Author: Grubb

Today we decided to take another trip out of Fukuoka and see the Dazaifu Tenmangu Shrine.  It was a thirty minute train ride to Dazaifu where the shrine takes up enough mountainside acreage to include an amusement park and a mall-size modern museum.  The street from the train station to the shrine gate was lined with shops…

After taking our train trip to Nirvana, we returned to Fukuoka to search out the Tocho-ji Temple.  It sits, like the Little Temple That Could, squat among modern high rises in the middle of the city. Founded in 806 AD by the Buddhist monk Kukai, the temple is over 1200 years old. Enshrined near the temple…

This morning a thirty minute train ride from the Hakata station in Fukuoka took us into the hills of Nanzoin where we hiked across a bridge to the General Head Temple of Sasaguri Shikoku.  “Melody Bridge” had metal strips set apart and a mallet to play them like a xylophone as you crossed. The temple was…

Every July in Fukuoka the Hakata Gion Yamakasa festival is celebrated with towering floats (yamakasa) weighing up to one ton being hoisted by guys dressed in breechcloths racing around the city.  The festival is 770 years old and is believed to have been started when a monk had himself carried throughout the town praying in an…

This morning the weather was sunny and in seventies.  We walked along a river path under the cherry blossoms and wandered through a flower market where the pink azaleas and deep red Japanese maple prepared us for the colorful art that was to follow in the Kagoshima Museum of Art. The big exhibit featured paintings by…

And we’re not talking Tom Cruise, we’re talking Saigo Takamori, born in 1828 in Kagoshima, the son of a low-ranking samurai.  After his military training he served under Shimazu Nariakura the local Satsuma daimyo.  When Shimazu died, Saigo was disgraced and exiled.  He attempted suicide, but maybe his heart wasn’t into it because he was reinstated and returned…

The Shimazu-shi were the daimyo, or feudal lords, of Satsuma (Kagoshima), Ōsumi, and Hyūga provinces in Japan from the 13th century until the mid-19th.  In other words, the Shimazu family were landholding magnates for around 500 years.  The span of this clan makes European dynasties look like brief historical blips. The feudal narrative of the Shimazu clan…

Celebrating the Day of the Dead in Mexico City, Malcolm Lowry might have been under the volcano, but after taking a ferry from Kagoshima to Sakurajima this morning, we were on the volcano.   And it’s still active. After the ferry docked in Sakurajima, the island created by the volcano with the same name, we took…

There’s always a minor sense of relief when we make it through the fleet of taxis (not to mention armada of buses) bunched around an historic site.  So there was a little spring to our step leaving the Osaka Castle and trekking to the subway where we caught a metro that took us to within a…

Yesterday morning was devoted to seeing the Osaka Castle and the National Art Museum.  The castle, known for its eight story pagoda-style toshu, or castle keep, covers 15-acres with a river-size moat circling an enormous outer wall, and a smaller moat outside the inner wall.   Built in the 16th century by the Toyotami clan, it was…

Took a day trip to Nara yesterday to see the fabled bowing deer.  They roam at will in a park that encloses shrines and temples and have an unusual reputation for bowing back if you bow to them first.  According to the guide books, this imitative behavior has evolved over the centuries.   I bowed a number of…

We strolled the Dōtombori neighborhood yesterday.  Divided by a canal, It’s a very commercial part of town, and to say that in Osaka means we encountered block after block of outrageous signage. The first stop after surfacing from the metro was to join Japanese families posing in front of the Glico Running Man sign.  It’s apparently the…

A couple of the Wakayama port towns we’ve walked through in the last week, Yuasa and Kii-Katsuura, have been remarkable for their stillness.  As towns go, they’re purported to be functioning.  Yuasa is famous for the discovery and manufacture of soy sauce; Kii-Katsuura for its tuna fishing.  But when we wandered the streets, nothing was observably going on.  Yuasa…

This morning, while we were waiting for the bus that would take us to Shingū, the first of our shrine stops, Marty, a tall, affable American who had just finished the Kumano Kodo with his wife, asked us if we were going to “the falls’.   He was referring to the Nachi Falls near the Nachi Grand…

We finished the last length of our Kumano Kodo Kii hike on Sunday.  Leaving Chikatsuyu, I waved goodbye to the farmer stacking straw along with the applauding puppets on the side of the road across from the bus station.   It took two bus rides to get us halfway up the Kii mountain where we got off…