Daytrip

比叡山 Garden in the Sky

This week I’ve had the pleasure of having my parents visit me. This is particularly good for my touristy activities which, aside from the odd temple visit, have been on the back-burner because of university work – by the time I’m done in the afternoon I’m a bit too tired to go out. Having my parents visit has made me realise that I can go out in the afternoons after lectures instead of going back to my room and napping away the valuable sunlight hours (it gets dark around 5:30 now). While we’ve visited several places that I’d been to before this week, I’ve also seen some new parts of Kyoto. On Sunday we took the train from Demachiyanagi Station (出町柳駅) up to Mount Hiei (比叡山). I had seen that you can get cable cars up the mountain and I’d been keen to check it out for a while.

The train to Yasehieizanguchi station (八瀬比叡山口駅) only takes around 15 minutes and costs 240円 (£1.30). The train takes you out of Kyoto to a small town surrounded by mountains with the Takano river (高野川) running through it (the same river carries on through Kyoto). The cable car is very close to the station and runs on both weekdays and weekends – I think its more frequent on the weekends, running every 20 minutes or so. While we waited for the cable car dad and I had a look around the town, walking up to a monument that appears to be celebrating the founding of the ward that is occupied by Mt Hiei. In any case, it was a pleasant (very short) walk up to the monument and back. The walk was through a small forest of maple trees which will look spectacular in a few weeks when Autumn hits Kyoto.

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We then got the Eizan cable car (叡山ケーブル)followed by the ‘Ropeway’ (叡山ロープウェイ) up to the top of the mountain. The cable car is essentially a tram up the mountain while the ‘Ropeway’ is a suspended cable car. The first cable is very long and definitely necessary and the second covers the short distance to the top – it is possible to walk up to the ropeway from the top of the cable car, it probably wouldn’t take that long but it is pretty steep. The cost of a return ticket from the bottom to the very top, including a ticket to the garden museum, is 2100円 (£12). It is definitely worth getting the ticket with the garden museum included (if you plan to go) at the bottom of the mountain as the museum ticket is only about 400円 extra and at the top the tickets cost 1000円. The time between the cable and the ‘ropeway’ is only about 5 minutes (so efficient) so you can’t really spend a lot of time looking at the view before boarding (obviously you could wait and get the next ropeway if you wanted to).

The views from the cable car and the top were spectacular – you can see the whole of Kyoto from the cable and when you get to the top you can look over the other side of the mountain at Lake Biwa (琵琶湖), the lake over the mountains to the East of Kyoto. It’s worth a journey up the cable for the views alone, we were lucky to go on a clear day so we could see the mountains fading into the distance – they looked like giant rumpled up cloths stretching into the haze, it was spectacular.

An interesting aside about Mt Hiei: while I was looking up more about the mountain this evening I learned that some monks do a thousand day marathon walk around Mt Hiei over the period of 7 years (doing stints of 100 or 200 days at a time), covering the same distance as walking round the whole world! Only 13 monks have completed this since WWII. Here is the article on it if you want to check it out, pretty interesting stuff.

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Very near to the top exit of the ‘Ropeway’ is the entrance to the ‘Garden Museum’ (ガーデンミュージアム比叡), a European-style garden designed to reflect the works and subjects of Cezanne, VanGogh, Renoir and other impressionist painters. At this time of year it was amazingly colourful and quite the contrast to the stark rock and tree oriented Japanese traditional gardens. They had also dotted around prints of the aforementioned artists’ works, probably to evoke a more ‘European’ atmosphere and remind us of the source material. As it is at the top of the mountain you can enjoy the flowers and the views at the same time. In a few weeks it will be even better with the Autumn colours – there was a bit of red but you can tell that in a few weeks the mountain will be cloaked in the robes of Kyoto’s Autumn.

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They also had a special Halloween theme at the garden which meant that they had some pretty large pumpkins (big orange ones, not tiny green Japanese ones) and ‘trick or treat’ posters dotted around the park (which looked pretty out-of-place). Japan has gone pretty Halloween-crazy in general – there have been Halloween decorations in all the shops for weeks and the Halloween-party-period seems to have started last weekend and carries on over this weekend coming. I hate to think what the buildup for Christmas will be like – I’ve already seen a guy dressed as santa (though I fear it was a Halloween costume) and some snowy wreaths out and we have over 2 months to go!

P1000974P1000933I’ve just noticed they didn’t do their pumpkins properly – they seem to have used marker pens to make the faces instead of cutting them out. Sub par.

The gardens were fantastic and fairly empty – a good trip away from the maddening crowd. Most people travel up to Mt Hiei to visit the temples (which I will do next time!) and totally ignore the garden. There is also a cafe (Cafe de Paris, no less) which does really nice cakes, proper tea (with milk), coffee and probably does a decent lunch.

