Japan, Kyoto: Station, Tower, Temples and Shrines

When you arrive in Kyoto for a visit, by train at least, the first thing you will encounter is Kyoto Station. It is an amazing edifice, completed in 1997, and home to approximately five billion shops and restaurants, and a truly glorious indoor/outdoor space. First, here is a view from the top (11th floor) mezzanine, north side. Next is a shot of the Sky Garden. Here is the front exterior as seen from the Kyoto Tower, one block away. You can see the Sky Garden right center of the frame. And here, not to change subjects, is the Kyoto Tower, as seen from the Shosei-en Garden near my hostel. In this view, from Rico's inside the 11th floor restaurant space of the Station, you can just see the Tower's viewing bubble towards the top left. It's only 100 m high. The weather was really fine during all but one day of my Japan visit, and luckily foul weather didn't really interfere with my sightseeing much, as the next view shows. However, a phalanx of diminutive Tower visitors did get a bit underfoot, as the bottom pic illustrates (the viewing binocs are free, though the Tower admission is Y700). According to the brochure, Kyoto Tower was built in 1964, using a method called monocoque (structural skin) meaning the tower has no steel frame, like say the Eiffel Tower, but is made of steel plates joined together to make a cylinder.
Kyoto Hongwan-ji
Kyoto is the home of Pure Land Buddhism (Jodo Shinshu) founded in the early thirteenth century, and the temple was built in the mid-1500s.
A half-century later, Hongwan-ji had accumulated enough power to threaten this cat named Tokugawa Ieyasu, who cleverly encouraged a breakaway faction to set up their own hongwan-ji a little distance away. About a ten minute stroll for a middle aged fat guy. The old temple became known as Nishi (West) Hongwan-ji, and the new, larger, more impressive one, as the Higashi, or East, Hongwan-ji. The "new" one of say, 1602, is one of the world's largest wooden structures, but it's being refurbished underneath an even larger aluminum-sheeting structure, which is surely not in the running for largest.
Incidentally, you don't drink the water from the dragon's mouth trough, you wash your hands, then scoop some water into your palm which you use to rinse your mouth, and spit the water onto the surrounding gravel. All the Japanese Buddhist temples I went to (only four, I'll grant you) had this. Though the schoolkids definitely cutened and livened things up, frankly, I found these temples to be austere and cold, dark, unphotogenic, and not-very-worshipped-at.

Fushimi-Inari
Kyoto's most famous place of worship is a Shinto shrine, world-reknown for its endless path of massive orange torii. The entire circuit is about 4 km, uphill both ways. It's only three stops south of the Station via subway or train. I honestly didn't see any monkeys, but what I did see was quite a lot of this: I went about forty minutes up, and had just stopped to rest for the first time when two fit younger guys came back past me, and said it was still quite a long way to the top, and they had enough. About then, the idea of completing the circuit started to lose its charm--I'm on vacation to enjoy myself, after all. So I went up a little further and came back down by a different route, where you can see a lot of other shrines, including the foxes with the key in their mouths. Still not sure what that means, though. In the last pic, Buddhism and Shintoism are side-by-side; in this way, Koreans and Japanese seem similar, in that they are willing to entertain a variety of religious views simultaneously. Majorities of both groups profess to being atheists, but they nonethless paticipate in various religious practises, talk blithely about the spirits of the ancestors (and even streams and mountains), and perform the rites and rituals they want to. Anyway, if one religion is good, surely two or three is even better...

Bangkok: One Day

Bangkok in one day?  Can't be done.

I did try, choosing a hotel equidistant from the Grand Palace on one side and the shopping road of Khaosan Rd on the other.  Sadly, by the time I cooled down in my 1450 Bt room's air conditioning and washed up in its hot water shower, there wasn't a lot of daylight left for either one.

