Nara Walks

“Just as Chocolate Pillows walked back into my life I find you. This all seems wrong, somehow. I shouldn’t be here. It was wrong of me to have come.”
“Give into your desires. I am the one you need. I will not walk out on you like the Chocolate Pillows. I am forever yours.”
“No, stop, please. It’s…it’s just too soon. My heart it not ready. Please, put your wrapper back on and go.”
“You cannot resist me. Search yourself. You know this to be true.”
“Yes…yes, but I cannot betray my love…I…stop that. Move away from my lips.”
“Taste me. Taste me and see why you will never return to these pillows of chocolate.”
“Oh yes…I mean no…stop…I am so weak…I have to give in. Take me, Orange Chocolate Biscuit, I am yours!”
“Unwrap me, me love.”
“Wait, did you hear that? Oh my God! Chocolate Pillows! I can explain! I…it meant nothing to me! Chocolate Pillows put down that gun. No, Chocolate Pillows, noooooooooooooo---“

I wake up in a cold sweat with the crosswalk clanging loudly outside the crack in Nostradamus trying to shake the image of a small Japanese chocolate puff pointing a double barreled shotgun at my soon to be exploding cranium. I had dozed off, the orange chocolate goodness still sticking to my lips as a reminder of my betrayal. I was a cheat, and have made a cuckold of my once true love. These things happen innocently enough, the story is common. Jilted lover of small chocolate filled rice puffs finds solace in the taste of another only to have the lost love return. Man loves Chocolate Pillows, Chocolate Pillows leaves man, Man morns loss, Man finds another love, Chocolate Pillows return and Man now finds himself in a confectionery love triangle. Yup, same old story. I was so vulnerable when I first saw them, wounded and confused. They sat so beautiful on the shelf of the K-plat Convenience story in Saidaiji station. I had to catch a train but I could not look away from the mesmerizing wrapper, bright red and seducing. On the back of the box were marks I did not understand but on the front was a picture of chocolate topping snuggly hugging a cookie. I quickly took out some coins, rushed to the counter, paid and jolted down the station steps to just make the train before it pulled out of the station. Little did I know such a simple action would be an addiction as when I popped a piece of this bar of wonders into my mouth my world erupted into an orange taste sensation! It was chocolate, it was cookie and it was orange all transmogrified into one single piece of miracle food. I devoured the rest of the bar hamster like, two handed shoves into my mouth so that my cheeks would fill with the taste. I’m sure I was attracting stares odder then the ones I’d been given for wearing the Megan shirt on the train but none of this mattered. These people were no there, nor was the train or the passing scenery. There was only the orange chocolate biscuit and me. One passionate romp on a train would not do and I partook in another sinful orange chocolate orgy on my way back that evening. Nothing fills a wound left by chocolate like more chocolate and if you are going to patch the void in you where once rested a love affair with chocolate filled rice puffs I suggest you do it in grand style with three boxes of orange chocolate topped biscuits. The question remains now that the Chocolate Pillows have returned to me: Can I possibly be romantically linked to TWO sweet Japanese treats? Does this make me some sort of sweet toothed pervert? Things in my chocolate universe have just taken a turn for the kinky, my friends.

Two extremely beneficial things have come out of the revamping of my schedule for my Nara week. The students that reign terror over two of classes have been removed from them, separated from the good kids, and placed in classes unto themselves. Now, I know this is sort of like winning a free ticket in the lottery as I still have to teach them but having them segregated into their own pen gives the other kids a chance to thrive while simultaneously giving me all my wild horses in one corral. Now this of course could backfire and you might be reading a post one day entitled How 5 Japanese Boys Stapled Me To A Wall And Set Fire To My Testicles but at least I know what I am going into when I walk into this day and, who knows, maybe that much evil in such a small place will not be able to withstand the competitive evils and thus they all will cancel each other out. That said, if I ever see a set of matches in one of these kids hands I am sprinting to get my Kancho Codpiece. The second shift is far more salubrious to the health of my travel aspirations. Of the four days I teach in Nara three of them have now become 5 o’clock start times. This gives me an entire day of roaming in my favorite of Japanese cities. Better than that, do you know how many deer you can chase down, mount and ride like a rodeo cowboy in a single afternoon? For normal deer I’d say at least two but for Nara deer so easily charmed by those cart cookies you could maybe play Lone Deer Ranger on thirty of them before suppertime. There has got to be a place some where around these parts where I can rustle up a saddle. Those rickshaw riding Nara folk have to be blind to not see the free four-legged transport all around them. With time to kill and deer to ride (alright, you got me…deer to attempt to ride in a coffee induced stupor but instead I wind up kicked in the lower regions to upchuck said coffee onto some sacred Buddha as the tourist look on in horror…I am strange travel delusions at 1230am) I packed a lunch along with my teaching cheat sheets, nametag and Nara maps and over the course of the week I set to the task of covering more Nara ground in an effort to reach some of the more out of the way locations less marred by a multitude of tourists.





