The Day the Sun Almost Died

We interrupt this broadcast for something momentous!

On May 21st, Osaka experienced an annular solar eclipse.  Something like this hasn’t been seen here in 280 years.  That means the last Osakans who saw something like this in 1732 swore their allegiance to the Shogun; and the people who see the next one in 2292 will either be directly uploading holograms of it to each other’s neural nets, or feral lizardfolk fearing that devils will eat up the sun.  Depending, of course, on the future of humankind.

I joined my lady and her friends after 6 AM, and we got onto the roof of their apartment.  At first, we were real disappointed at all the overcast, because it made our eclipse glasses mostly useless.  It turned into a real blessing thoug, as it meant not only could we take easy point-and-shoot pictures of the event, but look right into the damn thing.

In small doses.  It still was the sun, after all.

6:47 AM. Taken by putting the eclipse glasses over the camera lens.

 

7:09. This is when I realized the clouds meant I could take pictures without the filter.  This is what it looked like to the naked eye.

7:18

 

7:23

7:27. Approaching alignment, a slight “diamond ring” effect can be seen

 

7:28. The moment of annular eclipse.

 

7:31. Another ring effect as the moon exits the eclipse.

 

8:18. One last photo through the filter before the moon gets on with its regular life.

 

I’m not really sure how to follow all that up.  I just can’t believe I was there for it.

Hiroshima 3- Sacred Isle

Let me start out by apologizing.  I’m not really the blogging type.  It’s not something that comes naturally, and I so often neglect to post anything, let alone anything of interest.

So where was I in my last post?

There I was.

The seas around Hiroshima are full of little islands.  One of the larger ones off the coast is Miyajima, an island with a small town and a long history as a religious site.  It’s also very famous as one of the most scenic places in Japan.

Itsukushima Shrime is the most famous part of the island, dating in its present incarnation to the glory days of the Taira clan of samurai in the 12th century.  Depending on the tide, the torii gate is either on a sandy beach, or off the shore out in the water.  It is definitely the most well-known shrine gate in all of Japan.

The island’s town is full of wandering, semi-domesticated deer who pretty much have the run of the place.

The complex of Itsukushima itself, in its tidal shallows. At highest tide, not only the gate, but all those buildings stand on stilts over the water.

Behind the shrine, you can see Misen, the ridge-like mountain in the center of the island.  Feeling adventurous, we all elected to scale it by foot.

Denizen of the mountain

There ahead is the peak…

 

Near the summit is a small Esoteric Buddhist temple. In the tower burns a constant fire, its smoke filling the air and slowly blackening the building itself.  To simply walk inside is a serious trial.

Small sub-temples and altars follow the step winding steps to the summit.

At the top, this slowly rusting platform, tended by an elderly man selling victuals.

 

Island country

On the other shore is the city Hiroshima

Hiroshima closer

The city center at max zoom

Back in the village below. The tides are beginning to roll back up.

 

Within the pillared halls of Itsukushima Shrine itself.

 

With the sun descending and the village going to bed early as small villages do, we took the ferry back into Hiroshima.  Not to settle down quite yet, however, but to partake in some extreme karaoke.  After all, in my opinion you have to drink in a city late at night, before you can really tell what it’s like…

Hiroshima 2- Lordly Trappings

Hiroshima’s geography is a little different from other Japanese cities I’ve visited.  For instance, Osaka sits on a plain with a slight, but visually apparent, shelf-like incline towards the sea, with the straight and easily navigable Yodo River connecting it to Kyoto further inland.  Kyoto sits in a valley basin right at the confluence of two rivers that flow from the mountains.  Kobe sits on a very narrow, steeply inclined ribbon of land between the Rokko mountains and the sea.

Hiroshima, though, sits right on a river delta that fans through the city, filling downtown with myriad channels of water and fingers of land, rather than a single river channel.  Furthermore, the edges of the city are dotted with little round mountains and hills.  It’s a very complex landscape.

Hiroshima Castle sits a bit up the delta, in the northeast corner of downtown.

The castle burned down in the nuclear attack, and was restored in the 1950s. It's now a museum detailing the history of the city, castle, and the confusing succession of lordly families that controlled it.

From the top, one can get a bit more perspective on the city.  Hiroshima is a truly major city, but like most Japanese cities, it isn’t very built up vertically, with only a handful of high-rises.

Looking south to the harbor

Roughly east, in the direction of the main train station

North to the suburbs and mountainous inlands

Roughly west, to what looks like a dense residential district

A bit to the east is Shukkei-en, the 18th century garden estate of the Asano lords.  It’s a relatively small plot, but endlessly faceted and layered with details.

fisk.

