Sunday, June 12, 2016
Kyoto - heart of Japan
So for the longest time, I wanted to visit the old capital city of Japan, Kyoto. The main reason is because I first heard of this place when I watched the anime series Rurouni Kenshin almost 10 years ago, which is kinda silly of me.
During the anime series (and with certain degree of historical accuracy), many battles occurred in Kyoto between Imperial forces and "Shogunate" during the Japanese civil war. And in the anime series, the main characters goes back to Kyoto embarking on his most important battle to "open a path" for a better future in Japan. So I felt pumped up to go into Kyoto.
Of course, Kyoto is very famous for many of the cultural sites, especially temples and castles, For sure we cannot visit the hundreds of castles that exist, so we have to choose a few selected one to visit.
The first one, is the "Golden Pavilion" which looks pretty nice.
Also, black sesame soft serve is probably one of my favorite.
Rock garden of "Ryoanyi" was a neat place with artistic appeal.
The large temple of "Kiyomizudera" was nice because we visited on the evening, and they actually have special week of "light-ing"
The bamboo forest in "Arashiyama" felt pretty epic, it's a place that you can imagine 2 samurai fighting to death in a movie (unfortunately I was feeling a under the weather during that time, so did not take any good pictures).
My favorite place is probably the "many red gates" temple of "Fushimi Inari" because it was a very cool hike to a top of a mountain, and this just a symbolic place of Kyoto.
My friends and I spent about 3 days in Kyoto, taking daily trips from our base in Osaka. Probably good enough time to hit all the major attractions. We also hit other places like "Imperial Palace in Kyoto" with a free English tour (need to book ahead of time) and the "International Manga Museum" which surpassed my expectations on how much fun it was, and the geisha district of "Gion", where you can appreciate the old style looking streets and hallways.
Definitely, it is a place I would like to visit again, maybe on a lower pace schedule, just to appreciate more on the cultural treasures in Japan.
Outside of the fun stuff and the natural appreciation of cultural heritage of a country, I also observed that Japanese people are very traditional and paid much respects to the rituals and beliefs. So it was natural to see them bowing to a temple gate, or at the entrance of the temple, or to participate on getting the good luck charms, etc. In a way, that is very Asian, but also made me realized that many people do not know the true God of this universe. Even been a very open country, about 1% of the population in Japan are said to be Christians, which is very low and makes me realize the great need of gospel work in there.
On that topic, I visited at least 3 different churches during my stay in Japan, and it was refreshing and encouraging to see fellow Japanese believes worshipping our good God! Probably will share more on that on another day.
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