Holiday in Japan (10): Nara
On the penultimate day of the official part of our tour (Tuesday), the pace slackened, when we did not leave our hotel in Kyoto until 9.30 am and we were back at 3.20 pm. We were out of the city all day.
At a place called Fushimi, we visited a sake brewery called Kizakira. This proved to be much more entertaining than one might have expected as a result of the manager talking to us being an atypical Japanese, loud and exuberant. And, yes, there was a tasting session.
As we drove on to Nara, our local guide Kazoo attempted to explain a few of the complexities of the Japanese writing system.
Japanese utilises three primary writing scripts: Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji. These scripts are used in combination to represent respectively native Japanese words, foreign loanwords, and ideographic concepts.
Hiragana and Katakana are phonetic scripts, each representing a syllable. Kanji, on the other hand, are ideographic characters borrowed from Chinese, representing entire words or concepts.
Nara was the capital of Japan during most of the Nara period from 710 to 784 as the seat of the Emperor Shomu. We visited the grand Todai-ji Temple which is surrounded by a park full of tame deer.
Though it was originally founded in the year 738, Todai-ji was not opened until the year 752. The temple has undergone several reconstructions since then, with the most significant reconstruction, that of the Great Buddha Hall, taking place in 1709. Today temple is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The Great Buddha Hall houses the world’s largest bronze statue of the Buddha Vairocana, known in Japanese as Daibutsu.
As our look around the Hall was concluding, the weather suddenly turned cold and dark and then it started to rain heavily with thunder and lightning. Fortunately, Jenny and I managed to find a French restaurant where we had a tasty galette pancake.
Back in Kyoto, in the evening Jenny & I decided to revisit the futuristic station. Now that we knew what to expect, it was not quite so awe-inspiring, but it was good to have a slower and more thorough look around, followed by dinner nearby.