Honors tokyo 2017
A Guide to Getting Lost in Tokyo
The second week of the program has gone by in a whirlwind as we as a class traveled around 6 hours by shinkansen down to Hiroshima on Monday, and then back up to Kyoto on Tuesday. After visiting numerous well-known sites, like the Peace Memorial Museum of WWII in Hiroshima, and cultural sites like Kinkakuji and Ryoanji (and Nijo Castle, which I got a premium experience of), I’ve gotten to see many bits and pieces of Japan’s cultural diversity and development in all the cities I explored. After class dismissed on Thursday, I traveled around Kyoto with Alison and Laura, and in the evening, I went by myself to a smaller, local natural onsen (温泉, hot spring) around our Airbnb. It was the first time I went to one of these more local places, rather than a large spa or something catered to tourists. Thus, there were no signs in English, and I was probably one of the only foreigners. The onsen was a lot less flashy than the ones I’ve previously gone to, and I truly experienced the calm, quiet, and peace of the slow-paced, relaxing Japanese onsen atmosphere. I was also one of the youngest people there, which is more evidence to Japan’s aging population, especially in smaller suburban areas. Looking back, there were actually many places where there was a surprisingly large amount of elderly people; I’ve noticed that there are rarely places in Japan where there’s a special discount for seniors, which says a lot about the normality of seniors going out and about. Even when I hiked up Mt.Misen, a mountain on Miyajima island, I saw many older people also going up, slowly, but surely. Alison, Laura, and I even commented on how rare seeing seniors climb a mountain would be in the U.S since most retired Americans tend to stay more at home, or inside retirement homes/camps instead of walking outside (based on my observations). . . As I mentioned, Friday morning, we left bright and early to visit Miyajima’s Itsukushima Shrine again, to see the national treasure for what it’s known as, “the floating shrine”. Here, I was really able to see how well this 1400-year-old shrine has been preserved, and how despite all these years, there’s a natural beauty that still remains. The way that the shrine interacts with nature and the sea was really striking. Both the shrine and the hike up Mt.Misen later were more filled with tourists, but there was still a sense of preserved nature. Though tourism is evidently a big part of Miyajima island, lots of the places remain relatively unchanged for tourism. There is a really nice balance of what part of the attractions are open for tourist experience, but also a very intentional protection of natural parts of the island. For instance, the cable car that we rode is definitely made for sightseeing visitors, but I didn’t see much of the mountain nature being disturbed too much due to it. Instead of having paved paths, much of the hike was simply small dirt trails, in which case I sometimes couldn’t tell if it was the main trail that I was supposed to take.
That evening, we stopped in Osaka on the way back, and immediately felt the change in atmosphere with all the skyscrapers and neon lights surrounding us. In a sense, it was more like Tokyo than the other cities, but still bigger, livelier, and more ‘festive’ feeling. The main streets were so long and wide that we didn’t even walk through all of them the entire night. Seeing this giant difference in style and culture from these vastly different cities that are geographically fairly close to each other, I have come to realize just of diverse Japan is. Each of these big cities are known for completely different things, and have really different atmospheres; it’d be wrong to say that something “seems Japanese” now, since I’ve found that each small region of Japan is actually so unalike.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
|