Miyajima Island, Okayama, Himeji, Osaka

The last three days have been really busy, with me visiting no less than 5 different cities and towns. When planning my trip I estimated the time cost of travelling based on how long it takes in Australia to travel distances. This is what I planned:
- 2 full days in Hiroshima
- 1 day to travel from Hiroshima to Osaka
- 1 full day in Osaka
- 1 day to travel from Osaka to Kyoto
- 2 full days in Kyoto

But once I started travelling, I realised how in appropriate it is to base travel in Japan on how one might travel in Australia. For example, Osaka is a city of 3 million people while Kyoto has a population of 1.5 million. It only takes 30 minutes to travel from one to the other on the local train... and only 15 minutes on the shinkansen. So with the benefit of hindsight, I could have quite easily based myself in Osaka and travelled to and from Kyoto, Himeji, Okayama, Akashi etc just for the day or half-day. Anyhow, with this in mind, I altered my schedule about three days ago so I could visit a couple of other places. The Japanese love lists of top threes, eg the top three views, the top three castles, the top three gardens etc etc. By modifying my schedule I could take into account some more of the best of these top three.

On Friday 10th I visited World Heritage listed Miyajima Island (something I intended in my pre-trip planning), which is about a half-hour local train ride south-west of Hiroshima. The island is only a 10 minute ferry from the coast, but has a very rugged geography and is quite beautiful in a rural way. The whole island is a deer sanctuary, and you even find deer wandering through the main town. Miyajima is famous for its torii (a Shinto Red Gate) that floats in the water just off the island. If you have seen a tourist photo of a red gate in Japan, this will be the one you have seen. Even from the ferry it was an impressive sight. The view of this torii is considered one of the top three views in all of Japan.

Miyajima is also home to a Buddhist temple, which is at the top of its highest peak. I walked about 1 kilometre uphill to get to the first cable car station, wondering why they couldn't extend the cable car to the bottom of the mountain. The first cable car was very steep, and fairly long, to cover most of the mountain's height. The second cable car was a horizontal transport from one peak to the next. This second cable car station has a beautiful view overlooking the Sea of Japan, although it was fairly hazy on this particular day. This peak is also home to dozens of monkeys. Lockers were provided in the station for us to secure our belongings (as the monkeys have a bad habit of stealing stuff). Unfortunately for me, on the day I visited, the only monkey up there was me.

Frankly, I think they should have built a third cable car to get to the very top of the mountain, because it would be a very hard climb even without the represesive heat that I endured. The temple was beautiful and boggled my mind how they carted the building tools and materials up such a high distance. From the temple it was about another 10 minutes of very steep climb to the very top of the mountain. I was sweating up a storm by the time I got there, but collapsed in laughter when I got to the top, because there (in true Japanese tourist style) was a 3 story contemporary-styled pagoda where I could purchase soft drinks, or the obligatory alcohol and cigarettes. I have absolutely no idea how the ancient woman tending this store manages the climb every day to get to work because I was buggered after doing it just once.

I returned to the bottom of the mountain and my way to the sea shore to photograph the torii gate, only to discover the tide was out. There was the beautiful torii gate standing in the middle of a field of mud. At the time I was disappointed, but still took lots of photographs. As the tide was out, tourists are able to walk to the gate, and truly appreciate its magnificient size. A torii, in one form or another, has stood on this site for about a thousand years. This particular torii dates from the late 19th century. Even that is an impressive achievement considering it is an entirely wood structure. The main supports alone are as wide as a family car. For good luck, people push coins into these wooden supports, looking like a ring of metal barnacles.

The day after Miyajima I headed to two different towns before arriving at Osaka. The first stop was Okayama (which I had not considered visiting until the night before). I visited the Okayama Castle, which is styled like almost every other Japanese castle (and almost identical to the Hiroshima castle I visited a few days earlier). But Okayama's castle is unique within Japan for being black in colour, lending itself the nickname of the Black Crow. It's a pretty impressive sight, rising just like a black crow from the surrounding greenery of forests and gardens. Okayama Castle (like that in Hiroshima) was completely destroyed in World War II. When it was rebuilt in the 50s or 60s, the reconstruction team had the foresight to include an elevator.

