Category: travel

Niigata City, capital of Niigata Prefecture, isn’t really a travel destination for foreign tourists at all, but we ended up staying there for five nights because of a conference Yan was attending. Unsurprisingly, there was a huge contrast with Kyoto in terms of Romanized signage, though there were two English-language maps at the tourist information center (one, of restaurants, was somewhat out of date).

When researching this trip, it seemed that all the guidebooks basically assumed one would just use the city as a jumping-off point to ferries to Sado-ga-Shima, the island just off the coast. So I did a lot of scrounging online for information about things to do, some of which came in handy. I thought I’d put that info here for others to reference.

The bus system worked pretty similarly to the one in Kyoto (pay at front when exiting), so that made it a bit easier, but we ended up mostly walking (which was pretty doable). There were no paper maps of the bus system available at the tourist office, but the main terminal, on the north end of the train station, has a large mural that depicts the city but routes (unfortunately, we didn’t discover this until the day before we left).

The place where our lack of ability to read Kanji was most of an issue was in restaurants. It’s much harder to be more adventurous about that sort of thing when one is a vegetarian. So we didn’t eat as well as we did in Kyoto. …I should probably rephrase that to say we did have some good food (some really excellent tofu one night, and some damn good sushi), but the language barrier created challenges.

The city is definitely grittier than Kyoto. It didn’t help that it rained off and on most of the time we were there- it sort of added to the industrial landscape. We stayed in an inexpensive business hotel, Dormy Inn, which was close to the train station and a bit over a kilometer from Yan’s meeting site. It was quite nice for the price- had an en-suite bathroom (it was also larger than the Kyoto hostel!) and two onsen on the premises (which we didn’t avail ourselves of).

There are a few main areas of tourist interest in the city. Downtown/Bandai (between the train station and the Shinano River) contains a lot of restaurants, shopping, bars, and strip clubs. Across the Shinano River to the north is the more traditional nightlife district (possibly more upscale bars?) and what seemed to be a newer downtown area. This more northerly district historically had  lots of canals; it was a port area as well as the red-light district. Today, the canals have been filled in and are now streets. It’s fairly easy to walk between and around these areas. South of the station (which we didn’t get to ) is the main pro soccer stadium and a large lagoon with parks and gardens. Much of the rest of the city is residential and industrial areas.

I’ll post later about two areas in the city where I took walks: along the Shinano River to Hakusan Park, and to Nishikaigan Park along the coast.

I ended up doing three day trips out of the city using my rail pass (Tokyo’s Ueno Park, Echigo-Yuzawa, and Fukushimagata Wetlands); I could probably have spent another day just wandering the city instead, but these were things I was pretty excited about seeing (more in later posts).

Things I ended up not seeing that seemed like they might be neat:

• Northern Culture Museum (via bus): an old family estate and teahouse in a rice-growing area.
• Sakata & Murikami (via train): small towns with historic areas that were recommended to me as scenic.
• Yahiko (via train): a forested mountain and shrine southwest of the city.
• Toyanogata Lagoon (via bus): Big Swan Stadium is on this lagoon; there are also parks and apparently excellent birding in winter.
• Sado Island, of course.
• There’s also a tourist but that takes a route through scenic parts of the city, which would have been useful for orientation, but I didn’t take:

After visiting the Arashiyama bamboo grove, we headed north on a scenic walk, visiting two temples along the way: Jojakko-ji (on a hill with an expansive view of the city) and Gion-in (a tiny temple really only known for its moss garden), and a cemetery (Adashino Nenbutsu-ji).

Jojakko-j was very leafy and cool, which was ice because it was a pretty warm day. It had some neat moss-covered stairs, wooden buildings, and a small pagoda near the top of the property.

One thing Arashiyama is famous for is its moss gardens. We didn’t visit the most famous (Koke-dera) because you have to apply several days in advance via postcard to get in. But Jojakko-ji and Gion-in had enough moss to satisfy me.

This was a good place to sit and be peaceful for a bit.

Yan was perhaps less impressed by the moss gardens, in part because entrance fees can add up if you’re going to multiple little temples in a row.

