Iwakan: Miyajima

With only a week of living in Japan left, I figured I should go do something cool, and since I hadn't yet been to see Miyajima, that became the goal. Miyajima is an island off the coast of Hiroshima (actually part of the city, I think) that is one of the three great sites in Japan, the other two being Kyoto's Ama no Hashidate (kind of far away) and Miyagi prefecture's Matsushima (really far away). Joining me on this trip and thankfully handling pretty much all the details, faithful friend Mie, seen here riding on a boat.

Our journey started at the local train station, but didn't really start getting update-worthy until we got to Hiroshima. Hiroshima still has streetcars, so we took one of those for the sake of taking one (it wasn't that far) to the peace park. I already posted a bunch of crap about that, and we didn't spend any real time there, so there aren't going to be any pictures of that. From the park, though, one can take a boat down the river and out to Miyajima, which we did.

You can see the atomic dome there. While the boat is on the river, you can stand on the deck outside, which we obviously did, but once you get to the ocean, you have to go back inside and they speed up, the boat bouncing around like crazy. While we were taking pictures and whatnot, a guy offered to take a picture of the two of us, which I don't have because it was with Mie's camera. Mie offered to take a picture of him and his friend, and so I tried to get out of the way, but they thought it was funny and took a picture with me, too. I also don't have that picture.

This is what Miyajima is famous for, its shrine. The actual name of the island is Itsukushima (厳島), and Miyajima (宮島) just means "shrine island." For those paying attention to the characters, shima (島) means island. The unvoiced palatal sibilant sh is voiced as an affricate, j, sometimes due to the preceding sounds. It is odd because usually the change is only in the voicing, but here the actual type of sound changes. If you left it as a fricative (sibilant), then you would get the zh sound, like the j in the French je. That sound doesn't exist in Japanese, however. Anyway, this is the torii, which looks like this at high tide. When the tide is out, you can walk out to it, which we did, but I don't have any pictures of. The tide was out when we got there and we had to wait a while, actually, before we got this. There were some Americans who tried to swim out to it, but they got yelled at by some priest or something. There's a boat that takes you through the gate, actually, if you want to. Prepare for a multimedia experience.

I was saying "Amerikajin da" meaning "[I am/They are/etc.] American[s]." I don't know what we were talking about, so I don't know what the topic of the sentence was. Japanese is high-context.

That's the other thing that Miyajima is famous for, obnoxious sacred deer that try to steal your food or anything they think is food. You are not supposed to feed them, unlike the deer in Nara, though I suspect that people do, anyway. That deer ended up eating that map, but we didn't need it anyway.

There are lots of deer. I have no idea who that other dude is; he just happened to be there.

We went into the main building of the shrine (this costs a small fee), and were lucky enough to see somebody's wedding ceremony. I tried to take a couple pictures, but they aren't very good.

Ah, well. We also did omikuji, which is a kind of fortune telling where you shake a box to get a stick out, and the stick has a number on it. Then you take a fortune out of the drawer with the same number. I got kyou, 狂, which is the worst one. That basically never happens at shrines because they want people to do it more, which they are unlikely to do if it says they are going to get sick or lose their job or something.

We also saw this big pagoda. Not much to say about that. After all that walking around, etc., it was time to take a break (I love this about Japan; it is almost always break time). On a hot day, what makes for a good meal?

Tempura soba! The long tempura is anago, conger eel. Soba is buckwheat noodles. I wanted cold noodles, so this hit the spot nicely.

After lunch, it was time to make our way up Mt. Misen. On the way there were stores selling normal touristy stuff, which in Japan usually includes wooden statues. I don't know who buys giant wooden statues, but they usually have big ones like this:

I'm pretty sure the one on the right is Yebisu, who appears on some of my favorite beer.

The first segment of the climb is done via a "ropeway."

Don't look down, Mie!

Living on the mountain are Japanese macaques. There are a bunch of signs saying not to feed them and not to look at them in the eyes. Also, there are lockers to put your stuff in because apparently they are good at stealing things. When we were coming down the mountain, a couple of them came flying down the path towards me, howling. It was crazy. They were fighting, though, and didn't do anything to me.

I think this was about halfway up?

Most of the way up there is this little shrine building. Mie's doing the classic Japanese pose. We were covered in sweat by this point from trying to climb up the mountain. It isn't that steep, but it was so humid that none of the sweat would evaporate until she found a passage behind the building here that acted as a wind tunnel where we stood to cool off. There were French dudes who were climbing the mountain in sandals (what?).