Holiday Complex - Week 32 (December 23 - December 29)

Holiday Complex

Week 32

Hey, back again.

I'm starting this post on February 6th on the eve of my departure for Hokkaido and a few days of skiing. (And finishing it much later)

Where did I leave off?

Oh yeah, Nikko.

After the hiking the previous day we had a nice relaxed sleep and woke up to, amazingly, a light dusting of snow!

We started off the day by wandering along the path we hiked on the first day. The snow changed the picturesque landscape of the previous day into something even more prone to causing the release of shutter buttons. Winny and Sophie were psyched enough to jump for joy on several occasions. I recorded these historic moments as best I could.

Before we headed to the day's main event we stopped by a sight that we'd seen the day before but had not ventured into due to a lack of time. This destination was the right, esteemed, well appointed Nikko Imperial Villa.

It was incredibly beautiful. The inside of the building was amazing, very old, very serpentine and very cold. The building itself surrounds a number of interior courtyards and still contains many of the pieces of artwork and furniture that were used there by its inhabitants before it became a museum. The rooms were all labelled by their general usage, so we had an idea of how life in a house like this must have been. It was quite fascinating. Strolling along the tatami and seeing places where treaties had been struck and Emperors had taken dinner was awe inspiring.

The garden was even more beautiful. The lighting was perfect, the thin veneer of snow melting away slowly in the cool sun made for an idyllic setting if I’ve ever seen one. We ambled around the garden, stopping for photo opportunities here and there. I took a photo of the villa from across the garden that, in my opinion, may be the best picture I have taken thus far. It was just an absolutely beautiful morning. Although I will always remember how cold my damn feet were in that villa. Seriously, after taking off our shoes and swapping into slippers we were hopping from heated mat to heated mat trying to stay warm. It was to the point at the end where we would actually dash for the next one.

Thank god that finished.

The guards in the villa were very nice too, taking a number of pictures of us on various occasions. It was also kind of cute seeing their stations, each one equipped with its own little foot heater and (usually) a book and a few other accoutrements.

I think I'll probably remember this better than the attraction that Nikko is (world) famous for, the Toshigi shrine. It was our next stop, after lunch and although it was really quite amazing, it probably wasn’t quite as awe inspiring as it might otherwise have been.

Description, ho!

As I alluded to earlier, the Toshigi shrine is a World Heritage site. It was originally commissioned by Tokugawa Ieyasu. He was a Shogun in the sixteenth century and considered to be almost indomitable in his martial and political prowess. Among a few other things, he’s famous for popularizing the "Hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil" maxim as a guideline for the general conduct of citizens in Edo Japan. The shrine itself acts as both a place of worship and the final resting place for the shogun himself.

We wandered around the temples for several hours, checking out the temple complexes. It’s always kind of interesting how the larger temple areas seem to subdivide into several individual but closely associated buildings. It’s never just one huge temple inside a wall, at least as far as I have seen, always a group of courtyards enclosed close by each other.

We checked out an extremely famous carving of three monkeys enacting the “no evil” expression. Made for a great photo opportunity! Afterwards, Winny and I paid the toll to see the "sleeping cat" a tiny (but very famous) sculpture that guards the entrance of the tomb of Tokugawa Ieyasu. The tomb itself lies beyond the guardian neko (cat) up a rather grand stone staircase that leads through ancient Japanese cedar.

There's sort of interesting difference between this section of the shrine and the main, more religion focused section. The shrine area is actually extremely showy for a Japanese shrine. Unlike Thai shrines, the standard for Japanese shrines is cool and reserved. The Toshigi is anything but, as the above pictures attest. Gold adorned gates guard cavities in walls that are etched with dragons cavorting in brilliant colours.

This is very much the opposite of Tokugawa's grave, which is incredibly reserved, very subtle in its design. The simple, earthy tones of his tomb clash somewhat with the bright and very wealthy looking ornamentation of the rest of the shrine. The effect is not unlike stepping out of a rock concert into an alpine field. Well, maybe not that extreme, but close. It’s quite the interesting dichotomy I think...

The rest of the temple was entertaining as well. Sophie found a GIGANTIC sword exhibited in one of the temples. It must have been about 6 feet long, really really huge... It looked like it was meant to be used by a cave troll or something. We all tried a few luck-divining devices, and we all ended up more or less breaking even. After an hour or so, we left the second to last complex for our final destination of import that afternoon.

The last shrine in the complex closed at something like 4:30. We must have made it through the front gates at like 4:29. Our group was the second last through before the entrance closed for the day. We headed up a few flights of stairs to the temple, again placed in a stately grove of ancient cedars. Taking off our shoes for the last time that day, we entered the temple and examined the relics contained there, including a very impressive old set of samurai armour. After a few minutes we departed and were greeted with an absolutely idyllic scene upon our exit.