When the city was bombed, Shukkei-en was used as a mass grave before being restored.  In a place like this, I can only assume the dead sleep well.

Hiroshima

At risk of getting whiplash, we turned around and headed much further west for Hiroshima, a city I’d visited years ago, before I paid too much attention to cities.

Hiroshima, 1.1 million people, Japan’s number eleven.  Hiroshima has a history dating back to the end of the 16th century.  Like Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya, Hiroshima has been roughly where it is as a Japanese city since the Tokugawa age- around the lower end of the top ten.  That is to say, not one of the country’s titanic cities, but still among its major population centers and definitely the biggest city on the main island west of Kansai, by far.

Unlike Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya, though, Hiroshima was not controlled by the ruling house of Tokugawa.  It was originally founded by Mori Mitsunari, a powerful ally of Toyotomi Hideyoshi who more or less ran the main island west of Kansai.  Toyotomi’s loyalists lost out when Hideyoshi’s general Tokugawa Ieyasu decided to seize the country after his master’s death.  The Mori clan was not eliminated, but they lost Hiroshima and their fiefdom was reduced to roughly modern day Yamaguchi Prefecture.  Hiroshima, its fortress, and its lands, were parcelled out to other loyal vassals of the shogun.

Incidentally, it would be the the domain of Choshu, ruled by the old Mori clan, that played a prominent role in the abdication of the house Tokugawa.  Some might say, a slow-burning grudge come to fruition…

After the end of the feudal era, Hiroshima rapidly modernised as an industrial and maritime city with a certain military connection.  It was in the neighboring city of Kure just around the bay, after all, that the Empire’s Yamato class battleships were built.  This was one of the pretexts for the nuclear attack on the city.  Hiroshima, though, recovered quite fast from such a lingering blow.  The city had already surpassed its prewar record population by 1955.  Through growth and merger the city expanded and passed a million people for the first time in the early 1980s- making it one of Japan’s newest megacities.

The most famous symbol of the bombing is a 1910s expo center and office building that survived the explosion occurring nearly above it.

There was apparently a good deal of controversy about what to do with the husk of the building in the 1960s, a time when all war-torn Japanese cities were furiously building over again, even at the cost of their own heritage.  Some expressed the opinion that the wreck should have been demolished and paved over as a sign of reconstruction, but with time the approach of keeping it as a monument has become much more widely embraced.

There's more to recovery than simply erasing the past, after all.

So what’s Hiroshima actually like as a city, anyway?

I’ll start by comparing it to other major regional centers I’ve visited.  Tokyo, center of Kanto, capital of Japan, and greatest metropolitan center in the world, has great pride in its global power and relevance as a world city.  Osaka, largest city of Kansai, Japan’s “Second City”, has perhaps even greater pride in its pure Osaka-ness, its local spirit.  Nagoya, largest city of the region in between the two, Japan’s “third city” and “Central Capital,” seems to have none of that.  Tokyoites and Osakans (that’s what I’m calling them) tend to be pretty proud of their cities and talk them up at least a little.  Nagoyans tend to say they’re from the prefecture of Aichi, rather than specify Nagoya.  There’s plenty in Nagoya, and it’s on the rise the same way Tokyo and Osaka are now (though to a lesser degree).

Still, Nagoya carries a rarely-mentioned “uncool” vibe in Japanese circles.  My family, upon visiting it, immediately compared it to Milwaukee.  Not in a physical way (Nagoya is far more populous, dense, and well-off), but in its atmosphere of aloofness, to an almost “indie” level.  Nagoya keeps to itself, saving its secrets for the initiated and the truly curious, and leaving outsiders to wonder what’s so special about it, anyway.

Hiroshima, though, falls into the Osaka category.  It’s a regional center with a hell of a lot of local pride, a baseball team beloved no matter their win/loss record, a freewheeling and uninhibited nightlife, and more than Osaka, remnants of the past.

For instance, an extensive and well-traveled streetcar system!

 

It really makes you think about the strength of people and communities.  This was a city that truly endured what some writers might call the “post-apocalypse”, and has not only thrived, but kept more of its heritage than many other places after the world war.

Nagoya Castle

Another dawn rises on a megacity…

The last time I visited Nagoya Castle, I was in a little hurry and didn’t have time to visit the grounds themselves.  That is the best part of the castle, I can now say.

Long after Nagoya Castle ceased to have significance as a center of feudal power, the grounds continue the tradition.  What were once the residences of nobles and courtiers are now the office complexes of the postwar Japanese bureaucracy.  Pretty much all of Aichi prefectural government is housed in the old castle grounds, in an odd moment of the past being the present.   I didn’t take any pictures of the offices because there was nothing to take- a soulless sprawl of early postwar office blocs.  Trust me, nothing to see.

