Nara Prefecture and Kyoto Day One (of Two)

The first weekend in March my friend Ayako from Shirayuri took me with her on a bus tour for Japanese tourists to Nara Prefecture and Kyoto. Kyoto was the seat of the Emperor before the government seat moved here to Tokyo (then called Edo) as recently as 1868.

After a long drive in the bus (past Mt. Fuji, Fuji-san where I got some awesome pictures—I’m really looking forward to visiting there in a couple more weeks), we arrived in Nara prefecture, but were running too late for our first stop to see the orchards of blooming plum trees. It wasn’t a big loss because they hadn’t started blooming yet, though some in Kyoto had.

We continued on to Nara Park. It is home to the Todaiji Temple, many shrines and another Daibutsu (a giant representation of Buddha).

I learned the next week that the Japanese would never call a representation of Buddha “Buddha” because there are many different versions of Buddha symbolizing different things, but none of them is Buddha; he was a man. This confusion of terms (we only have the one in English) led to a bit of a tense moment visiting Ayako’s (from BC) house in Nagasaki. But I think we got that worked out in the end. In any case it was dropped with no hard feelings. . .

Unfortunately, I didn’t get to see this Diabutsu, let alone go inside him. I had a dinner date to keep. We were guided through the park and then left to wander with some extra time before dinner near a narrow street lined with shops (no time to see the giant Buddha, but 30 minutes for shopping before dinner. . . right) on one side and a strip of park on the other behind which rose a great steep hill. Here in this strip of park were wandering some of my favorite, and yet most confusing members of the park. There are hundreds, hundreds, of relatively domesticated deer running around in this park. The merchants sell “deer cakes” and people feed them and pet them and take pictures with them. (It seems that a buck had been some sort of figure of authority or power or maleness to some emperor for whose sake the temple for Buddha had been made.) So, though I felt it was really strange and kind of wrong, but I’d always wanted to be all Disney Princess in the woods making friends with the forest creatures, I gave feeding the deer a shot. I bought some deer cakes (little flat rice cakes) from a local vendor after watching him feed the deer some bread. He was much better with the animals than I was. It helped that he was taller than me. Also, he gave me half a loaf of stale bread to feed them after I bought the cakes.

There I was, halfway in the street, halfway up some stairs leading to the strip of park, and surrounded by 7 young bucks (no antlers though—none of them had them) who all wanted each piece of bread or cake I was giving out. This was when I remembered why I thought this was kind of wrong. Wild animals are unpredictable. They’re supposed to be, you know, wild. One of the guys was particularly insistent and would butt softly (for a big hard-headed wild animal) at my hip or elbow every time I tried to feed the other guys. It was a lot like a dog or cat nudging at your hand or arm to be petted, but with a lot more power and assertion behind it.

After running out of the half loaf of bread (mostly you hand feed them, which is pretty cool), we decided to walk away and hope not to cause them to stampede after us to give another group some attention.

We had attracted (and well fed) most of the deer currently browsing around the area, but we spotted a small doe a little ways away. She looked really timid. Really timid. So I took my time approaching her, and once I got as close as I dared just stood there still with my hand out offering her some of the food. Eventually she came up to me, but not any closer than to reach the food if I really outstretched my hand and she her neck. After a couple of pieces of the deer cakes this way, she moved a little bit further, but not too much. She was really sweet.

About 6 of the other women on the tour had also elected to buy the tour dinner at a nearby restaurant, so we all ate together at a long low table on a tatami mat. I was asked a bunch of questions in Japanese, none of which I was able to answer very well. They were simple questions that I new the answer to, in Japanese, but there are many different ways to ask “where are you from” and “how old are you”. Then they complemented me on using chopsticks, which is pretty common, because they expect us to have no skills at it. Dinner was pretty good. See:

And I ate everything, see:

After dinner it was a brisk walk to the main temple area, which we were visiting just at the right time of year to see a particular festival of that temple. It’s the running of the flame ball!

Just after dark, 10 monks run 10 balls of fire across the front of the temple. Before shaking it at the other end, and letting down a beautiful rain of glowing sparks on the people who got their really early to get front row seats! It was the 1,255^th time this ritual had been completed!

From there was the long walk back downhill to the bus. We climbed on board and drove to Osaka and to our hotel to shower, eat ice cream, and bunk down for the night.