While we had been inside a light snow had begun to fall, which was perfection itself in my opinion. It had been cold all day and this was just the chocolate glazing covering the cherry of this visual sundae. To make that chocolate swiss in origin, it was just a couple days before Christmas and this was the first snow I had seen this year. It was still to be a green Christmas for me, but at least I’d felt a couple of flakes melt on my skin before that ideally snow-buried day of the year rolled around. It really added an amazing, dare I say enchanting, sheen to the shrines.

But that was pretty much the end of the trip! We left the shrine and hoofed back to the station, pausing to take one last look at the crystalline waters of the river. Then the only thing left was the long ride back to Utsonomiya and Tokyo. What a fantastic trip!

The rest of the week was surprisingly ho-hum. Christmas is not really all that busy in Japan due to the traditional holiday being the New Years break , from the first to the third. It was more or less business as usual during the week baring the speakers I brought into school to rock out some Christmas music and a few small gifts that got exchanged. The Thursday before Christmas I had had my youngest kids class decorate a 4 foot Christmas tree with all the decorations in the school. It was pretty awesome, as the tree came out looking like it was being choked to death by garland and bulbs. I kinda liked it though, and it was cute watching them over engineer the decoration pattern.

Working during Christmas wasn't a huge problem for me either. As my family knows from the past 5 Christmases, movie theatres don’t close down over the holidays. I’ve worked on Christmas day before as well as Christmas Eve. In both cases it was a drag but this year it was actually really good. It kept me distracted from the fact that I was (and am) thousands of kilometres away from home!

Sophie and I celebrated Christmas the traditional way. I brought home a cake on Christmas Eve and we ate it together while chatting about what was going on back home. It was a bit heart-wrenching I suppose, but damn if the cake wasn’t delicious. And the cake I bought was perfect too! The last container in the super market when I went there, and only two pieces! It was quite clearly meant to be.

After work on Christmas day I came home for a few hours of webcamming, first watching my family open up their presents and me opening the cards and other little gifts that had been sent to me. I really appreciated it and it felt pretty close to sitting in my living room, smelling the spruce tree and wadding through mountains of wrapping paper.

I’ll talk about what I received in the next post as it applies to some fairly important stuff.

And that was pretty much it! The weekend was sort of slow, Sophie and I just sort of relaxing after having such an awesome time the week before. That weekend also signalled the start of my winter holiday, so I we didn’t get up to anything particularly awe inspiring. I took Sophie to Shibuya for the first time and we wandered around through the various stores there before walking to Harajuku. I bought a nice hoodie at American Apparel (I think Dylan owns the same one) to replace the grey one I bought the previous year. Unfortunately that grey one got a bit sun bleached while out hiking, so it’s now my OFFICIAL hiking hoodie.

Not much else, other than a slight cold that lasted most of the week. I blame that on wearing a wind breaker around Nikko. Le sigh.

Stay tuned for the next update which includes awesome tales of New Years!

Edit: As I finish writing this it’s February 19^th and I’m about to head out to Nagano for two more days on the hills!

Edit: Check that, February 25^th and I’m back from Nagano. Took a long time to write this one, too many holidays I guess.

Exhibiting the utmost of my alpine ability...

Ian “Mello Yello” Cantello

Photos: 1. The photographer, as shot in the mirror of his hotel room, 2. Sophie and Winny Jumping for joy (Sophie on right), 3. The Abyss, again, as shot the next morning, 4. Winny admiring her well appointed Nikko Imperial Villa, 5. The shot outside the garden, 6. Self-explanatory, 7. The reflecting pool in the garden of the villa, 8. The Villa. Best shot I have taken thus far perhaps, 9. Moss on the stream, 10. Hear no Evil, Speak no Evil, See no Evil, 11. The gate to the Toshigi shrine, 12. the tomb of Tokugawa Ieyasu, 13. Descending from Tokugawa Ieyasu's tomb, 14. Snow over Nikko, 15. The famous bridge of Nikko

Aborted North - Week 31 (December 16 - December 22)

Aborted North

Week 31

Well, Monday to Friday, what is there to say?

Not a whole lot on my front. Sophie had an interesting time I think though. It was her first real chance to bum around the city and get a feel for everything. She spent most of the week investigating, wandering around Koganei park and getting a feeling for being back in Japan. I went out jogging one night of the week and Sophie came along and wandered around the park while I jogged my usual circuitous route. Sophie came back the next day and took a bunch of pictures with her film SLR which I’m really looking forward to seeing when I get back to Canada...whenever that is.