I was here for the real history.

Nagoya has long been considered the “Middle Capital” of mainland Japan.  That goes back to the founding days of the Tokugawa, when it was their directly-controlled fortress city watching over the highway between Osaka and Edo.  Back then, the city had roughly 140,000 people, making it one of old Japan’s greatest cities.  Nagoya, though, was important even before that.  Osaka was the very last stronghold of the House Toyotomi, whom Tokugawa Ieyasu needed to destroy to control Japan.  Not knowing when he would defeat Toyotomi, Ieyasu founded Nagoya Castle as a westward bulwark against them.  In the end, the Toyotomi were destroyed at Osaka in 1615, in a battle Ieyasu personally fought, and was rumored to have secretly died in.

So there’s a lot of history here too, and it all ties together.  Just as Tokyo (Edo) has been Japan’s first city since the 17th century, and Osaka the second, Nagoya has been Number Three since just as long, with only a few fluctuations in the 20th century.  And it all ties back to this castle, which was an estate of the warlords besides its role as a military fortress.

During the United States’ campaign against Japanese civilians, Nagoya was heavily targeted by air assault, and the ancient castle was incinerated (among the city’s many losses), to be rebuilt at the turn of the 1960s.  With study, the old estates were restored.

As one of the warlords’ directly owned capital fortresses, Nagoya Castle had many amenities, chief among them the gardens.

One of the unique centerpoints was a “dry pond”, with no water, only stone.

The castle gardens contained their own artificial nature, with little mountains, caves and grottoes.

 

The complicated contours of the garden apparently also hid the entrance to a secret passage through the walls, by which the lord could outwit his assailants in a siege and escape the fortress.

 

 

Honestly, those were the last pictures I took in Nagoya, despite having another day and doing plenty of wandering.  I revisited all the great sites I saw the last time.  Not that they wouldn’t be great to look at again, in another light.

No, simply that there’s a certain kind of simple joy to being able to experience something without constantly trying to commit it to data, always judging your world by how photogenic it is.  The first time I visit something, I let my camera take it in.  The second time I leave for my senses alone.

Trust me though, there’s much more to see.

City With a Laser

I hadn’t visited Nagoya in almost a year, and it was about time I brought someone along.  It’s pretty close to Osaka metro by local express lines, so we booked it.  I was excited to travel to another region in the country for the first time in ages with fellow travelers.

So Nagoya.  Japan’s Third City.  The Middle Capital.  2.2 million people.  Not nearly as built up structurally as Tokyo or Osaka, but featuring some major towers.

I featured plenty of architecture shots in my last big Nagoya post, but left out this building just across from the main train station. It felt a bit plain and stodgy to me. Now I learn it's Japan's fifth tallest. Also, I've started to appreciate plainish buildings that use their materials well. I have a thing for that lustrous stone, and really like green glass.

Of course it pales to the Mode Gakuen Tower. Talk about a hell of a vocational school.

Nagoya Central Park. Lady implores the Not Eiffel Tower.

Which is Nagoya Tower, finished in the mid 1950s when the great Japanese cities were building steel frame towers as symbols of industry.  Turns out you can go up.  Time to try and get some night photos of the city.

Looking west to Nagoya Station, across the busiest and most built-up parts of town, Sakae and Fushimi.

Looking south down Central Park, eventually to Nagoya Harbor. You can see a green laser firing out of the park. Yes, Nagoya has a laser. More on that later.

Out north, over Nagoya Castle to the city's suburbia.

Looking west to quieter parts of the city

So more on that laser…

It’s an installation in the park that seems to alternate between shining straight up, and…

right at the tower.

Talk about strange occult symbolism.  Is there a Chukyo Illuminati Chapter?

The laser’s really strange too.  The way it propagates through the air at distance gives it a relatively constant thickness in your perspective, no matter how far away the beam is.  See the last picture for instance.  It’s almost impossible to judge perspective based on the beam alone.  I’m not sure who came up with the laser idea, if it’s permanent or a temporary exhibition, if it has symbolism or is just supposed to be neat, but…hey, welcome to Nagoya!

Nunobiki in Winter

I’ve had a hell of a time.

For two weeks, me and my family ran around Japan, wearing our legs out wandering cities, visiting holy sites, climbing mountains, and even partying from time to time.  Now that they’ve gone back to Milwaukee, part of me enjoys having the time to get things done by myself.  A lot of me misses having them around in the same town, though.  Not even necessarily to meet with every day, just to know they’re carrying on nearby.

