Day 161: Final Wander

I braved the rain today to spend my last day in Japan revisiting some favourite areas and checking out a few new ones. I spent the majority of the day hanging out on the west side of town around Shibuya, Harajuku and Omotesando. This is one of the big style and art areas of the city, and I spent a lot of time wandering through back streets looking through small clothing shops. I had a bit of money left that I wanted to spend since otherwise I'd have to go convert it in Korea, and I find Tokyo suits my fashion tastes more than what I can find at home. This isn't so much because I love Japanese fashion, but there are so many subcultures and styles in Tokyo that I find there's a lot more diversity in what's around. In the end, I didn't buy any clothes because the things I really liked were more than what I was looking to spend, but I did use up the money on a music CD and a few little gadgets.

Along the way there was also a good amount of street art, but almost entirely limited to stickers. I'd say the mix was about 50/50 on local and foreign artists, although with the ones I don't recognize it's sometimes hard to know for sure where they are from by style alone. I'm going to do a quick spotlight on one of the Japanese artists after. In regards to visiting artists, in one of my Berlin posts I included a random sticker of an animalish boy that I just happened to like and didn't know anything else about. In Tokyo I found a few more by the same artist, and that gave me enough information to track down the creator as a Melbourne-based artist called ghostpatrol - should be something to look for when I'm in Australia later. Also a sticker by The London Police stuck in there, who also got mentioned in Berlin.

I next took the metro across town to Akihabara, still looking for any final purchases. Ultimately all I bought in Akihabara was a nice meal, but it's always an interesting place to spend a few hours. My last major stop was at Ueno station, which is a fairly central hub of metro and train lines that I've passed through numerous times, but that I had never really stopped at. I took a stroll through the adjacent park which contains a few museums and a zoo apparently, but nothing I was interested enough in to pay for. I worked my way to a large pond with a temple in the middle next to the park. It seems a bit random to have this body of water full of lilies just sitting in the center of Tokyo, but there's a lot of random here.

I have to get up around 4:30am tomorrow for my flight to Korea, so I'm debating if I should go to sleep at all or just stay up until then. Since I'm getting into Seoul early in the day, and my time there is shorter than I'd hoped now, I want to squeeze in as much as I can, so I should probably at least have a nap for a few hours.

Day 160: Taking it Easy

In total I've been in Tokyo for around 9 days of this trip, so I've got all the most important things checked off my list here. The weather wasn't the nicest today, so other than going on a 3 or 4 hour walk around the area earlier I've mostly taken today off to do some planning and just general lounging around. I've set up my initial accomodations for when I get to Seoul now, and have a rough idea of what I want to do in Korea with the shortened time I now have there because of the rescheduling I had to do for visas.

Tomorrow I'm going to head out early and have one final day of submerging myself in Tokyo, but I'll probably need to go to bed early sìnce I have to get up at 4am for my flight out. I think I'll start off tomorrow back in Harajuku and Yoyogi Park, and see if I can find any street art in that area since it's kind of the center of street culture in the city.

Day 159: City of Samurais

I'm staying in Tokyo again until I fly out later this week, but today instead of staying in the city I hopped on a train for the short ride south to the much smaller city of Kamakura. While Kamakura is a somewhat quiet getaway these days, it was once the center of politics and culture, as well as the capital of the island back in the Kamakura shogunate era 800 years ago.

Kamakura is famous for its temples and shrines, as well as being popular for its sandy beach along the coast. Of all the temples and shrines, the most distinct icon of the city is the Great Buddha of Kotokuin Temple, so I went there early to make sure I found it.

I hiked along a back trail that links many of the sites, and checked out a handful of other places, some which were more interesting than others. One of the temples, the Hasedera Temple, had lovely gardens and was full of hundreds of small statues.

Another cool place was a shrine hidden in a small clearing through a tunnel in the hill. The unique thing about this shrine was it's mystical spring that by legend makes any money washed in it lucky, so that whatever is bought with it will bring back even more wealth.

After all the temples and shrines I wandered a bit and checked out the city beach. It was another hot, sunny day so the beach was quite busy, but it was a nice walk through the surf in the afternoon.

Day 157: Lakes and Waterfalls

I started the day taking the bus from Nikko to Yutaki Falls, over an hour away. The sign by the waterfall explained, in typical bizarre Japanese fashion, how the waterfall was admired for its feminine attributes. I'm not entirely sure what attributes it was talking about, loud and violent?

I hiked up the path to the top of the falls and did a circuit around Lake Yunoko. It's a small lake with an onsen on the far bank. There were quite a few people out fishing on the lake, which was a regular theme throughout the day. The trails in general were all pretty easy and maintained wonderfully, and the scenery was lovely.

