Castles & Robots

Our flight out of Fukuoka was quite late, so we decided to leave early and see as many things as possible on the train ride back across Japan.

Our first stop was an 18 m (59 foot) tall Gundam! A toy company built it for their 30th anniversary. It was built at a 1:1 scale and was done up in lights, but only its head turned a little bit. Still, totally worth the stop.

Truly epic.

Great day...for hanging out with robots.

Next we visited Himeji Castle, one of the best preserved ancient Japanese castles. It was under renovation when we arrived, but that kept our visit short and we had a schedule to keep. The sky was clear which made for beautiful pictures, but it was so hot. We grabbed a taxi to get back to the train station in a hurry, and it was one of the most harrowing rides yet. Our elderly driver ran lights and nearly threw us out of the car when he made the turn to drop us off and the passenger door automatically opened.

Under construction.

Cool stuff. Supposedly it resembles a white crane.

Proof I was in another Japanese castle.

We arrived at the airport with plenty of time to spare and were checked in to our Incheon hotel before midnight. After a quick fix of banana milk we were done with traveling for a few hours.

Turning Japanese

Sushi was the first order of business in Tokyo, though we were still hungry after finding that it’s not significantly cheaper than in the States. We walked around Sunshine City in the northwest part of the city, and eventually found some Chinese pork buns in the train station near our ryokan.

More vending machines. This one had pancake-flavored milk for sale.

Correctly anticipating a low level of enthusiasm for self-planned sight-seeing, we had all booked a bus day tour of Tokyo. It was a welcome break from the past few days, and we learned a lot of subtle bits about Japanese culture from our tour guide. We were able to see a lot of the big tourist sites and make plans for our last days in Japan.

One of the 3 tori gates to the Meijo Shinto Shrine.

A corner of the Eastern Imperial Gardens.

The Senso-ji Buddhist Temple, built around an image of Buddha found by fishermen. Noone has actually seen the small statue.

One of the ceiling tiles in the temple. Dragons!

At the Kaminarimon, or Thunder Gates, leading to the Buddhist temple.

On the Symphony, doing a quick boat tour of Tokyo Bay.

A mini-Statue of Liberty. It's a replica Japan made of the one France let them borrow? I don't know.

After the tour we went to Shibuya, famous for its insane scatter crossing (a crosswalk that alternates between vehicle traffic in set directions and foot traffic in any direction). We had a dinner of tempura there, then stopped by a small shop for ice cream and other snacks on our way home.

Hachiko waiting for his master outside Shibuya station.

A shot of the scramble crossing from the nearby Starbuck's window.

There wasn’t enough time to really get to know Tokyo like we did Seoul, but I’d visit Japan again.

Land of the Rising Sun

Getting to Mt. Fuji was more difficult than we anticipated. We left Kyoto about noon and didn’t begin hiking until about 9 PM Monday. The plan was to hike all night and reach the summit before the sunrise at 5:41 AM. I was prepared enough to have my hiking boots with me but foolishly left my one jacket in my luggage in Korea. It had been sweltering our entire time touring Japan, but climbing up 3,700 m in the dark can get quite cold.

So eager. So naive.

Fortunately we had a full moon to help light the way.

Yeah, that says 385 minutes (~6.5 hours) to the top. And we just started.

The hike up was difficult but not painful. We took breaks at all the way stations and started early enough that we could eat ramen at the last restaurant on the way up. Really we just wanted a break from the wind, which was a good thing because the food was terrible. Towards the top it really started to get crowded, but we managed to find a good spot to sit well before the sun began to rise.

Viktor took this excellent shot looking up the trail.

Well look at that. A vending machine on top of a sacred Japanese mountain.

It really was a fantastic thing to see the sun rise over from Mt. Fuji, one that can’t be captured in pictures. In just a few seconds the blood red sun was completely over the horizon and people began their descent.

The beginning of the sun's rise.

Yah I made it! But damn was it cold.

Group shot at the top.

Really we were just delaying the inevitable trip back down.

The return part was something none of us prepared for.

Looks a lot different by daylight. Because you can actually see.

Walking down (off?) the mountain.

After spending the whole day traveling and the whole night climbing, the alternate downhill path was grueling. The switchbacks were entirely too steep and the path was laid with essentially loose gravel, making it very difficult to keep balanced. Almost 5 hours later I was at the 5th station where we started, hungry, tired, and in a lot of pain. I pieced together a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and we got on the bus back towards our hostel and unused beds. The owners were kind enough to allow us to shower even though our room was already occupied by another group. We dressed and packed in the lobby and started off for Tokyo.

Kyoto & Osaka

Japanese people are very short, as evidenced by the height of their doorways and ceilings in our traditional ryokan. [lost the picture I wanted to show]

We wanted local food our first night in Kyoto so we asked the ryokan workers where they usually ate. We decided on a place that had free rice refills because they actually charge for that here! After living in Korea for 2 months where dozens of side dishes, tea, and rice are refilled for free this change had us reeling.

Kyoto tower the night we arrived.