Just across the river from Okayama Castle, and within view, is the famous Korakuen Gardens. Filled with fields, gardens, waterways, islands, and ponds, Korakuen was simply stunning. Even the hazy, overcast weather did little to discredit its ranking as one of the top three gardens in all of Japan. I realised that what is most beautiful about Japanese gardens, is their asymmetric layout. Unlike the equally beautiful by symmetric gardens of Europe, the Japanese gardens can offer an entirely different view just by walking 20 paces away.

From Okayama, I took a 20 minute shinkansen ride to Himeji. Like Okayama, most people visit Himeji for a half-day just to visit it's world-famous and World Heritage listed castle. This castle has featured in many movies. You'll see it in the Japanese Bond flick, You Only Live Twice, as the ninja training camp (run by Tiger Tanaka) that James Bond visits in order to be reborn as a Japanese man. (Personally, I think my hairline is somewhere round You Only Live Twice. God help me if it proceeds to Diamonds Are Forever!). Himeji also turns up in two Akira Kurosawa films, most notably in Ran (inspired by Shakespeare's King Lear).

Even without its popular culture links, Himeji Castle is an amazing sight. It is huge, and by that I mean unbelievably massive for a wooden structure. It sits on a hilltop commanding an amazing 360 degree view of the area. Around the keep (which must be no less than 3 times bigger than Okayama and Hiroshima castles combined), there are many fortified walls, with secret entrances and dead ends designed to trap attackers unfamiliar with the castle's layout. Himeji was never breached. In fact it was never attacked. But that probably has a lot to do with how imposing it would look to any attacking army.

From Himeji I jumped on the shinkansen to arrive in Osaka. As I write this I am just about to leave, and it couldn't come sooner. If Canberra could be described as a SimCity game honed to perfection (with the sterile feel that comes with overplanning), then Osaka is the SimCity game that has been built without any planning and left to deteriorate for a thousand game years. It is a big, dirty, ugly, soulles city, that sprawls from no apparent centre into the far distance. Take for instance the train stations. The combined shinkansen/local-line station has 20-odd platforms just for local trains. But this isn't the main station. That would be Umeda/Osaka, which has more platforms than I can remember, connected by dozens and dozens of confusing, twisted passageways that run under, over and between platforms and buildings, and with two-dozen exits from the station. Umeda is an interchange for the subway, which is a further complicated mess, added in more recently than the above-ground lines. I had no idea where I was going while traversing this underground city. If Osaka ever fears an attack from a foreign city or power, the populace should hide in the subway. It was more confusing than Himeji Castle.

I visited the gay district on Saturday night, which for a city of 3 million people was a joke. Two or three bars with collectively about 50 people inside. I think this has a lot to do with how homosexuality is regarded in Japan. There are no laws prohibiting homosexuality or homosexual acts. In the past, it has been governed by social mores that reign in Japan. In many ways, Japan is a Victorian-era country. The younger generations are cool with it, but very scared of the societal impact on their family by coming out. Often it is treated as a "phase", beyond which they marry, have kids, treat their wife like a slave, then continue to do what they want on the side.

I had a hangover yesterday, which wasn't helped by the dreary overcast weather. I visited the Sky Umeda building, which looks similar to Paris' La Defense, and was built to revitalise the down-beat Umeda district with a signature building. Basically it is two forty-storey towers, joined at the top by a platform linking the two. On this platform is a garden and an outdoor rooftop observation deck. To get up there I had to take a glass elevator, and a suspended glass-enclosed escalator from the 35th to 39th floors (yep, nothing underneath the escalator except 35 floors of nothing). The view was pretty impressive once I got to the top, although it was just a lot more of grey ( grey buildings, grey sky, grey ground). Still, the building is pretty cool.