The English around Nara makes the city easy to circumnavigate and should you find yourself in a bind there are always English speaker travelers around to point you in the right direction or, as is the case with me, to ask you to point them in the right direction. If the good people of Nara could train the deer to be travel guides you’d clear up the aimless wanderers in no time. Maybe you can strap map satchels to them or something. If I can’t ride them at least let me use them as navigational tools. Embed compasses into them! I followed the English signs out of the station as they pointed me to where I had planed to go that morning. I have learned my lesson on setting out on long walks without any form of nourishment. The walking precedent has been set as somewhere, at some point, I will have to walk up a long flight of steps and these requires energy. When not wanting a large meal of noodle and cutlet from one of the restaurants near the station I find quick sustenance in Japanese version of the dollar store, the 100-Yen shop. Just like back home these places are filled with cheap, tacky merchandise but in Nara the cheap, tacky merchandise makes for fine gift shopping as the Nara dollar stores stock up on some of the items you can find, only more expensive, at some of the tourist shops scattered about. I walked by the rows of waving cat statues and masks towards to food aisle. I was disheartened to find the banana drink they once had now seemed to have been removed from circulation as their drink cooler had shrunk to two sizes less then what it had been only a month ago. They had also removed all of their cold bottled coffees, my favorite drink here and as this is what I was seeking I found myself a Lawson (a convenience store chain) and snapped up the next best thing to cold coffee in a bottle, cold coffee in a milk carton. A few blocks away from the station is another one of those dirty looking ponds although it was not as vile as the one in Tenri as things actually can survive in these waters. When last I visited this park a single turtle sat sunbathing on a rock. I thought how neat, a turtle lives in this pond. Today the one turtle was now over two dozen turtles. Either it was a victim of cloning experiment gone wrong or the thing is a shelled sex beast! I watched them all slowly crawling onto logs and rocks to bask in the sunlight. I choose a park bench with a nice view of Kofukuji Temple and the pagoda and the instant I took my sandwich out of my knapsack a flock of birds filled the tree branches above me. Paging Mr. Hitchcock! Before they got any notions of forming a bird army with sandwich conquering aspirations I finished up my lunch and walked slowly away. Any false move might cause me to become Tippi Hedren. I crossed a bridge out of the park and happened look down to see another gathering of those stone Buddha statues. Man, these guys are everywhere.














The first destination on my list that week was Naramachi, a section of the city of Nara very similar to that of Imaicho here in Kashihara. Naramachi is another well preserved old Japanese neighborhood of wooden homes that take you back to a time before the towers of steel and concrete. These houses and shops once belonged to the merchants of The population of the town grew in the 11th century and soon the place had a name: Go. Nara and was created back in the Nara period. Shops were set up to manufacture merchandise for shrines and temples. Go’s reputation for such merchandise made the area very lucrative and in the Muromachi period the people of “Go” broke away from shrine and temple rule and saught personal independence as a town. This would not last for long as under the rule of the Edo Government Go, now Naramachi, was controlled by Toyotomi Hidenaga. The town now turned to the trades of making bleached cotton and sake but these industries declined at the end of the Edo period and Naramachi would struggle to remain now once again as a temple town. It was not until the Meiji period where merchant shops began to return again to Naramchi only this time of Western influence. Butchers, barbers and bakeries began to dot the streets and in 1889 Naramachi was given official town status. Today the area serves as it has for all these centuries, as a winding street walk through shops, old buildings, temples and shrines. On my walk that morning I was alone, the tourist had not yet returned from the large sites of Nara and I had this pleasant area all to myself. I found these mysterious red bags hanging from many of the buildings there and am unsure what they mean. Some of the old homes are open to the public and there you can tour about beautiful gardens. At one such place I found the ruins of an old residence where only these rocks resembling breasts remained. I stood on the nipple of one of these rocks under a cherry blossom tree and the petals snowed down on me. The trees are losing them pretty quickly now. Other Naramachi discoveries were more stone Buddhas, frightening faces adorning rooftops and a set of stone footprints carved into a garden path stone. I did not tour extensively around the area as I was on a deadline but Naramachi will be a place I return to next month.