While at Jojakko-ji, the moss was sort of just there being soft and verdant, at Gion-in the moss was actually landscaped! Different varieties were used to create mossy features under the maple canopy. How cool is that?

There were little planters with different species labeled:

It was also interesting to see how the light quality under the maples varied from the quality in the surrounding bamboo forest.

The light under the bamboo was quite different:

At one point, we saw a cat sleeping on the moss. Kawaii!

The last place we visited on our walk was a graveyard: Adashino Nenbutsu-ji. As the name indicates, it’s a Buddhist site. It’s known for a collection of small stone Buddha statues-grave markers-all packed together in rows.

The markers were apparently collected from old graves around the area about a century ago and brought to this one site to consecrate them. It’s still an active graveyard, so there were parts of the property with modern graves as well.

Thus ended our trip to Arashiyama. Of course, we had to walk back to the train station- a few miles away.

Though we didn’t take many photos of street scenes, much of the area was pretty. A lot of traditional older homes, and of course shops and restaurants along the way. It was quite a nice walk, and a nice way to end our stay in Kyoto.

On our last full day in Kyoto, we visited the Arashiyama area, which is right up against the hills on the west side of the city. It’s a very scenic area, with many historic sights and temples. We certainly didn’t visit everything- or even a majority of the interesting sights.

After taking the train to the Arashiyama station, we ate some breakfast pastries that we’d brought with us from the shop at Kyoto Station. Then we headed down to the Katsura River, and the famous Togetsukyō Bridge.

It’s a popular area for weddings, and we actually saw the bridge in car commercials featuring Arashiyama sights when we had a TV in our Niigata hotel room…but more on that later. The bridge is near the confluence of the Hozu & Ōi Rivers, which are both quite scenic as they cut through the hills. We walked along the river to Kameyama Park, and stopped for a bit to listen to a woman practicing the flute near the riverside.

At the top of Kameyama Park, there’s an overlook with nice views of the Hozu; one can take boat trips up the river or travel on the Sagano Romantic Train. We did neither, but amused ourselves by speculating whether we’d regret not optimizing the amount of romance on our vacation.

At the top of the hill, we saw our first Japanese giant hornet! And gave it a wide berth.

One of the main sights in Arashiyama is the famous old bamboo grove.

Really beautiful, but cars are apparently allowed to drive on the path through it. So taxis would occasionally come through, stop at the end and disgorge passengers, and then the drivers would take a picture of the passengers. Some of the taxis had schoolkids, so it was a bit of a cop-out: taking a taxi to the required field-trip sights instead of walking. I guess this gives kids more time to shop for ice cream and Hello Kitty merchandise before catching the train back to town.

Our time in Arashiyama was just beginning. Next time: landscaping with moss!

On our day trip to Nara, we didn’t really stop for lunch and so were getting a bit hungry after our day walking around temples and being accosted by also-hungry deer. The day was also cold and fairly windy.

As we were walking back toward town from Kasuga Taisha at around 3 pm or so, we saw a woman selling sweet potatoes out of a little portable oven. This was kind of geekily exciting, because years ago this was one of the things illustrated in manga that my sister and I would puzzle over (sweet potatoes as a snack?)- so we decided to buy one.

The price on the sign was 200 yen per 100 grams, so we mentally expected that we’d be buying maybe a quarter or half a potato, and that it’d be 300-400 yen. Wrong. Unfortunately, we did not realize that we would have to buy an entire potato- and the things were huge! Our intended “snack” clocked in at 0.5 kilos on her little scale. So voila, we were the proud owners of a $12 tuber.

The saving grace is that it was really yummy. It was actually a little sweet, nice and warm, and roasted the right amount, so it had a smoky flavor. So we can’t say it wasn’t worth it. And we did see other people buying the potatoes for the same price so it’s not like the woman took advantage of our ignorance.

So we took our precious potato and sat down on a bench to eat it. And wouldn’t you know it 5 seconds later a freaking deer comes by and expects to get fed! We had to keep pushing the deer away so that it (probably “she,” from the lack of antler buds) wouldn’t nibble at the sweet potato! She used all her little cutesy tricks, bowing and bobbing her head, but we were firm.