Sightseeing in Kyoto was hectic but we got a lot done. First stop was a Shinto temple beside a bamboo forest. Shintoism is a religion practiced exclusively in Japan that believes in hundreds of demons and gods. From my limited knowledge, I think it’s where a lot of the Anime draws its inspirations. Buddhism is second on the list of practiced religions, though there is a lot of dual belief (one focuses on celebration of life, the other on death). Of course Confucianism is also a strong presence in the culture and lifestyle in Japan.

Our first stop in Kyoto, a small Shinto shrine.

Walking through a bamboo forest, just doing some exploring.

We walked through a traditional castle before lunch. The coolest thing about it was a series of scratching needles beneath the floorboards that intentionally. I guess that’s why ninjas are always running across rooftops. Afterwards we took a bus to Kiyumizu-dera, an amazing Buddhist temple built into a mountain overlooking the city.

In the gardens of Nijo Castle.

Some buildings in the inner of 2 rings of fortifications.

A preserved part of the castle that contained wall paintings and the "singing" floorboards.

A lot of effort went into getting this group shot! Can't recall why we didn't just ask someone...

Lunch at Mos Burger. Quite delicious.

The road leading up to the temple was very similar in Insa-dong in Korea with peddlers of uniquely Japanese gifts lining the narrow cobbled road. The temple entrance had a pagoda, bell, and series of tori gates. The side of the mountain was a cemetery that reminded me (nerd alert) of the one in Ninja Gaiden. Little stone carvings looked over some of the stones, dressed up in ribbons and obviously tended to on a regular basis.

The shopping area leading to the temple.

Approaching Kiyumizudera Temple.

The water here is for purifying your hands and body before entering.

The Buddhist Temple was sprawling across the hillside.

A hillside graveyard, totally like the one in Ninja Gaiden.

We saw a few more areas in Kyoto before catching a train to Osaka for dinner. The Osaka nightlife was remarkably different from any of the other Japanese cities we had seen so far, full of young people in ridiculous outfits and many of the moving/illuminated advertisements unique to Japan. I heard that the population of the city increases significantly once it gets dark.

The closest thing Japanese get to slots, Plinko machines. Very loud.

Takoyaki, the deep-fried octopus balls.

My vending-machine ordered noodles. Prepared by people, though.

We found a restaurant with a vending machine at the entrance for placing your order. The noodles we got were quite tasty, and we also sampled their famous deep-fried octopus balls.

The Glico Running Man ad in Osaka. Goofy dude.

A full day of sightseeing had us exhausted, and we still had a full day of travel day to get to Mount Fuji in time for the sunrise.

Enter Japan

At the EAPSI closing ceremony I heard everyone’s presentations on their Korean summers. We spent equal parts on our actual research and the cultural differences of laboratory work in Korea. I was somewhat surprised at how similar everyone's experience was--labmates working ridiculous hours and encouraging heavy drinking. Such is the real Korean way, it seems.

This was it, our closing meeting in Seoul.

I ended the day at the PC bang with Joe Hagmann playing StarCraft 2 (finally!). I played a bit of the campaign and noticed that the voiceovers and in-movie text were in Korean. Shouldn’t be surprising considering the popularity here, but I also have no idea what happened during the first few missions. We hopped on Battle.net and got a few team games in, winning a few but losing more to those crazy Koreans and their micro skills.

Lipton Tea--free Lineage in-game item with purchase!

Early the next morning we caught a flight to Fukuoka, Japan. From there we traded in for our Japan Rail Pass and took off for Hiroshima. There was still daylight by the time we checked in to the J-Hoppers hostel, so we walked over to the Peace Park and checked out the A-bomb museum. Learning the history of the site was really interesting and informative, though tinged with a bit of that Asian pride that seems to permeate most tourist sites.

A parade display at the Fukuoka airport.

So Japanese. Big-eyed cats in an arm-grabbing vending machine.

Our first meal in Japan! Okonomiyaki, a noodle, meat, and veggie dish on a pancake, Hiroshima-style.

The Peace Park near the detonation site of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima.

One of the displays from the museum. The ball is where the fat boy detonated.

One of the few standing structures, the Atomic Bomb Dome, hasn't really been touched since 1945.

We spent the next day in Miyajima, an island south of Hiroshima famous for its tori gate and temple. A short train trip and ferry ride has us petting the indigenous deer, thought to represent the health of the nation. We took a rope gondola ride up to the top for some pictures of the bay area, though it wasn’t terribly clear that day.

Packing up from the hostel.

The Miyajima deer were really chill about people being near them.

Miyajima's famous tori gate, leading to the Shinto Itsukushima Shrine.

A view from the top of the island, looking back at the last gondola station.

A 5-tiered pagoda on the island.

The historical sites in Japan are very different from the ones in Korea, even though many of the sites here are also Buddhist temples. The Japanese are also crazy about their vending machines. Unfortunately food is much more expensive than Korea, but converted to dollars it’s probably equivalent to eating out in America.

After spending the day sweating and sightseeing we got back on the train for Kyoto.