Japan Summer Vacation Trips - Pics/Video 3

Part 3... And first up is Kendo (traditional Japanese fencing)!

While walking through the national treasure of Nikkou, I heard what sounded like a big Taiko drum and lots of screaming. Naturally attracted, I followed the noise and found a shrine-like building with a number of guys and girls going at it. Here's the video:

And after the kendo and some delicious curry croissants made by a famous hotel restaurant called Kaneya, we headed to the museum. And the pics, well what I was able to take because photography isn't really allowed...




We had lunch at a local restaurant and it was actually quite good. I snapped a quick photo of the town and of the restaurant before devouring my demi-glas hamburg and my travel partner's curry rice.




Next we headed to the numerous shrines laid out around the area. Here's a video of an underground passage we took to cross the road to get back to the shrine area. There are huge pictures on the walls of various scenes in Nikkou of interest.

Many of the shrines can't be photographed, so I'll tell the story of the two most interesting ones.

In one, you move through a labyrith of rooms to get to the center room, and it's quite large, about maybe 30 feet by 20 feet, and the entire ceiling is painted with an enormouse dragon. There's a monk there banging away at this hammer instrument, and just when you get under the head of the dragon, you can hear this long drawn-out loud screech of the dragon calling back to the instrument. Very exciting to experience, and it must've involved some really cool architecture planning to have that happen.

The other is the most famous shrine in Nikkou I think. The outside has carvings of monkeys doing the 'see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil' thing, and it's used here as a metaphor for the various levels of living (the children all keep quiet for survival, waiting for the mother to come back with food, etc. but the carvings get more deep - with the monkey looking to the heavens as the spiritual part of life beyond just survival, etc.) Since of course these are on the outside, I could take photos of them, and I did in detail as you'll see in the next Part of this series coming later this week. In the meanwhile, enjoy this stream of shrine photos of Nikkou.