I’m not too lonely, though.  I know they’ll be back.  In the meantime, I get to sort through the evidence.

I took them to a lot of places in the area I’ve posted pictures of already.  That means, for the most part, I didn’t take repeat pictures.  There’s something enjoyable about visiting something a second time, when you can just take it in without having to try and capture it all the time.  Still, there were a few moments that were different enough from my last visit to warrant a few shots.

 

Nunobiki Falls in Kobe was one of them.  I hiked this trail before in the late spring, and again in a summer downpour with my sister.  Winter, though, affords one a very different view.  This was on our second full day together, after a sampling of Chinese street food.

 

At all times of year, one can look back down on the center of Kobe from the mountainside.  Winter air, though, is so much clearer- this time I could see across all of Osaka Bay!

The heart of Osaka, seen all the way from Kobe

 

The Two Towers:

The Dark Tower: Osaka WTC, Japan's third tallest, on a lonely island in Osaka city harbor

 

The White Tower: Rinku Gate, Japan's 2nd tallest, all the way across the bay in Izumisano, near the airportThe lake at the top, a more somber scene in winter, still gorgeous

Late Christmas

So I’ve been rather quiet lately.  Work is done for the year, my visa and registration hurdles have been soundly navigated, and I’ve even cleaned up the old place.  Apart from that, I’ve been doing a lot more nothing lately.  Even Christmas, I spent around the house.

Why?

Because real soon, things are about to get real crazy.  My family arrives from America tomorrow, for a two week visit.  I’m getting my fill of doing nothing now, because we’re going to be chewing up the scenery real soon.  Expect more posts.

Gods and Beasts

I have my haunts, the places I frequent when I want to travel just a little out of my city.  Kyoto and Kobe’s city centers, and the mountains that are within walking distance in both cities, provide me with peace of mind when I want my urbania tinged with the odor of incense and soil.  Occasionally, I want to travel a little further afield without having to reserve a train seat or book a room.  I’ve been to Mt. Hiei before, the mountain in the northeast of Kyoto that served as the headquarters for the massively influential Tendai branch of Buddhism.  I had never before visited Hiei’s counterpart, Mt. Koya.

Koya was the great headquarters of Shingon Buddhism, counterpart to Tendai.  Both are considered “Esoteric Buddhism”, with a complex array of gods, incarnations, and rituals, an arcane mysticism that appealed to the inner circle of the ancient imperial court.  Both arrived in Japan from India via China at the turn of the ninth century, and the founders of both Japanese sects were friends who turned into rivals over matters of religion.  While the Tendai at Hiei turned into fearsome power players with a hold on Kyoto, Koya built a reputation as a place of die-hard mystical mountain men.

In an age when walking distance from the emperor measured your power, Hiei was right up against the capital.  Hell, this was an age when people might walk for days to reach their destination, and even I could make Hiei from the old palace in under two hours.  Koya, though, was isolated.  Kukai, the founder, wandered through the wilderness searching for the right place to found the first temple, until two mountain gods in the guise of white and black dogs lead him to Koya.  To this day, it lies in a rugged, sparsely populated, and largely undevelopable mountain region of Wakayama Prefecture to the south of Osaka Prefecture, more than an hour south of Osaka city.  This worked to Koya’s advantage-　it didn’t become as entangled in plots and rivalries as Hiei, and thus was spared the destruction brought on the former, and other temples like it with a military arm, when the warlords of the 16th century conquered the country.

So a holy mountain, counterpart to Hiei, but a mite more of a journey.  I had to go.  I took a train a good hour south from Osaka, passing the mountain ridge that separates it from Wakayama Prefecture, crossing the broad Ki River Valley flowing towards Wakayama City, and entering into a rugged land of short but steep mountains, dense forests, cold mists, blue waters, and little villages packed into rocky valleys.

Hiei is almost impossible to miss in Kyoto, a stern black pyramid of a mountain that juts out of the land around it.  Koya, on the other hand, blends into a landscape of like mountains, tall but not very prominent in its surroundings.  It was hard to tell whether I was really on Mt. Koya or not, until I was already at the top.

My trailhead started here, at the unpopulated dead end of the line serving Koya

Up to another unknown mountain. Japan's trees change in prolonged stages. Some have already gone bare, some at their autumn peak, and some not due to change for another month or so.