You could see the little thought bubbles above her head: “Come on this is the part where you humans feed me, look how cute I am! I’m cocking and wagging my head in a particularly adorable way, aren’t I? Watch me bow and nod at you. How come you’re not following the script here?!” First she would try to move in on Yan, then move over to me, then move back to Yan. This was exactly like the bunny’s behavior when we’re eating fruit. Herbivores! Little beggars.

Eventually she spotted some little kids with ice cream and wandered off. We did not watch the potential carnage.

So we finished the potato, and energized by half a kilo of carbs, we walked back to town. We’d decided to stay in town for dinner (a fusion pizza place with pickled veggie-sake lees pizza! and salad!), rather than heading back to Kyoto first. But only an hour after eating the potato, we weren’t really hungry. We walked around town for a bit, and found our way to one of the ancient burial tumuli marked on our map (for travelers to Nara, note that the tourist map they hand out at the train station is not to scale).

These mounds were built between the 3rd-6th Centuries, before the introduction of Buddhism made cremation popular. The mound we saw was pretty overgrown (so much so that we didn’t take a photo of it, unfortunately), and only had a sign in Japanese. But it did have sort of a mound shape with a moat around it, so we’re pretty sure it was a burial mound. Pretty neat to see.

As my readers may have noted, I’ve been out of touch for a while- largely due to travel, a cold, some travel, and then an allergy attack upon my return. Bleah. I’ve been concentrating on work, and been managing to get some writing done- but the blog has obviously suffered. But I’ll jump right back into talking about out Japan trip.

On one of our days in Kyoto, we decided to take the train into Nara- the even-more-ancient-than-Kyoto-capital. It’s a smaller city about a 45-minute train ride from the former. It has a large number of Buddhist, Shinto, and other sights. The train station is west of the largest concentration of sights, so we grabbed a tourist map and started walking east.

Our first stop was the Kōfuku-ji temple complex. This is a Buddhist site, and we encountered a group of pilgrims praying at one of the shrines, Nan’en-dō. The “five-story pagoda” was also part of the temple complex. This was where we encountered our first Nara deer.

Ah, the deer. They are ostensibly wild, but everywhere around the center of Nara and are quite used to people. Lurking inside their cute exterior lies the vicious and aggro heart of a park-dwelling herbivore. Honestly, the deer reminded us of Noe- but with antlers and about 10x the mass.

The big thing here is buying deer senbei (rice crackers) from street vendors, and then feeding them to the deer. The deer basically lie in wait at the vendor carts, and then mob you as they see you taking the crackers. And they’re pushy!

There are warning signs every so often about the cute little buggers. I didn’t get head-butted or reared at, but I did get nipped in the butt.

After taking turns being mobbed by pushy deer, we walked toward the next sight we planned to see- Tōdai-ji. Again, a Buddhist temple complex. This one is famous for containing the largest freestanding wooden structure in the world, with (I believe) the second-largest bronze Buddha statue inside.

It’s hard to think about what to say about this, other than it was quite big…and quite impressive. The Buddha is almost 50 feet high, and behind him is a huge wooden backing covered in golden paint. To the side are two wooden statues that are “only” probably like 20-25 feet high. Everything’s hugely massive in there.

After lingering in the Daibutsuden for a bit, we stopped outside to buy some souvenirs, and some human senbei for a snack, then headed onward.

We stopped at Nigatsu-dō (part of the Tōdai-ji complex), before walking to a major Shinto shrine, Kasuga Taisha.

Kasuga Taisha is famous for its lanterns- both bronze ones inside the shrine and stone ones lining the paths without. The shrine complex is surrounded by a park area of cedar trees, and is very pretty.

While we were at the shrine we got to see the formal photos for a wedding that had apparently just taken place. The bride and groom were in traditional outfits. The bride’s clothes in particular were pretty neat — she had a huge white egg-shaped headdress.

After hanging out in the park for a bit, we were a bit footsore, hungry, and chilly. I’ll tell the tale about a memorable snack we had before heading back to Kyoto tomorrow…