We headed down just before sunset (the last cable down is at 6:04) in search of dinner, enjoying the view of Kyoto on the way down. I would allow around 2 or 3 hours to properly appreciate the gardens and the view. Combined with one of the temples you could easily spend a whole day on the top of Mt Hiei.

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伏見稲荷 The Gates of the Mountain

On Wednesday after class I went with some friends to Fushimi Inari-Taisha (伏見稲荷大社), the shrine with thousands of Torii (鳥居) which are the red gates that you see at all shinto shrines in Japan. If you don’t know what one looks like never fear as by the end of this post you’ll probably be sick of them. This shrine is really beautiful and well worth seeing for anyone visiting Kyoto. It was also featured in the film Memoirs of a Geisha. Entrance is completely free!

The closest train station is Fushimi-Inari station on the Keihan line (there is also a JR station nearby) so access is pretty easy. We walked from the station towards the shrine, passing a lot of souvenir shops, sweet shops and even a cat cafe (yes those are actually a thing). As you approach the shrine there are no more cars and the streets are lined with shops and street vendors, including an entire shop dedicated to Hello Kitty which had some terrifying cat toys that moved when you squeezed them hanging from their tails outside. (Note: when I went back a week later the hello kitty shop was boarded up – it seems it went out of business!)

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I bought some Yatsuhashi which is a traditional Kyoto sweet made of rice flour, sugar and cinnamon. I bought strawberry and chocolate Yatsuhashi – the outside was chocolate flavour and the centre, which would normally be sweet bean paste, was strawberry flavoured bean paste. It was actually pretty nice; though it didn’t taste that strongly of strawberry I could definitely taste the chocolate. It has quite a glutinous texture and was very sweet so perhaps not for everyone but as I have a sweet tooth I enjoyed it.

P1000307P1000309Fushimi Inari-Taisha itself begins with a temple complex that includes all the usual Shinto features – a shrine to pray to and give money, a fortune stand and somewhere to buy charms. The lower temple is big for a Shinto shrine, probably because at new year millions of people come to pay their respects there.

Fushimi Inari-Taisha is a Shinto shrine dedicated to Inari Okami (稲荷大神) the kami of foxes, rice, tea, fertility, sake, agriculture and industry as well as general prosperity – clearly a good guy to visit at new year if you want all your bases covered for the year ahead. As Inari is the kami of foxes there are fox statues all over the shrine often wearing red bibs, though the internet informs me that there is no special reason for them wearing a bib beyond it being a rite.

Note: I am referring to the deities of Shinto as kami (神) as directly translating the term into ‘god’ applies a western idea of what a ‘god’ is which does not really fit into the Shinto concept – kami can be seen as a cross between a god and a spirit rather than a concrete entity that is omniscient and all-powerful. If you are interested in reading more about Shinto there are several good introductions to the topic, I got most of my info on Shinto from the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Japan by Bowring and Kornicki.

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After passing through the lower shrine complex we reached the feature that makes this shrine famous and striking – the Torii. These red gates line the path from the lower shrine all the way up the mountain to the various shrines that make up the complex creating a tunnel of red around the path. The sun shining through the gates onto the path was beautiful. Each gate has a date written on one side and the name of the company that paid for the gate on the other side – thousands of gates have to come from somewhere.

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The whole complex spans 4 km up the mountain and takes about 2 hours to walk all the way round. We did not do the whole complex as it was starting to get dark and we were all fairly shattered from university. There were shops selling drinks and snacks up the hill as well as vending machines though as you get higher up there are less shops. There was even a restaurant which had traditional tatami seating – you sit on the tatami mats on the floor rather than on chairs.

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We went up to the first viewing area which was spectacular – you can see all of Kyoto from the mountain. We went in the afternoon around 4pm and the sun was shining off the buildings. Though the mountain does not face East I imagine the sunset shining off Kyoto would be beautiful.

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We made our way back down the mountain and took a different way back. This was a good idea as it gave us the chance to see more of the shrine and a less visited part, even though at one point we thought we were lost. The shrine’s entrance had been quite busy so seeing areas that were mostly deserted was nice. We even ran into a cat relaxing in one of the shrines – though he’s not a fox I suppose he’s close enough that he can pretend.

P1000290We eventually reached the main road and the shops again. There I bought Taiyaki with ice cream inside it. Taiyaki is fish-shaped pancake, hard enough that it holds its shape and you can add filling. Mine had banana, cream, ice cream and custard cream in it. It was really tasty.

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All in all I had a great day at Fushimi Inari-Taisha. This whole trip only took 3 hours or so so it’s a good afternoon trip. Other than the train fare it’s also free so well worth a visit.