The trail was dense, dark, and very quiet, always threatening to rain but never quite starting to pour

Out of nowhere, I found myself on a road twisting around a ridge.  I turned a hairpin corner to find this:

Not what I expected at all.  See, Koya isn’t just a temple, it’s an entire town of about three thousand, tucked into a bowl-like depression on the top of the mountain.  It’s got schools, banks, supermarkets, and even a couple bars and liquor stores for the non-monastically inclined.  Hiei in its golden age was like a city unto itself, but lost that status after Oda Nobunaga destroyed it in the 16th century.  Koya, I guess, has retained its status as an independent community long after temples stopped being a political force in Japan.

Ancient tower in the middle of a children's playground

The town of Koya is utterly full of monasteries. This was just the most distinctive of many I saw, founded in the 17th century.

Downtown Koya

Koya is not a single temple so much as a notion spread throughout a town, but there is a core to it.

This is the gate to Kongobuji, one of the largest and most significant temples in Koya, established not in the original founding in the 9th century, but at the end of the old imperial order in the 12th century.

Kongobuji contains a large complex of gardens

…including apparently the largest, or one of the largest, rock gardens

The inmost sanctum, though, is next door- a relatively simple and unassuming, but dark enclosure.

The great tower of Koya, definitely the largest Buddhist tower I have ever seen

Here in this little forest are worshipped the gods who led Kukai to the top of this mountain land.

The town of Koya retains a lot of its former character. Settlement ends here at the ancient temple gate, the town entirely within the old holy precincts. Beyond- nothing but wilderness.

...what awaits literally on the other side of that gate

The foreboding road to the cable station

I could imagine this landscape exactly as Kukai had- besides the road, nothing around me to suggest the warmth of humanity, a land reserved, even a thousand years later, for gods and beasts.  A land where there is nothing for you unless you can take or build it for yourself, as the founders did.

I bring you a tale…

…the tale of a town.  And in this town, there was…

A BOX!

Looks like someone ordered the 1:1 scale model set...

…and in the box was arguably Japan’s most famous castle.  For it was undergoing renovation, you see.

The discovery that Himeji Castle was closed to the public was a real disappointment for me when I first heard.  As a student, I missed out on visiting Himeji right before the renovation.  It will take a little while, so it might be a year before I can actually venture inside.  Still, I felt Himeji was the last truly major city of Kansai I’d yet to visit, so I had to go nonetheless.

A little background.  Himeji lies along the southern coast of Hyogo Prefecture, a bit west of Kobe, Hyogo’s capital.  Much like Hikone, whose castle I mentioned in an earlier post, Himeji was a decent city by Edo age standards.  Like Hikone, it was the center of a domain awarded to a samurai who had served the Tokugawa in their decisive battles.  Himeji was a relatively respectable city for its time, but further grew in stature in the early 20th century as the city expanded and industrialized.  As a port and factory city, it was one of the US Army Air Force’s extensive bombing targets.  Much of the city was destroyed, but through strange fortunes the castle was not.  One napalm canister even broke through the roof of Himeji Castle, but failed to ignite.  Now a city of 540,000 , Himeji continues to be the fourth significant city of Kansai, after Osaka, Kyoto, and Kobe- as far as metro area is concerned.

You know me and cities.  I had to see what it was like.

First stop, though, was the castle, since it has closing hours and the city doesn’t.

Despite the fact Himeji was not a directly Tokugawa controlled city like Osaka or Nagoya, the Himeji fortifications are huge- indicating the esteem the house of Ikeda was held in for their service.

The main keep was, as mentioned, closed for renovation.  A section of the western castle wall, however, had served as the detached residence for the lady of the domain, and this was open.

A corridor connecting quarters inside the wall

The quarter section of the western wall, where the lady would have made her home

The keep may have been closed to visitors, but one could still travel up the scaffolding to see the actual structure in its state of maintenance.

The top of the scaffolding also affords a good lay of the land.

Looking west. At the bottom, you can see the enlarged section of wall I just came from, where the lady's quarters were.

South to the center of Himeji

So what is Himeji the city like, then?

Well, it’s a very typical Japanese middling sized city in a less urban surrounding.  The downtown buildings are all postwar and nondescript, with no skyscrapers.  The city center is dense, but very limited in area, so if you walk a block or two you feel like you’re in more of a country town.

The difference between Himeji and other cities of its size I’ve visited is in the people.

 

There was so much foot traffic for a city this size, and so many young people.  When people speak of a Japanese population decline, what they don’t know is it’s not entirely new.  The rural areas, on balance, have been losing people since the 1950s.  What’s new is that many regional cities, medium sized cities in the middle of relatively rural areas, are now losing people like never before.  Himeji, though, is holding on to a certain vitality, with a good deal more youth and new families than the national average, and a very slow but steady growth pattern.

 

I’ll gladly return when the castle’s open.