Tag Archives: torii gates

Nara and Inari

Our intention was to visit Inari first and then Nara, but a slight miscalculation in the express-ness of our train landed us at Nara in the early hours.

Righto.

Must.

See.

Temples.

The park full of bambi was a little bit of a pleasant diversion, as were the multitude of cartoon deer-boy characters. The surprising thing about the temple was the giant buddha inside. How many giant buddhas are there? I know there’re a few in China but this is getting ludicrous! Even more ludicrous (or perhaps portentous for those that way inclined) is the number of times Buddha’s head has fallen clean off after various (not 2011) earthquakes.

We had a small stop along the way to admire a random house with a grand old cherry blossom in the front yard, held up with various bamboo crutches and the flashbulbs of many admirers.

Inari turned out to be surprising also what with the thousands of torii gates at Fushimiinari Taisha Shrine (conveniently located at the exit of the Inari JR Station). I can just imagine the conversation with the subbies: “You wanted 100 gates? I thought you said 10,000!”

We ran out of daylight a third of the way up the mountain of torii gates (which worked out better than had we run out of daylight at Nara) and headed back to the Cube for an interesting Japanese take on spaghetti for dinner.