The Swiss Alps, Japan-Style

Holy moley! Two entries in the past three days! How could it be!

It was a four day weekend, that’s why, and I had a fun-filled, action-packed, (insert third phrase separated by a dash here) two days.

Yesterday (Monday) I did a little bit of homework/midterm prep in the morning, got sick of it around lunchtime, and decided to head over to Ikebukuro, an area that I hadn’t really been to yet. Of particular interest there was this huge cemetery and the nearby Gokoku-ji Shrine. The area that the cemetery was eerily quiet and sort of looked like it was uninhabited. All that meant for me was that I was pretty much all alone in the cemetery on a beautiful, sunny day. Good times. The cemetery was real neat and much different than a traditional American one. The tombstones were much more ornate and often had bonsai trees and shrubs planted all around them. Also, every tombstone had a bunch of wooden fence-like planks in the back of them that had Japanese kanji written on them. Not too sure what that was (if anyone has any idea, let me know!). Gokoku-ji was also really neat, especially the giant statue of Buddha in the main square.

After that I wandered over to the main area in Ikebukuro which was absolutely packed since yesterday was a national holiday (National Founding Day – I can probably guess the story behind that one). It was wild and crazy and mayhem-like, so I basically walked around for a bit, had enough, and then headed back.

Today, as I mentioned in a previous entry, I headed out to Nikko (all the pictures in this entry are from there, by the way) – a town about 2 hours northwest of Tokyo. Originally, no one I knew wanted to go (everyone was going to Tokyo Disney but a) it was about $50 admission and b) it looks exactly like the one in Orlando, so I wasn’t too interested), so I was going to do it alone. However at the last minute, I heard through a friend that another friend of mine, Marcella, was going to go as well if she found someone else to go with. Bingo!

So we met this morning at 9:00AM and hopped on a train out to Nikko. The ride was a little more than 2 hours long and only $13 one way (there were faster options, but we were in no rush, and on a budget). Nikko is bordered by the Japanese Alps to the west, and beautiful rice patties to the east, which makes for truly gorgeous (I need more synonyms for "beautiful" because I repeat the same words in every entry -- I can't help it, everything is so great!) scenery. The town sort of reminded me of a Swiss town, with its winding roads lined with little shops and the mountains in the distance.

We got to Nikko around 11:30 and walked up the main road toward the shrine area. After a quick lunch, we headed over in the direction of Toshogu Shrine, which is commonly referred to as the most beautiful shrine outside of Kyoto. And they were NOT kidding around when they said that. In comparison to the other shrines and temples I’ve seen thus far, Toshogu was about 50 times more opulent than all of them combined. All of the buildings were lined with gold plating and the roofs were all made out of huge planks of wood and bronze. There were also these extremely intricate carvings all around of Buddhist monks, dragons, and other various creatures. One building has the famous “Hear no evil, See no evil, Speak no evil” monkeys carved into the side (supposedly this where they originated).

Words (and even pictures) can’t do justice to the beauty of this shrine. The combination of the towering, gold-plated buildings, a huge five story pagoda, and the surrounding forest really made for an incredible sight. One of my favorite parts was in this particular area of one of the shrines that had a huge dragon painted on the ceiling. The monk explained that if you clap two wood blocks together in a certain spot of the room, the acoustics make it sound like a dragon screaming. He demonstrated, and sure enough it did (though I’m not really 100% what a dragon scream sounds like, but I’ll take the nice monk’s word for it).

After Marcella pried my away from Toshogu, we decided to go down to see Kendo Falls in nearby Lake Chuzenji. We finally found the right bus, after several wrong turns and several convenience store stops to ask for directions, and headed down (or rather up) to the lake. The bus ride was on this extremely windy road pretty much straight up this mountain. As we got farther and farther up, snow started to pile up all around. To add to that, you could see huge snow-covered mountain peaks all around you. Again, very much like Switzerland.

We got to the Chuzenji after a little while (where it was about 15 colder than Central Nikko), walked over to the falls, and quickly realized that it was totally worth paying 1000 Yen ($8.50) for the bus over there. The falls were not spectacularly tall, but were surrounded by huge cliffs and trees. What really sealed the deal was that all the cliffs and trees were covered in snow and part of the falls had frozen over near the middle. It was quite something. Again, the pictures don’t really do it justice, but it was sort of like a landscape out of Middle-Earth or something like that.

After the falls, we realized we had to head home and officially put an end to the four day weekend. Overall, I would say it was a definite success, though it’s definitely going to be hard to head back to school tomorrow.

Nikko was amazing. It seems like every week I find another place in Japan that makes me say to myself “I have NEVER seen a place like this before and everyone in the world HAS to see this place and it’s amazing and AHH!” and then I outdo myself with another place the next week. Japan never ceases to amaze me and everyone should try to come here if at all possible.

Jaa mata nee and be sure to check out my album from the graveyard/Gokoku-ji and my other album from Nikko on Facebook. I will try to put some on Flickr ASAP.