Antiquity...and hungry deer.

Tonight I returned to my apartment feeling cold and a little footsore. However, with a camera full of pictures and a head full of tales it felt safer to get it all down before I went to sleep. Firstly, it snowed a little here in Kyoto the day after Christmas, but it was too warm to stick. When I first came here someone said that it never got terribly cold, though it was very windy. For the most part this is true, although the wind definitely makes up for the lack of sub-zero weather.

Keeping the cold and wind in mind, I bundled up in my scarf and my new hat (resplendant with pompom), and traveled with my friend Nikki down to Nara. Nara is famous for being the first capital city of Japan in addition to having famous temples, more history than you can shake a stick at, and...deer. 

(The bucks all had their antlers sawed off and rounded. I found out why quickly enough.)

 (While they were born a long time ago, there were still some deer that were clearly still babies).
 
The deer were definitely my favorite part, although they were pretty pushy. Most of the deer have been taught to “bow” for treats (which you can buy for 150 yen pretty much anywhere) which consists of bobbing their head up and down. This is most similar to the head bobbing I do in the office when I need to use the printer, so I decided this behavior was bow-worthy enough to get treats. The does and fawns are well-behaved enough, but the bucks had a tendency to head-butt to get your attention. It wasn't hard, and thank god that their horns had been sawed off, but after a couple blows I was starting to get bruised. Fortunately, Nikki (being more assertive than I), found that firmly shoving away the pushy deer got them to behave quickly. Especially when they saw the well-behaved deer getting all the treats. 

(Like all wild pokemon, deer know four different attacks. “Bite” “Take-down” “Double Kick” and “Headbutt.” These attacks are super effective against little girls and old women.)

After being thoroughly accosted by deer, Nikki and I went to go see the Todaiji temple. This Buddhist temple is both the largest wooden building in the world, and holds the largest bronze statue of Buddha in the world. I took many pictures, so it is probably easiest to just caption them to give you a run-down of what we saw.

There are deer up until the inner temple grounds.  On of the deer grabbed my ticket, so I had to wrestle with it to get the ticket back. This caused great amusement for the other visitors ^^; Thanks to my latent deer-handling abilities, however, I got my ticket back in one piece.

 The last/main gate to see the Todaiji grounds. Please note that you can buy tickets here, and do not need to bother with a joint ticket to also see the museum, unless you really want to.

 This building "The Great Buddha Hall" or "Daibutsu-den" is really huge. It is, after all, the largest wooden structure in the world. It has also been burned down twice in various wars. You can see models of the earlier temple buildings/grounds in the back part of the current hall.

Please do not confuse the "Daibutsu-den" with "Dobutsu-en". On is a sacred icon and world heritage site, and the other is a zoo.

 I had heard that you aren't allowed to take pictures inside of the temple itself. Surprisingly, this was not true. I stopped after a couple of photos though. If you want to see the 6 or so other statues and the miniature replicas of the old temple grounds (still a good 20-feet wide in small scale) I suggest you look them up online or plan a trip to Nara itself!

One of the enormous wooden pillars that supports the building has a hole cut in it that visitors are supposed to squeeze through if they want to be blessed with enlightenment in their next life. Nikki managed it, though after she barely made it I decided it was best not to try myself. Enlightenment aside, I suspect that the temple monks needed some form of entertainment for themselves when the tourists started showing up.


We also visited two museums, the Todaiji Museum and the Nara National Museum. If you're going to visit only one museum (and I recommend that you do, as they overlap quite a bit) I would recommend you go see the Nara National Museum, as it has the most depth and variety. The museums house artifacts found on the old temple sites when they were burned down/destroyed in various conflicts. As such, the bulk of the displays are scrolls, small sacred objects (such as altar implements), and paintings that are often darkened from age. 

(Nara International Museum, with thanks to asiaexplorers.com for the image)
 
While I did not find the museum exhibits anywhere near as exciting as the deer, there were a couple pieces that caught my eye. The first was a painting that illustrated the equivalent dieties/holy figures between the Shinto and Buddhist pantheons. As someone who was raised with Western monotheism and “thou shalt have no gods other than me, or else” I found this quite profound. I'm not sure if the undertones of the piece said “look, it's okay to participate in both faiths” but there also seemed to be a lack of follow up paintings featuring the previous artist's hands/head/unmentionable pieces being chopped off. It has always suggested a deep religious insecurity to me that blasphemy/heresy/how-dare-you-see-god-in-a-different-way-than-me-dammit has ever been a capitol offense in the West.

On a less theological note, almost all of the scrolls were written strictly in Kanji (complicated Chinese characters) which I found really exciting. This is because 1. I'm a huge geek, and 2. It shows a distinct period in Japanese history when Kanji was used by (male) scholars, katakana was used by men (to a lesser extent), and hiragana was used by women. One of the reasons why “The Tale of Genji” and “The Pillow Book” survived to be so popular is because they were written by women, and thus in hiragana. Hiragana is a phonetic script (unlike Kanji, which can have several different readings per character), so it was easily read and didn't suffer as much from the transition into modern Japanese (in which all three character sets are used). At least, I recall this as being accurate from what reading I've done. There is an odd chance my Japanese literature professor may be reading this blog, in which case I would like to concede that some of this may be pulled, academically speaking, from my ass.

That's all from me today. In closing, I would like to admit that I bought more souveneirs than was probably wise. Most of them deer themed.