steepholm

I fly back to the UK tomorrow, and I've been too busy to blog ("TBTB" - put it on a T-shirt), but it would be remiss to leave the world agog longer, so here is a rather abbreviated highlights reel of the last few days.

I arrived in my beautifully appointed machiya (traditional Kyoto town house) after travelling from Nagoya. Like the rest of this trip, I'd booked it with three people in mind, but had the whole place to myself - tatami rooms, garden, bath and all. This was luxurious, but of course in a slightly lonely way. My planned activities too had been calibrated for first-time Japan visitors, and for a little while I wondered if I might deviate from it far enough to take a ferry across the Seto Inland Sea to Takamatsu in Shikoku, for there's nothing I like more than sailing through an archipelago of adventure-tinted islands - but the weather forecast didn't really justify it. So, I stuck to plan A and went to Nara and Fushimi Inari Taisha instead.

Mine was a first-time Nara visit, in fact, but somehow I wasn't in the tourist frame of mind that day, and couldn't even rouse myself to buy a 'senbei' for the famous bowing deer. However, one deer liked the cut of my jib and came over expectantly, only to be surrounded by small children offering senbei, so I got quite a good shot after all. (I didn't get to see a small girl curled in the foetal position in abject terror while a deer kicked her in the face, though, nor even an old woman being knocked over from behind. Maybe next time.)

I did, however, get to see the famous daibutsu (i.e. very big Buddha). Having visited Kamakura a few years ago and somehow missed theirs, it seemed the least I could do.

Buddha on the left: Kannon-sama on the right, for scale.

Fushimi Inari Taisha I had visited once before, in 2016, but I was very glad to return - a truly inspiring place. (Much more so than a big Buddha statue, to me at least, impressive as that was.) I took the internet's advice and went early in the morning, and certainly the crowds at 8am were much less than I'd experienced in the middle of the day previously. That said, there were some other people there - the majority being Western tourists like myself. It was quite amusing watching us all trying to take shots without any other tourists in, to give the impression that we had the whole place to ourselves. This is the "tourist gaze" at work. But it's a lie, people - albeit one in which I'm entirely (and shamelessly) complicit:

On the final evening in Kyoto I met up with my friend Yuka and her friend Tomomi, and we went to an obansai restaurant where I enjoyed myself so much that I forgot to take any photographs. It was Tomomi who first alerted me to the exitence of Onegai! Samia-don, the Japanese TV anime based on Five Children and It, which of course has duly found its way into my book.

The next day I met with Maki (a veteran of Fosse Farmhouse whom I'd hung out with in Bristol) in Minoh City near Osaka and had lunch at the local owl cafe, as you do. A seat under the intimidating gaze of a raptor may not be the most appetite-inducing setting, but we shared a very nice galette. Then we went to Eriko's house, where I was to spend the next couple of nights.

Minoh City has a couple of firsts associated with it. It boasts the first - yes, the very first - Mr Donut in Japan. It's also the home of Calpis, the awkwardly named but surprising delicious milky drink, which was discovered a century or so ago by a devout group of Japanese who went to Mongolia on their way to find out about the life of the Buddha, and encountered a yogurty Mongolian drink (I'm thinking something like kefir?) - whereupon one of their number forgot all about the Buddha, rushed home to Minoh, and made a fortune.

On a previous visit I'd been to see the famous Minoh Falls (which were indeed impressive), but this time Eriko invited me to another waterfall, known only to locals and not many of them. Apparently it used to be more popular, but lacking the flat paths of the famous falls grew gradually disused. The way there was lined with now-abandoned stalls, and even a small Buddhist temple, the building in ruins but the (presumably quite valuable?) ornaments and statues left intact. Japan is a country of abandoned villages (blame the low birth rate), and this had something of the same feel on a smaller scale. The falls were worth it, though, and this time we really did have the place to ourselves, lizards and lonely ghosts excepted.