The 173 m Umeda Sky Building is one of the tallest buildings in Osaka. Two towers connected by the Floating Garden Observatory. This building is the sort of thing that architects come up with when they have too much time on their hands. The connecting section is two stories high with a large hole in the middle. How this got to be called the Floating Garden Observatory eludes me. It is a very glass and shiny building. We got whisked up the 40-floor elevator to join the crowds milling around at the top. The views were genuinely nice and there was a coffee shop.
Back in the coach, we were driven to Nara. From 710 to 784 this was the capital of Japan. 8 temples were built there which are now all UNESCO heritage sites. We walked up to Nara Park from the coach and were struck by how many deer there were. Apparently, the god Takemikazuchi arrived in Nara on a white deer to guard the newly built capital. Since then, the deer have been regarded as heavenly animals, protecting the city and the country. Tame sika deer roam through the town, more than 1,200 of them. Snack vendors sell sika senbei (deer crackers) to visitors. If you bow at a deer, some of them will bow back. They do of course expect some senbei for this.
Unfortunately, the rice crackers are not healthy food for deer. A 2009 study found that most of the deer were malnourished from not having enough grass to eat. The deer have become so excessively numerous in Nara park, that there isn’t enough grass in the park for all of them to live entirely on grass, creating a dependency on humans for rice crackers. This lack of grass also causes the deer to resort to eating garbage and plants that they would not normally eat. The deer are overpopulated because of being fed frequently and having few predators. The deer have caused extensive damage to trees (by feeding on bark), bamboo (by eating their shoots), and other plants in the park. Additionally, the deer have become aggressive towards humans in their solicitation of food (which leads to people getting injured), aggressive towards each other in competition for rice crackers and have lost their fear of predators in general. Although your first impression might be of deer and humans in harmony, it is not a particularly good arrangement and the deer are suffering.
We were directed to look at Todai-ji, one of the Seven Great Temples of Japan. This is home to the Daibutsu, one of the largest bronze Buddha statues in the world. We do like the odd Buddha statue. I have a small one myself. My favourites are the large Buddhas on top of hills. They look out across the world in a peaceful, calming sort of way. Here we had a bronze Buddha and several other statues in a temple being visited by thousands of paying tourists. To me, this started to feel like iconolatry rather than a simple appreciation. We joined the queues to get in a made our way around in the packed temple. The day was generally quite hot but inside the temple was stifling and absolutely packed with people. I was quite pleased to get out.
We had to run the gauntlet of hungry deer to get back to the coach. Then we were taken to a calligraphy class. At the entrance, we needed to take our shoes off. This is quite common in Japan. You leave your shoes near the door and paddle around in socks. In Japan, the calligraphy techniques were introduced by the Chinese. It was not too surprising that the ink, brush and paper were almost identical to those we encountered in China. This time, we were each shown how to write our name in Japanese. After a bit of practise, we got to paint our name on a wooden box.
The ink is a mixture of soot, gelatine and camphor. The mixture is kneaded into a homogenous mass and then pressed into moulds and dried. The dried ink block can be wet and rubbed to create useable ink. We were each given a small lump of soft ink which we could mould in our hand to create a uniquely shaped ink block. This was then wrapped in tissue paper and put into the box that we had just painted our name on. The ink would take a year to dry out and we were told not to open the box during this time. Overall, it was a bit of an odd experience. The calligraphy is quite interesting and spending a bit of time on a mature consideration of the subject, how glyphs are formed, meanings, how do you write using a keyboard – all this sort of thing would have been interesting. Being given a box with a blob of soft ink struck me as more the sort of thing to keep kids entertained. We are long term travellers. Our lives are contained in a 23 kg suitcase. This does not leave space for souvenirs.