Tuesday night I also had a class canceled, which allowed me to walk back to my apartment and get Sophie to walk around town a bit. We went to a family restaurant called Jonathan’s and enjoyed both Japanese and American food. Good little combination.

After that a bit of shopping and then home for the night.

The remainder of the week passed in much the same fashion until Saturday night, when Sophie had the opportunity to meet my current coworker, Kayoko, and my former coworker Sean, in that most excellent of places, a yakiniku restaurant. We went to Gyu-Shige in Tachikawa, enjoyed a lot of meat, some good rice and then, due to the relatively early end times of the trains, quickly caught a train back to Koganei. We would eat yakiniku later on in the trip as well.

Sunday morning was the beginning of the “holidays” for me. Although I had to work from the the 24th to the 27th, the 23rd was a national holiday on account of it being the Emperors’s birthday.

Excellent.

So we went to Nikko, a small resort town up in the mountains north of Tokyo. It also contains a World Heritage site!

Who was we? Well, Sophie and myself of course, but also the esteemed Winny of Fujiyoshida fame.

We met Winny in Shinjuku and proceeded from there to the Shinkansen station in Tokyo. After the brief Shinkansen ride a transfer onto a local line at Utsonomiya brought us most of the rest of the way there. Bit of a trip in all, a couple hours. It was pretty scenic at least, and I started to get excited when I saw the size of the mountains out towards the edge of the city. I had this relatively ambitious plan to abandon the two girls and head off into the peaks for 2 of the three days we were there. It was nice to finally see some snow up on those mountains too.

The arrival in Nikko was...disappointing to say the least. We ran into a rather odd woman from the Midwest who assumed we were all Americans on the train. We had sort of an awkward conversation with her...which was also kind of strange because she began speaking and then seemed not particularly interested in what we had to say.

It was also a bit remarkable because that was the first time in several months that a foreigner I did not know struck up a spontaneous conversation.

Anyways, upon our arrival at the station I mentioned that I had a couple of books on hiking in the area and I offered to photocopy her a few pages that focused on the Nikko area. I assumed she would come with us to a convenience store to get the copies done...She assumed that I meant I would print it out and then drop it by the front desk of her hotel, which is an extremely haughty assumption on her behalf.

In the words of my generation...fuck that.

The lady kind of disappeared at the station and none to soon in my estimation. We took off down the main road of Nikko towards our hotel which was maybe a 4 kilometre walk away. Ouch.

Nikko is an initially uninspiring town. I forgot that my guide book warned me about this. The main street is lined by some pretty dreary, run down at times, tourist shops. On the plus side, once we passed out of the area surrounding the station, Nikko suddenly became picturesque. We crossed over the river that runs through the town and were awarded with our first impressive touristy sight, the Shin-kyo bridge.

Apparently the bridge was made when a Buddhist priest on a pilgrimage came to the river and was unable to find a way to cross. Two snakes appeared and extended themselves across the river before suddenly vanishing after the priest had passed. The bridge standing there now is not the original, as it has been rebuilt numerous times over the last 400 years.

We continued on the long, long walk to our hotel . Ultimately we found it and it was quite beautiful, Japanese style, and right next to the river. Really amazing. We dropped our bags and headed out for a short walk along the river that looped all the way back through the city. The river is amazing, I’ve never seen water that clear or that blue before. We strolled along taking photos and admiring the scenery before looking for a restaurant. This section of the river actually called the Ganman-ga-fuchi abyss...which is way over dramatic as the photos attest.

I was intent on finding an authentic Japanese place for dinner that night because Sophie was still fresh in Japan and hadn't had much in the way of real Japanese food yet. This proved a harder task than you might think.

Now, I’m not sure if it was the wicked economic recession or the timing of our visit or whatever, but most of the restaurants in the city were closed. We ended up halfway back to the station at a little Korean place that was actually quite awesome. The proprietors were incredibly friendly. We struck up a long conversation with the husband portion of the husband/wife combination that owned the store. He was very genki and quite funny. He was nice enough to write his name in proper calligraphy for Sophie. Very cool.

We headed back home and watched some TV before heading to bed relatively early.

It should be noted at this point that we were sleeping on futons and that this was one of the first times Sophie had ever used this particular kind of bed. She did, what we’ve come to term, “The Rotisserie” all night, meaning she tossed and turned in a rolling motion all night. She even said that she rotisseried into Winny on more than one occasion. Winny is apparently a pretty heavy sleeper because she didn’t even notice it. Crazy.

Next morning we were a bit slow to start but ended up on the bus and en route to Chuzenji-ko after spending about a half hour wandering around an old graveyard that contained the graves of some old Samurai lords. It's an interesting trip up a dozen or more switch backs for terminating at Chuzenji-ko.