Byakugo Temple, though advertised in the tourist walk maps provided at the Information Centers around the city, is a little out of the way and I imagine most of your regular day-trippers do not get out this far. It is not the easiest of places to find as it is located in the middle of a residential area off the beaten path. Ah, here were the steps I had predicted I’d have to climb eventually. The ticket shack at the bottom of the steps was empty which lead me to believe I’d be able to get into this place for free but a woman stopped me at a shack at the top of the steps where I had to fork over Y500 if I wanted in. Well, I had walked all this way I might as well pay to find out what was inside. Byakugo, it is said, was built as a sort of get away for Prince Shiki, a poet from the 7th century. It is named after the white cilia, short blond hairs, on the forehead of Buddha. Of the 32 facial expressions of the Buddha, Byakugo is but one. After the death of Skiki the temple was built up in its present day form. It was destroyed by fire during the wars of the Muromachi era but rebuilt gain in the Edo Period by Saint Kuukei. As a temple, if compared to the others around Nara, it is pretty bland. The gardens around the site would be beautiful if in full bloom and the view of Nara from the top of the steps quite good on a less hazy day but today it all felt so unworthy of dropping down the cash to step inside to see yet another place that looked like a lot of the other places I have seen for nothing. A few statues outside were nice to look at but I felt it all to be such a waste until I found there was another building near the back that was the actual Temple and I had just been looking at some other building on the complex grounds.










I followed the instructions of the sign and removed my shoes to enter into a the temples house of horrors as I was met with the fear evoking gazes of the statues inside. You found your usual Buddha here but along with them there were four or five creepy statues. One of them is that of King Emma and it is the main draw to this temple. His angry gaze is to awe his worshippers into respect. The wood wearing on these statues makes them look like burn victims and only adds to the scariness which I nicely illuminated by the candlelight. I started taking some photos when a woman ran into the place like I was about to set it on fire and informed me that there was no photography allowed. I had always managed to snap off a good twenty photos and figured I got my money’s worth and did not have to spend anymore time with the scary king statues of the Byakugo Temple.











The walk back towards the main tourist sites in Nara was very peaceful as there was really nobody out here at this time of morning. Japanese road signs pointed me towards something but I usually ignored them, couldn’t read them anyway, and took alternate routes never really looking at my maps. A few homes out here had cans tied to string hanging from them. What did this mean? More statues, lanterns, shrine cats and blossoms marked my walks in Nara this week.



I also returned to the Kasuga Grand Shrine put the place was far too crowded to enjoy as I had the last time so I did not linger long. I had another hill to climb.















Wakakusayama Hill overlooks the city of Nara and is a nice 45 minute hike up to panoramic views. The first leg of the hike gives you some steps to climb while the second is all grass on the steep incline. The deer, although far less in number as there are no cookies here, roam freely grazing on the grass which is struggling to grow. Maybe that is because every January here this hill is set on fire in a Grass Burning Festival which should be an amazing event to look forward to in the new year. I am getting much better at this hill climbing thing and my breathing is becoming less labored and my lungs no longer feel as though they were about deflate like a birthday balloon although I am still nowhere near the shape I need to be in to climb Fuji. The walk is a stunning one, though, and as you climb higher you are met with mountainside cherry blossom trees and greenery just starting to bear their spring line of fashion. You might be met with a little disappointment if you think the climb to the summit of Wakakusayama Hill will bring you to some grandiose temple or shrine. To quote Charlie Brown clocked under his multi-holed ghost costume: “I got a rock.” Yup, nothing up there but a rock and maybe what was carved onto it was pretty damned profound but I couldn’t read it so I relaxed on the hillside for a bit, asked somebody to snap off another pic of me and the Megan shirt and then headed on back down.






I managed to squeeze into my itinerary another visit to Todaiji where the tourists were now packing the paths and steps leading to the temple’s sites. A group of school kids were getting photographed on the large steps leading up to the main hall and there I maneged to get a professional photographer to snap a shot of me and Megan shirt. Megs, we are moving up. I took an alternate route around the temple this time and found a few things I hadn’t seen before like another one of those huge bell towers and the best stone staircase I have seen so far in my travels. It was now covered with fallen white blossoms and just looked like something out of an epic romance movie.










I revisited Kofukuji this week as well. Ice Cream vendors have now set up shop near the pagoda as the waves of tourist start to stream in.

To end this entry on my Nara walks I will talk briefly about the best walk of the week. I shot no pictures, could see very little of anything and was drenched by the rain and it was amazing. The weather had been so great all week but took a U-turn this evening when the worst rain of the year just hammered down onto the city. I had a trainee today and I asked her if she wanted a night time tour of the city even though we’d be drenched. She said she didn’t mind and a rainstorm walk has never bothered me so after cleaning the class we walked out into an empty city. The city of Nara, packed and hoarded in the daytime hours, was now a ghost town. I walked the trainee over to the pagoda which was nicely lit by the street lamps. We stood under the pagoda and watched the rain run off this ancient structure creating a beautiful waterfall. The weather had not only sent the people heading off for shelter but the deer as well as we only spotted a few on our stormy walk. These rebel deer, just like us, undeterred by the rain, earn my respect. I will ride you last. The best site of the night was walking down the empty path to Todaiji and standing under the massive wooden gate listening to the storm pass, the rain drumming on the roof and waterfalls tumbling down around us on all sides. It is moments such as these that make the best memories and I feel Nara will bring many, many more.