May 18

Mt. Kurama

Today was a spectacularly breath-taking day! After classes, we all hopped on the subway to the end of the line and boarded a 1-man-train headed toward Kuramayama (Mount Kurama). They call it a 1-man-train because the 2-car locomotive is ran entirely from platform to platform by 1 man each day; the same man will sell tickets at the ticket booth, collect them boarding the train, operate the train, and ensure that all the passengers are off before opening up the turn-stiles allowing us off the platform.

It was a very pretty 40 minute train ride down, with some great scenery of trees, small villages, and of rivers and streams dotting the large hills in the distance. (*Interjection. Trying to write this all while my more-than-slightly-rebellious teenage home-stay-brother is literally pounding on the table and listening to some Japanese heavy metal is no easy feat. Let me tell you! >.<*) Upon departing from the train Dr. Miller educated us on the history of the mountain that we were about to climb…which I no longer remember =P. I do remember, however, that it had something to do with a legend of the ‘Tengu’, half bird, half man monsters that lived on the mountain and required obeisance of some type or another from the people of the village below…and the pictures of the masks are supposedly how the Tengu were rumored to look like.

We started the hour and a half ascent of the mountain and saw some pretty awesome architecture (both natural and man-made) on the way up. The jewel, however, wasn’t on the climb itself, but instead was on the top of the mountain, in an Otera (remember that Otera are Buddhist temples). The grounds of the temple were beautiful, but were not the main draw; it was the ritual crypts beneath the temple that were the sight this time around! Literally thousands of small urns were placed carefully on hundreds of wooden and stone shelves that seemed to be carved out of the natural basement they were kept in. Within the urns were locks of hair of deceased worshipers that were ritually washed in sacred waters from a nearby natural spring, and carefully buried within the crypt to symbolically await the time for their new re-birth into life. Among the multitudes of urns were 3 statues of importance within the Buddhist religion, Kannon-sama (the Bodhisattva of mercy and grace) and 2 others that I didn’t recognize that were all open armed to thank the dutiful service of those that were entombed within.

After we were satisfied looking around and taking pictures in the beautifully lit crypt, we walked a little bit down the mountain to catch a rail car back down to the base to make our way to the next destination; an Onsen nestled among the hills near the small town we started out from. After a short 10 minute jaunt to the Onsen (remember that Onsen are natural hot-springs that are made into public baths), we divided the group by gender and entered our appropriate Onsen. After showering off and cleaning ourselves, the 5 guys sunk into the waters that were being piped in from the nearest mountain. The temperature wasn’t all too hot for American standards, but was considered to be substantially cooler than almost all other Onsen by the Japanese standard (it was around 102 degrees).

While I’m not embarrassed by the human anatomy at all, it was funny to find out that 2 of the group members we are with are extremely uncomfortable with public nudity. Dr. Miller in effect told both of them to get over it and to just learn how to deal with it if they chose not to be open to that aspect of Japanese culture. He reminded us that the first stop on our railway trip was to a town with 7 Onsen, and that we would be visiting each one of them, which made the rest of us chuckle and formulate plans to make that day centered around having fun at the other two’s expense =P.

The soak in the Onsen was extremely refreshing in a lot of different ways. For obvious reasons I’m not able to provide any photographic evidence of how beautiful the scene was from the outdoor pool, but it was breath-taking (a verb pair that I seem to be using a lot =P)!

After the Onsen, we all headed back to our various homes and called it a night =)

No embarrassing Japanese today =(…