Leaving our calligraphy class two interesting things happened. First, I went to the toilet. Thing is, I only had my socks on. My shoes were downstairs by the main door. Without dwelling on too many details, the area immediately below a urinal is not a happy place. You would not want to stand there in socks. I went into the bathroom wondering about this and then discovered the solution. Bathroom slippers. Just inside the door were some slippers that you could wear to get from the door to the toilet and back. The second interesting thing was a turtle, in a plastic box, just outside the main door. Clearly this was small and inadequate accommodation for a turtle. Unfortunately, I think the turtle’s purpose may have been food related. I was reminded of an incident in China when one of our group came back from the buffet with some dark brown jelly that had been recommended to her. It was savoury and not very pleasant, she said. Much to her disgust, the jelly turned out to be made from the shells of young turtles and was prized for its health-giving properties.
The next day we were driven to Kyoto. This was capital of Japan for over a thousand years. Our starting point was the Arashiyama Bamboo Forest. I never found out why we would want to visit some bamboo because Diane fell over. Not badly. She had done some real doozies in the past, this one was mild by comparison. Mostly she banged he knees. So, instead of walking through the bamboo, we drank coffee for the morning.
In the afternoon, we visited Ryōan-ji – The Temple of the Dragon at Peace. This is a Zen temple within which the garden is considered one of the finest surviving examples of kare-sansui (“dry landscape”). The garden, 25 m x 10 m, was built in the late 15th century. Placed within it are fifteen stones of different sizes, carefully composed in five groups; one group of five stones, two groups of three, and two groups of two stones. The stones are surrounded by white gravel, which is carefully raked each day by the monks. However, the rocks are meticulously arranged so that from any vantage point on the viewing veranda, you can only ever see 14 stones at once. One stone is always hidden from your line of sight.
Zen teaches three core lessons through this deliberate design:
- The illusion of total perspective: As humans, our physical and intellectual vantage points are inherently limited. We can never perceive the entirety of truth or the universe all at once.
- Embracing the imperfect (Wabi-Sabi): True “perfection” is an abstract ideal. Real life is defined by the beauty of the incomplete, the asymmetrical, and the imperfect.
- Internal completion: Traditional Zen masters suggested that the only way to “see” all 15 stones simultaneously is to achieve true spiritual enlightenment, allowing you to see the unbroken wholeness of reality with your mind’s eye rather than your physical sight.
I tried contemplating the zen garden for a while but it was hot and crowded. All the pushing people were making me a bit grumpy so rather than meditating I felt more like I just wanted to get out of there. Not all was lost; I did get around to spending a pleasant few minutes thinking about how to write a computer program to arrange N rocks so that only X are visible through a specific angle a subtended from a range A where X < N and N are visible from A. Is this even possible with equal sized rocks? Can this be calculated other than by trial and error? What heuristics could be applied to a brute force algorithm?
Last temple of the day was Kinkaku-ji Temple (Golden Pavilion). Another Zen temple, this one stands in a ‘mirror pond’ in a classical garden of the ‘go round’ style. A strolling garden. The top two floors of the building are covered in pure gold leaf. The temple is an excellent example of the Japanese design principle of ‘shakkei’, meaning borrowed scenery, which connects the building with its wider setting. The overall garden complex is an excellent example of Muromachi (1330-1580) classical Japanese garden design. The correlation between a building and its settings were greatly emphasized during this period. It was a way to integrate the structure within the landscape. Garden designs were characterized by a reduction in scale, a more central purpose, and a distinct setting. A minimalistic approach was brought to the garden design by recreating larger landscapes in a smaller scale around a structure.
Both these temples have interesting aspects but, for the casual western tourist, really require a bit of an introduction and explanation before you visit. This should have been the role of our guide. Unfortunately, she treated us like children. Possibly she thought that Zen philosophy was beyond the reach of rude Europeans. Whatever, truly little was said and it was not until later that I found some of the significance of what we were seeing. On the ground, the reality was hot, sweaty crowds of forceful tourists shoving me around and standing in front of the camera. Diane had retreated to nurse her damaged knees. I skipped round the sign posted path quickly to catch a few photos before I lost my patience and me will to live.