Today’s idea was to go to Himeji-ji, cited in the book as the perfect Japanese castle, yet another UNESCO site, but one out of Kyoto about an hour on the Shinkansen. At least it’s not a temple, and the book says it’s worth a trip, so why not? The first thing was to go to that odd bakery for more weird pastry. I got a bun which turned out to have red-bean paste inside it, a thing marked “Spicy!” which had bacon and hard-boiled eggs in it (not spicy at all) and a bun with potatoes on top of it. The bakery’s motto is “Your good times have just begun,” and I have to admit, it is fun trying to figure out what the fuck they’ve baked.
The idea was to take it slow, and I did. Got to Kyoto station just after the train had left, so I killed an hour in the mall there -- not at all hard to do -- and got on the Shinkansen. Fifty minutes later I was in Himeji. The castle was clearly visible at the end of the street leading from the station, but the book had said it was a better idea to hit the Museum of Local History first. Not a bad idea, given my propensity for nice air-conditioned museums before the hard work, and, since this thing sits on top of a huge hill, I already knew it was going to be hard work. As I was walking, two guys on bicycles came up and asked in mid-American accents how I was doing and what I was doing, and I told them. It was only as they cycled away that I saw the Mormon badges they were wearing. One wasn’t even white, poor guy. He won’t be joining his buddy in heaven.
The museum was all the way past the castle, and not at all well-marked, but it did the trick of filling me in on local history. There was a tribute at the end to a professor who had collected things which related to the castle, and it said that in one of his publications he had deduced that “castles represent humanity’s desire for safety.” Especially the rulers of said humanity.
Himeiji-ji, with fireproof dolphins
The castle, let it be said, is spectacular -- from the outside. Inside, it’s dark, you climb very high-pitched stairs (after having climbed even more to get to the entrance), but at least a nice breeze was filtering in the windows. The exhibits are pretty good; one of the rulers was a bit of an aesthete, and they had some of his paintings, calligraphy, and writings on view. But the only thing you get for going all the way to the top -- not that you have a choice -- is a shrine, which had apparently been there since before the castle. They moved it to build the castle, and, as the booklet said “afterwards people felt Nature’s curse,” so they put it back. It has plenty of bottles of sake before it, and another of those places where the tourist can rubber-stamp the pamphlet you get going in. Another curious bit of signage was in the “West bailey,” whatever that is, a long dormitory which you see backwards so you only figure out that it was the aesthete’s wife who had her quarters there, building a tower with a bit of her dowry so she’d have a place to put on her makeup and also perform a ritual, plus, of course, house her 30 or so servants. The doors to the servants’ quarters are huge and the sign says something like “it seems odd that these doors are so formidable when the occupants of these quarters were only women,” which is a nice way of putting it. Of course, I don’t know what kind of women, so maybe it wasn’t so odd. I missed the house where people could commit harakiri, although apparently it was never used for it.
It was a pretty arduous trek, and given that my t-shirts were nearly wasted, I bought another one, horrible tourist thing, on my way out because it’ll come in handy, I’m sure. Got back to the train station and of course I’d just missed the train, so I killed an hour in the adjoining market and of course immediately found the food department underneath the big department store, which I cruised amusedly as the vendors whisked the samples out of my reach. Damn, I was actually feeling hungry, but it was almost 5, and I decided to wait til I got back to Kyoto and hit the tonkatsu place one last time.
They were glad to see me, but I sensed the master’s mind was elsewhere this time. There were ten bowls of all kinds of stuff lined up on the counter, some huge shrimp-like things being very active in the same fish-tank that had held the abalones last time, and some rather demanding customers next to me who looked like a successful businessman and his girlfriend, or maybe even his wife, and apparently a big party dining behind the shoji screen. The girlfriend spoke in a little-girl tone that I found immensely annoying, and they seemed to be having some very expensive food, including a mushroom stew which had five or six different kinds of mushrooms in it, including oyster, shiitake, and enoki. The crust on my tonkatsu kept coming loose, which it hadn’t last time, but the missus made me feel like she was telling the truth when she said “I’m so glad you came back here.” It was a good way to end the stay in Kyoto.
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