you turn the corner
and you see this:
That was pretty wild to sneak up on you when you are just walking along. And that's
not all of them, that's just those that I took pictures of. The guy in the green
hat is not an impression of real person, I don't think, I think it's a different kind of
spirit.
I don't know the importance of this guy, but he's got to be important, right?
As one might imagine about a place that might be called "Shrine Island," there are a bunch
of temples. Here is one that I liked the look of. We didn't go inside, but we walked
around and under it, and the entire thing is lifted off the ground by its foundation.
I don't know if that's a preservation thing, or an errosion thing, or it was just built
that way, but it's a cool looking building.
Speaking of cool looking buildings, here is another that I liked. I don't think it's
important in anyway, I think its just like the visitor center or something. I suppose if
I could read Kanji I could figure it out, but I'm fine just looking at it and not knowing.
The island has other buildings on it too, and some of those are houses, and people live
in them. Here is a picture of that, complete with an example of Japanese zoning regulation,
which is to say no zoning regulation. I'm only kidding of course, I'm sure if you tried
to build a steel mill on the island, someone would have something to say about it, but
it's so different from my expectation of zoning that I think it looks cool. I suppose
you can also talk about the efficiency of space management, and how living on an island
may have built space-efficiency into the culture here, but then wouldn't you just build up? But wait,
no, they have earthquakes, so maybe you wouldn't, but then in other place you do, so I don't
know, maybe it doesn't say anything about that.
Miyajima also has an area that looks like a docklands to me. It has this kind of miniature bay section, and a shrine that goes right up next to that, and platforms that extend over the water. My notes say this is a lake, but it's not because the island doesn't have a lake, so it's got to be the bay thing, right? I don't remember. Anyway, another picture of something that I think looks cool. Kinda the whole point of this blog, I suppose.
Another practice here involves wheels next to pathways. These always seem to come in the form
of staircases, and I don't know if that's a side effect of the area being so hilly, or
if there is something else to that, but there are wheel things where a hand rail might
be, and I guess you run your hand along them and they make noise and you infer some
cultural significance from that. Here is a picture of some:
So that was my first trip to Miyajima. I had a picture of a deer, but it wasn't great,
so I'm not including it. You probably know what a deer looks like. If not, well, then,
I don't know what to tell you.
At the time of this post, SarisonZero lives and works in Japan. He currently has a working website, and is putting away all of his winter things in preparation for an enjoyable spring.