Khaosan Rd, above, is just off this intersection, Kok Wua, below with a well-posed tuk-tuk, a strategic rallying point for the democracy movement in the 1970s.  The October Movement monument on one corner of the intersection played host to an anti-war singalong the night I was in town.

Portraits of King Bhumibol cover practically every building in this area, which after all is the seat of government, with loads of ministry buildings here:

This one, a particularly fine example, was located at one end of a large public square seemingly dedcated to the longevity of the Thai royal dynasty.  The "Giant Swing" or Sao Ching Chaa, is at the other end, with this interesting sculpture in the middle:

I also got nice shots of a shady klong:

I managed to make it, not to the Grand Palace, alas, but to Wat Pho, one of the great temples by any measure.  Also known as the temple of the Reclining Buddha, it is the birthplace of Thai massage, which I didn't know until a bloke outside asked me if I wanted one.  It is a large and gilded complex, where you have to pay 50 Bt to see the big Buddha--the largest and oldest temple complex in Bangkok, in fact, housing more than 1000 Buddha images, including the reclining one, which at 46 meters long and 15 meters high, is immense.

A few images from around the temple compound:

Stone giant protecting his courtyard

Perhaps a bodhi tree, scion of the one under which the Buddha awaited enlightenment

One of these things is not like the others, one of these things is not the same ...

Detail of the base of a prang

Late afternoon sun glinting on gilding

Stone giant, guardian of the temple

A few Buddhas at the base of the bodhi tree (?)

 Visiting the temple was a blast from the past for me--the distant past, as I know we came here at least a couple of times somewhere around 1970.  The wall murals inside seem a bit dingier (they didn't photograph well enough to post) but the spires and eves seem much shinier and more golden.  I really wanted to see more, but then I didn't want to leave the beach.  Ah, well, you can't have everything.

As Steven Wright says, "Where would you put it?"

Proof There is No God

Of course I am just being facetious, since everyone knows you cannot prove a negative. Still, the idea of an enormous Jesus statue being zapped by lightning and burning to the ground, strikes me as ... well, it strikes me as something, though I'm not sure what.

Take a look:



That's 62 feet of plastic foam and fiberglass aflame there, leaving behind nothing but the steel frame:


Video here. Nicknamed "Touchdown Jesus" because of the positioning of his outstretched arms, the figure stood in front of Solid Rock Church of Monroe, Ohio (Motto: "Our Church may be built of solid rock, but our Jesus is made of plastic").

This post has nothing whatever to do with living in Korea, so let me correct that now (from Wikipedia):

According to 2005 statistics compiled by the South Korean government, approximately 46.5% of the South Korean population express no religious preference.
Of the religious population, 29.2% are Christian (of which 18.3% (on total) profess to be Protestants and 10.9% to be Catholics), 22.8% are Buddhist, and the rest adheres to various new religious movements including Jeungism, Daesunism, Cheondoism, Taoism, Confucianism and Won Buddhism.

I also wrote a little about religion in Korea in a couple of previous posts, which you can see here.

Ack, Mormons!

They're everywhere, I tells ya!

So here I am, minding my own business, walking down the street about 7:00 pm or so, making my way toward the corner where I hope to find the rotisserie chicken truck and pick up a tasty dinner. This is something I have mentioned before, most notably here.

I'm walking along, and this young Korean starts to pass by me, does a double-take and smiles real big. "Oh, hello! How are you?" he says.

Now, most folks won't give you the time of day in this country, a feature of the culture being to ignore the masses of people all around you, except for the ones you already know. As a foreigner, I get my fair share of stares, mostly from the very young and the very old, and a lot of the "Hello, how are you? I am fine," kind of thing from middle schoolers. Occasionally, a college student will engage in conversation to practice his or her English, and that's what I assumed this was.

He asks to shake my hand, so we do. About then, I notice he is with another young guy, a clean-cut Westerner. Both are wearing black jackets with white collared shirts. 'Huh,' I thought to myself, 'the Mormons are here, too.'

