Thursday, 17 March 2016

Nara: More temples, aggressive deer, cherry blossom and Mochi



Nara is just a 50-minute train journey from Kyoto and is well worth a visit.




Nara was actually the first permanent capital of Japan so of course has a range of Buddhist temples and Shinto Shrines.  We are getting used to this balance of Buddhism and Shinto everywhere and have learnt that the Japanese have a flexible attitude to religion and mutually observe Buddhism and Shinto, often with a bit of Zen or Christianity thrown in dependent upon the occasion.


The most famous temple here is the Buddhist Toshodaiji temple.  It is pretty big and has some impressive statues of Buddha and his Guardians.  I was particularly taken with a tall wooden pillar that had a small hole in it and people of all sizes were trying to crawl through it but only those with the most narrow bodies could squeeze through.  No hope for John and I which is unfortunate as it is said that good health is granted to those who are able to squeeze through the tiny tunnel. Oh dear, back to the diet then!


We of course then needed to visit a Shinto Shrine to get the balance so Kasuga Taisha.  The most beautiful aspect of this shrine is that it has hundreds of bronze lanterns that hand from the buildings as well as stone lanterns that line the approach.  We commented on how beautiful this must look if the lanterns are lit up at night.




However, the main reasons I chose to visit Nara was because of the deer.  The park is home to hundreds of freely roaming deer and deer crackers are for sale in the park to feed to them.  The deer are considered in Shinto to be messengers of the gods, and are seen as a natural treasure. The books say that the deer are surprisingly tame although that was not John’s experience as within a few seconds of purchasing deer crackers, 3 or 4 deer made a beeline for him and nibbled and bit him in all sorts of compromising places.  Yelping in pain, John threw the deer crackers to me and I quickly managed to distribute them to the deer without suffering too much from their teeth.  I observed a number of men doing the same as John, i.e.quickly palming off the deer crackers to their girlfriends or even more cowardly to their children!


Moving quickly away from the deer we were lucky enough to discover an area of the park where the cherry blossom was out.  This was quite unexpected as we knew that although the plum blossom was out, the cherry blossom was a couple of weeks away so we felt very lucky to discover this little spot of pink and white blossom.  


Making our way back to the train station via the old district of Naramachi, we fell upon a very strange activity which involved 2 burly men with huge mallets pounding a green doughy substance.  There was quite a crowd gathered around as these 2 men took it in turns to slam down their mallets, appearing to nearly miss each other’s hands each time.  We had no idea what was happening or what this green goo was.  After the pounding stopped the green goo was formed into small round patties and sold for about 60 pence each.  Still having no idea what it was, I decided to buy one to eat.  It didn’t taste of much and I later learnt that this is actually called “Mochi” and is a Japanese rice cake made by pounding glutinous rice into a paste.

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