Not sure what the fish are, maybe Mike can tell from the pictures. The story of fishing in the area is a bit interesting. Around 100 years ago a Scottish man built a cottage in the area because the landscape reminded him of his native Scotland. He introduced trout into the lakes, which did very well, and later his cottage was converted to an angling and country club that attracted foreign dignitaries and celebrities and really transformed the area into a recreational area.

After completing the walk around the lake I returned to the Yutaki falls and followed the river downstream to another waterfall. The area around here changed back and forth between forest and marshland.

After a bit more hiking I got to the Senjo-ga-hara Plateau and the woods opened up into expansive grasslands.

After the grass I hit forest again, and followed it until I hit yet another waterfall - Ryuzu Falls. Ryuzu is a very long, drawn out waterfall that follows a channel of volcanic rock down into Lake Chuzenji.

A walked for a couple more hours along the bank of Lake Chuzenji, but the scenery wasn't as nice and there weren't any other hikers. Mostly the trail just followed along between the road and lake, but for the most part the lake was obscured by trees so the view was rarely all that interesting.

By the time I got to the town on the shore of the lake it was getting pretty overcast, so I decided to take the bus back to Nikko. Before the bus I stopped for some dinner of local rainbow trout ramen from a small shop. The evening back in Nikko has been relaxing, as all the days have been. The hostel is almost deserted (only me and one other tonight) and there's tons of room - a nice change from Tokyo. Tomorrow I'm heading back to Tokyo for the last few days I'm in Japan - although I plan to do at least one day trip out to another city before I leave.

Day 156: Never say 'kekko' until you've seen Nikko!

With the sprawl of Tokyo behind me, I'm spending a few days relaxing in Nikko. Nikko is a town nestled in a river valley a few hours by train north of Tokyo. It's famous for its temples and shrines, but its also surrounded by beautiful nature and excellent hiking. The word 'kekko' in the Japanese saying (see title) means beautiful, so you know it has a pretty good reputation.

Today I mostly focused on the temples and shrines, but did a bit of hiking in the afternoon. The main group of temples surround the mausoleum of shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu, and a lot of them are very decorative, covered in elaborate carvings and gilding, which is a bit unusual for Buddhist temples.

Perhaps the most famous thing from the entire group of buildings, however, is a fairly simple carved wooden panel on a small stable.

Those are the three wise monkeys, Mizaru, Kikizaru and Iwazaru who together represent the principle of "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil". The monkeys/principle are pretty common in modern culture (Google's "do no evil" derives from it), and the panel in Nikku is thought to be where the entire concept originates from.

There's lots of other things to see around Nikko. Steep forested hills plus lots of rivers tend to lead to some pretty nice scenery.

Tomorrow I'm planning another ambitious hike. I'm going to take a bus out to Lake Yunoko in the morning, then walk the 15-20km back to town. My feet felt fine today, but if I have any problems there are lots of opportunities to get back to the main road and take the bus home again. On the plus side, this time it's mostly relatively level ground.

Days 153-154: One For The Otakus

Yesterday I was still recovering a bit from Mt. Fuji. I actually felt pretty good, but I had a blister on one foot and didn't want to do anything too active for the day. I decided to go back to Akihabara and check out some of the side streets in more detail. Akihabara is one of the weird few places that seems to get more respectable the smaller the side alley you walk down. The main streets are full of big towers of manga and toys generally tailored to men, and most have sizeable adult sections that are very open and prominent. The side streets have some of that as well, but in general they are more little restaurants, electronics shops and random vendors.

The second of those pictures is a shop entirely of vending machines for toys. You know the sort you see where you put in money and a random little plastic bubble with something comes out. I decided to give one a go, since I thought a little Japanese keychain would be an easy souvenir that I could just clip to my bag. I ended up getting a Prince of Tennis (manga/anime) keychain.

I also finally found a Sukiya restaurant, which was my favourite Japanese fast food restaurant when I was here before. They still had my favourite - a bowl of rice with beef and a few onions on top covered in 3 cheeses that melt to make it all one gooey delicious mess.

Today I headed out with somebody else from the hostel with a specific goal in mind, and we ran into two others from the hostel at the train station who had the same idea in mind. We went to Shimbashi station and took one of the private train lines - the same one I used last time I was here to get to the science center. This time we headed to Odaiba, which is a large constructed island that is a mix of shopping and entertainment. A lot of the attractions cost money, but our specific target was free and out in the open.

That would be the full scale Gundam model on Odaiba. The significance of this will mean different things to different people, but the post title really says it all.

That gives a rough idea of scale.

We checked out a few other things on the island (including a brilliant dance performance by the always entertaining Rockabillies), but it was really hot and most things cost money so we didn't linger too long. Instead we headed back to Shimbashi to explore some random events and activities set up by a TV station.