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The plan for today is to head out to Kurama and hike up the mountain to Kurama-dera temple and then back down the slope to the small town of Kibune the Kibune Festival. On the way to Kurama, we met these kindergarten kids on a school trip. |
| See Ming and the kids with their teacher in front of a Tengu goblin. |
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The main buildings of the temple are a good 45-minute hike up the mountain, but a cable car took us halfway up and we joined the kids from there. |
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The trail down from Mount Kurama towards Kibune is called the Kinone-michi (Tree Root Path).
When Minamoto Yoshitsune's father and grandfather were killed in power struggles between the Minamoto and Taira clans,
he was brought here to be raised as a Buddhist priest.
He escaped into the wild and legend says he was trained by a Tengu goblin here.
You can read more about Yoshitsune's great achievements and tragic story here. After some time, we heard the sound of drums and we knew were were nearing Kibune. |
| Finally, at Kibune. The big archway leads up to a wooden shrine. Across the road (behind me) are a row of inns. |
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Kibune-Jinja Shrine. It is supposed to be older than Kyoto city itself but looks brand spanking new from the outside. Some priests were offering prayers for a good harvest inside. |
| Men in suits waited patiently outside the temple. Some were falling asleep. |
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In the summer, the inns build platforms (called kawadoko) over the river, so that people can lunch and dine in the naturally cool air. |
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| The men of the village arrive to carry the mikoshi (a portable shrine) into the temple. |
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With the Kibune Festival over, we decided to make our way back to Kyoto to embark on a quest - to find a "pig shrine" that See Ming had read about on the Internet. I was born in the year of the pig (or boar) and we were trying to have a baby by next year (the year of the pig), so we wanted to pray at this temple. |
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See Ming remembered that the temple was somewhere around Kyoto Palace so we looked around. We found a temple, but no pig shrines. We decided to try our luck with a taxi even though we didn't know what the temple was called. All we had was an uncaptioned picture of a stone boar in a pamphlet, so we went with that. |
| The taxi took us to a huge temple that was nowhere near Kyoto Palace. Could this be the place? |
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I think that's a pig. But it looks kind of funny. |
| Here's another one. What's that sticking out above its ears? Wait a minute! This is a cow temple! |
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Oh well! Since we're already here, we might as well snap some pictures of the place. |
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See Ming translated this sign for me (She can read Chinese, which is very similar to Japanese Kanji). It explains the prayer process for students. A prayer for excellent results requires a donation of 500 yen. A prayer for passing grades requires a donation of only 400 yen. |
| This cow is rubbed smooth and glossy by people touching it for health. You can touch it and touch the part of your body that needs healing. An old lady was touching it repeatedly and touching her body all over. I guess that tells us what we have to look forward to. |
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We prayed at some of the shrines and then realised the year of the cow is three years away and we wanted a baby sooner than that. It was time to leave the cow temple. We were about out of ideas for our pig temple search. See Ming said it was my turn to ask for directions. |
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From left: Skye, Keely and See Ming. My Japanese was incomprehensible by anyone above the age of four, so I took the easy way out and decided to ask the first Caucasian person I saw, which was Keely. I saw her having a conversation with a Japanese lady, so I figured she'd be able to help. I didn't realise she wasn't actually doing any of the talking. I butted in and asked if she spoke any English and she shouted "YES!" excitedly. It turned out, she'd lost her camera at the temple in the morning and was trying to explain that to the lady who worked there. I explained I wasn't able to help and then felt really stupid asking her if she'd seen some pigs in her travels. See Ming dug out the phrase book, flipped to the page called "In Trouble" and let her copy down the phrase for "Where is the Lost and Found?" and off she went in search of the temple lady again. As we were leaving, See Ming was sad that we'd come to the wrong temple so I consoled her by saying maybe we were meant to come here to help that girl. Just then, we heard someone calling "Hey! Hey!" We turned around to see Keely waving her camera in the air. |
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Our last stop for the day was the Heian Jingu Shrine, to watch a No performance called Takigi No. The queue for tickets was long. |
| The audience. |
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We weren't supposed to take any pictures of the performance but See Ming snuck a few shots in. |
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| After a few performances, it started getting dark and wood fires (takigi) were lit by officials. We thought this was the mayor of Kyoto. |
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But when he came out to give a speech, the mayor turned out to be this young guy. |
| The performances carried on late into the night. |
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We got hungry, so we left early to have dinner in a nearby restaurant. |
| The food was quite delicious, according to Major Tom and Ground Control (the pig formerly known as Piggy). |
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| Back to Day 5 (part 2) <<< | >>> Day 7 (part 1): Tenryu-ji and Arashiyama |
