Layer Cake

The next day we needed to get an early start in order to catch a train so that we could pick up Mom’s camera. We had made arrangements a couple of days prior to go and pick it up at a station in a little town about midway between Kyoto and Osaka. It only took about 45 minutes to get there via Shinkansen, which was convenient for Mom and Grandma since they had the train pass. My plan originally had been to not go with them, since I didn’t think I could really afford the expense of taking a Shinkansen in addition to the other costs of the day, but Grandma paid for my ticket so that I would be able to help them with Japanese. As it turned out, I was less than helpful. I managed to botch my ticket, which turned into a hassle as we tried to sort it out. Part of the problem was that once they were on the other side of the barrier, I couldn’t get to them, which meant I was stuck in the place you go after you get off the train but before you can leave the station. The other part of the problem was that the people who could help us were on the other side of the barrier, and we had a hard time communicating with them since Mom and Grandma don’t speak Japanese, and they didn’t know to come talk to me (not that I probably could have explained much anyway). Eventually we got it sorted out, but the whole thing put me in a foul mood, and I find my Japanese skill is influenced by my mood, therefore, the more frustrated I am the worse my Japanese is. We found the lost and found office, conveniently located right next to the stairs we had to go down to get off the train platform, and had to wait about 20 minutes for somebody to come and help us. It didn’t take long to get it sorted out once someone was there though, and we got Mom’s camera back with remarkably little hassle.
When we got back we decided to try and see the pagoda that Kyoto is famous for, one of the only remaining structures of its kind. The pagoda is a tiered structure typically used for housing ceremonial figures, though not always the focal structure in a compound. Some temples have pagodas at various key points on the grounds, and they sometimes serve as houses for the lesser deities or as spiritual guard posts. I don’t know much about them, but they are always comprised of an odd number of tiers, either three, five, or seven levels high. I don’t know if there are any seven level pagodas left in Japan, but the one we went to see in Kyoto was five tiers tall, and stood about 70 feet tall. The pagoda itself was located in a temple compound that was extraordinarily large, encompassing between two and four city blocks worth of space. The whole thing was walled off and surrounded by a moat, which had some of the largest carp I have ever seen in it. They seemed to be used to people being around, as they had a habit of following our shadows and popping up their heads if we stopped, probably hoping for food or that we would fall in and they could eat us. Most of the temples in the compound were being renovated, which is something you are likely to see if you do watch temple viewing in Japan. Japan has a pretty extensive program dedicated to maintaining and restoring the nation’s temples, and at any given time the odds are good that you will stumble upon one that’s being worked on. It takes a little of the charm out of the experience, but I can’t say that it makes it any less interesting of an experience. We wandered around the main grounds for awhile before wandering over to the area in which the pagoda was located, which was in a garden of sorts. Once there we learned that we needed to pay 800 yen in order to get into the area the pagoda was in. It seemed a little odd to me, since I could clearly see the pagoda about 50 yards away through the fence, and there didn’t seem to be anything worth paying 800 yen to get closer to see, but we opted to pay and get in on the off chance that everyone else going in knew something we didn’t. As it turns out we weren’t really missing much, but we did get to go in the ground level of the pagoda and admire how old it was (400 years roughly. It’s always something of a shock when travelling in countries that have histories that go back longer than the lifespan of your average tortoise to realize just how long some of the stuff has been around. This particular pagoda was actually closer to 700 years old, but it got burned down several times and I guess they didn’t feel comfortable counting the time prior to the most recent burning).
On our way back to the station we caught a lunch of noodles, at a restaurant where I was able to reaffirm my belief that kanji is a terrible thing to do to a hungry person. At this point we had already decided that instead of going through the hassle of finding a new hotel in a new city and moving around too much more we would keep Kyoto as our base of operations. To that end, since this was to be our last night staying at the Heianbo ryokan, we decided to look for a new hotel (I was finally able to figure out why the name “Heianbo” seemed so familiar to me. In my mind I must have combined the words “Heian,” which is one of Japan’s historical periods that I learned about in my Japanese literature class, and “Honinbo,” which is a title only one person can have at a time in professional Go, and part of the name of Honinbo Shusaku, one of the greatest Go players of all time). After nightfall, we spent about an hour wandering around in the rain trying to find the hotel we had booked, which upon finding we decided to look for a new hotel. We headed back to the ryokan, and spent the rest of the evening looking into hotels.