18 Years Later: Japan - Part 3

Preface 

Hey everyone, this is my third blog entry where I conclude the saga of going to Japan, I hope that you've been enjoying these reads up until now. I'm going to end this series by talking about my visit to Kyoto, Japan's former capital and a current cultural hotspot.  

Settling in Kyoto

Getting to Kyoto is easy, especially if you have a tourist JR pass. From Tokyo just grab your nearest Tōkaidō Shinkansen line from Tokyo and ride peacefully for about three hours until you reach, JR pass holders cannot use the Nozomi bullet train so the slightly slower but still really speedy Hikari bullet train is the best bet.

When we reached Kyoto we had something really special waiting for us, an AirBnB booking that would give us so much joy and trauma to the head (being 6ft+ in Kyoto is not advised).

Can you guess what it is?

How about now?

Yup

It's a traditional Japanese style house with tatami flooring and shoji paper doors. The room entrances were only about 1.8m tall meaning that I could comfortably rest my head upon them without actually going through. As you can see from the first picture the house did have regular bedding as well as the futon bedding in the third picture (the first room had fake paper doors made of plastic but shh nobody really needs to know). This style of accommodation helped make our stay in Kyoto feel as special as it did, if we're visiting a historically significant city, then of course traditional housing is a must. 

I'm not sure if I derive too much excitement from the cultural significance or lack thereof of this but it was different and really cool. 

Kyoto Relics

Kyoto has old stuff! We began our exploration through Kyoto by first visiting a castle. 

This castle

Nijō castle was a well fortified castle (now less fortified tourist destination) that was built by the Tokugawa Shogunate in 1679 for their residence, it's been destroyed a few times by lightning strikes and fires but it was rebuilt.

Another outside view of the castle 

The art inside the castle was visually impressive, many depictions of tigers and other animals in different poses had us laughing, we weren't allowed to take photos of them but I did sneak a photo in of some mannequins. Sorry. 

These models depict the Shogun (back) addressing his men, the Shogun is on a slightly raised floor platform to signify his rank

Next up was a shrine that I was looking forward to the most, Fushimi Inari-Taisha, this is a shrine well known for its thousands of vermilion gates to the shrine, a sight that I just knew I had to see for myself. In truth, I'm sure that everybody visiting Kyoto feels the same way, it was really bustling with tourists, I wished it was emptier but its popularity was something we just had to deal with.

 Approaching the first gate of the shrine

The orange colour scheme of this shrine is something I really dig, it stands out to you over the countless other shrines in Kyoto, I can only imagine how sublime walking through the grounds of this shrine would be were it empty. As we walked in there was an american guy explaining how aperture priority mode on cameras worked to his group in a very loud, condescending manner. Irksome right?

Annoying as loud condescending tourists were, we moved on to view some of the larger gates of the shrine, these gates were huge! I had heard there were thousands of gates, are they all going to be as large as these?

 I saw a mother doing a full close-up photo-shoot for her baby under these gates

There must've been around 50-100 of these large gates, they were very interesting to walk through, however you get a true mystical feeling when walking through the smaller gates that make up the large proportion of the so-called thousands of gates of the Inari Shrine.

Transported to another, rather orangey dimension - This photo was re-posted by OnePlus 

They feel Mystical because, on rare occasions when you can't see anyone else in front of you, such as in the picture above, you really can't see much of anything aside from orange gates,  no exit in sight like you'd expect from a dark tunnel but piercing rays of light coming in from the gaps between gates, you're no longer on the same earth you thought you were in 20 seconds ago.

On a side note, I realise now that the above picture is really oversaturated and highlighted, it still looks nice but when I return I'll be sure to take a better shot.

Happy Sumo Fun Times
Have you ever, in real life, seen one 150kg+ man lift another man of similar mass into the air? I have. And boy was it great! When in Japan, you go to watch some official Sumo bouts.

Promptly after finishing up in Kyoto, we hopped on our nearest Shinkansen bound for Tokyo and rode it to Nagoya. Nagoya is a city in between Kyoto and Tokyo which doesn't seem too interesting at first, however a traditional craft from the area is that of mechanised puppets or "karakuri ningyō" which is undoubtedly cool so don't judge a city by its uhh... book cover.

Thanks to japanvisitor.com for this map highlighting where Nagoya is

The thing of importance to us is that that the July Sumo tournament is held in Nagoya, at the Aichi prefectural gymnasium, and I bought the last few available tickets!

The stadium itself is huge, made to seat at least a few thousand people and the Sumo events last all day every day for 15 days. It has western style chairs right at the very back (if you need one of those) and Japanese style four person boxes all the way up to the arena. 

An impressive place

Just as an important point to note, these four person boxes that you see above are designed to hold four small people, if you are a group of four medium size to giant people you're going to need two boxes, or the aforementioned seats. 

A tournament day typically begins around 8-9am, and this is when the doors open and the preliminary bouts begin, there are usually matches between junior wrestlers at this time who are just beginning their journey into professional Sumo wrestling. After them other lower divisions of wrestlers will have their official tournament bouts.

Somewhere around 2pm the Jūryō matches begin, Jūryō refers to the second highest rank of wrestlers, Jūryō wrestlers are now considered to be professional Sumo wrestlers.

Around 4pm, after the Jūryō bouts, Makuuchi matches begin, the Makuuchi are the highest ranking Sumo wrestlers so these are the ones that everyone comes to see, and the stadium completely fills up by this point (it gets really hot with all the people). 

An epic moment, one wrestler being thrown out of bounds by another

It is for these wrestlers that you hear the loudest cheers and see the most excitement in the stadium. Even though (to be perfectly honest) we had no idea who any of these wrestlers were, we could clearly see the level of skill that they possessed, which really made it a thrill to watch. The smaller guys won more often than one would think.

Viewing Sumo wrestling matches will be the most memorable part of this trip for me, it's an iconic tradition that everyone associates with Japan itself, so I would recommend this to anyone who is planning a trip to Japan. Book well in advance as these events sell out fast.

The End

This marks the end of my small blog series on the Japan trip, I hope you enjoyed reading it. As always, I'd greatly appreciate any feedback and criticism you have on these as my main goal is to improve my writing ability. Soon I will attempt to venture into other topic areas besides travel. 

Thanks again for reading

- Angad