Chuzenji-ko is a mountain lake a little less than 1300m above sea level. The lake itself was created by the eruption of Nantai-san a few thousand years ago which plugged the valley allowing the lake to form itself. The way this lava dam was created left the lake with a truly picturesque natural wonder: Kegon falls. A thin finger of water dropping 67m down into a gully that feeds into the river going through Nikko.

We spent some time snapping photos of Kegon before heading out. It had been my intention upon my arrival to climb both Nantai-san and Oku-shirane-san over the course of this weekend.

Unfortunately, the proprietor of the restaurant the night before had informed me that there was already too much snow for the summits of either of the mountains to be reached. I’ll be back in spring to give it another shot, as anyone on my Facebook knows from my series of photos from Senjogahara...

Which is where we were headed. I was going to drag Winny and Sophie along on this hike, which is considered to be rather short (2 1/2 hours). We had a few difficulties in the beginning though. For one, the bus that would have taken us along the 2 hour walk to the trailhead was not running frequently at all, so we just ended up walking there. About halfway along Winny decided she’d had enough (I don’t blame her, it was damn cold) and she caught a bus up to the end of the trail in Yumoto, above Senjogahara.

Sophie and I made the long trek. After basically walking the entire north shore of Chuzenji-ko, and running into the delightful woman from the train from earlier on, we hit the trail head at Ryuzu falls late in the day and started the hike proper.

Senjogahara is a really beautiful hike. The timing of the hike in early winter meant that there was some snow on the ground in places but not more than a few inches deep in any one place. We wandered alongside the river, snapping shots of the falls before eventually hitting the boardwalk over the swamp in Senjogahara.

Things started to get interesting at this point.

The boardwalk resisted the snow a lot better than the ground did...unfortunately it didn’t resist it 100%, which meant that there was a nice thin veneer of ice over much of the boardwalk. This resulted in a really, really slippery ride at times for Sophie and I.

Things were going pretty well and we were making great time. To my chagrin though, the lack of a bus ride from Kegon falls to the trail head meant that it started to get dark earlier than I would have liked. About an hour or so from the end of the trail Sophie and I had to stop and crack out the headlamp and flashlight.

Around about this time I got a text from Winny telling me that she’d got bored of waiting and decided to head home. Fair enough!

Before long Sophie and I hit the second set of waterfalls, the ones that mark the beginning of the last short ascent up to Yomoko and the end of the hike. Up we went...

A couple minutes later we were at the top. We started off on the path that ran to the left of the lake. At this point, the sun had completely set and it was pitch dark without headlamps.
And here’s where it got dangerous.

The path was a bit sloped down towards the lake on the right, which was below a 10 to 15 foot drop. Problem was, the path was heavily, heavily iced over in places. Enough so that we couldn’t walk in a straight line without sliding towards the edge and a short fall into freezing cold water. Add to this the wind picking up and light snow flurries starting to come down which did a great job of reducing vision and making the ice more slippery than it already was.

Fucking fantastic.

So Sophie and I struggled along in these conditions for about 30 mins, at times grabbing each other as we were in the process of slipping towards the edge.

We made it through though, safe and sound and very happy to hop on the bus and warm up on the way back down the mountain switchbacks to Nikko, where we met a tired but relaxed Winny. Which also meant the hotel room was toasty warm! Things for getting everything set Winny!

Sophie and I had bought some food at the convenience store on the way home, so dinner was cheap, but good. I had some kind of ramen that advertised itself as “manly”. I didn’t notice any difference.

So we watched a bunch of Christmas specials and went to bed. As the heater creaked away in the corner a light snow began to fall outside the window...


The end of Nikko with next post dear readers!

Ian "Mello Yello" Cantello

Pictures: 1. Frozen puddle beside the river in Nikko, 2. Alongside the ganman-ga-fuchi abyss, 3. The ganman-ga-fuchi abyss, 4. Nantai-san at sunset, 5. Sophie enjoying the stepping stones right before the rapids in ganman-ga-fuchi, 6. Little pool beside Ganman-ga-fuchi, 7. A massive flock of hawks or something we saw at sunset, 8. Sophie and Winny strolling home after dinner on the first night, 9. Samurai tombs in Nikko, 8. On the bus heading up towards Chuzenji-ko, 9. Kegon Falls, 10. Chuzenji-ko, 11. Ryuzu Falls (beginning of the hike), 12. The path, 13. The river winding out of senjogahara, 14. Senjogahara, 15. Miller's Crossing shot, 16. Oku-shirane range in the far backgrounds, 17. This tree is famous, the only one in the middle of the wetlands, 18. Nantai-san across Senjogahara (mountain on the right), 19. Beginnings of sunset, 20. Sunset, 21. Final light.