We talk as we walk, mostly them feigning interest in me, with questions about how long I've been here, etc. Fine with me, as long they don't start preaching. Though I'm loathe to give them an opening, I eventually have to ask the American what he's doing here.

"We're missionaries," he says. Yep, I pegged that one. "We belong to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints; sometimes we're called Mormons," he explains.

Yeah, thanks for the explanation, I guess I look like I just fell off the mu truck. He starts to tell me about what Mormons believe, but I give him "I really don't want to get into a religious discussion with you. ... It seems to me that most Koreans already have a religion--sometimes two!"

They think that's reasonably funny. But true.

"So how many Mormons are there in Korea?" I ask.

"About 90,000." That's not very many, considering just the single Christian church congregation that my artist friend Cheonggi attends has 700,000 members. Korea also has spawned a few new religions, such as Cheondogyo. And of course the Unification Church, founded by Sun Myong Moon in Korea, has a few million adherents worldwide--you know, the "Moonies".

Anyway, we finally get to the corner, and my chicken guy is there, across the street. My new acquaintances are headed a different direction so we part company, but not before they give me a Mormon tract. Written in hangeul.

Gateman--Not the Superhero, But Still Pretty Cool

I've been meaning to create this post for a while, and I finally took the one minute needed to shoot the video below. And the fifteen for Youtube to process it.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.--Sir Arthur C. Clarke

Case in point, my flat's "entry system" or, um, lock. As you can see, it's keyless, at least in the traditional sense. You can apparently activate it by keypad code, or telephone code, or by using what seems to be a watch battery glued to a stick.


While I'm at it, let me include another of my favorite Clarke quotes:

The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion.

Yanghwajin

I spent today with older Mr Lee and Miss Cho at the Yanghwajin Foreign Missionary Cemetery in Hapjeong-dong and two attached sites--a Catholic Museum and shrine, and an interpretive center. Catholicism in Korea stretches back to 1784, and was quickly followed by the first execution of Catholics in 1801. The Catholic museum is at a site called Chol Tu San, "Hill of Beheading", where unknown thousands of Korean Christians were martyred in the 1866 Byungin Massacre.


The episode began with the murder of nine French missionaries. The French government sent two navy ships up the Hangang to the fortress at Yanghwajin, "Willow Flower Fortress" to get to the bottom of the events. At the time, Korea was ruled by the Regent Tae Won-gun, father of the teenage King Kojong (who would eventually come to be known as the last king of Chosun). The French ships were turned back, and Tae Won-gun cleansed the site with the blood of Christians. The site documents torture and persecution of Korean Christians throughout the 1800s.







In addition to the museum, the catholic shrine has a statuary park which includes a really neat outdoor Stations of the Cross and a big memorial to the martyrs.















The Foreign Missionary Cemetery was first opened in 1885, and is the resting place of several influential foreigners, including newspaperman Ernest Bethell, whose reporting tried to rally the West against the brutal Japanese occupation beginning 1905, and US diplomat Homer Hulbert, whose epitaph reads, "I would rather be buried in Korea than in Westminster Abbey." There is a very nice, media-intensive interpretive center. The first picture below asks visitors to use their hands to hold up the names of Protestant missionaries.







That bottom right photo is of Fifteen Years Among the Top-Knots by Horace Underwood, one of the earliest and most influential missionaries. In fact, the Underwood family served in Korea (and many are buried here) for four generations and 119 years, finally leaving in 2004. Underwood, a Presbyterian, founded what became Yonsei University, one of Korea's top three. Another Presbyterian missionary, Mary Scranton, founded Ehwa Women's University.



On this lovely autumn day, the cemetery was beautiful in its setting amid the turning trees and a crisp blue sky. But not too long ago, it had fallen into serious disrepair, and efforts of the Union Church (Protestant non-denominational), to which Mr Lee belongs, took ten years to bring it to its present state. Finally, here is a namesake Scottish missionary: