Koyasan

Koyasan is the name of this city that's located on a 900 m high plateau, and surrounded by a bunch of mountains. It is also the final resting palce of Kobo Daishi, a famous priest/monk who was the founder of the Shingon sect of Buddhism in Japan. Many people make religious pilgrimmages to this site. Before you get to the main temple (which is really cool, but you can't take pictures of it), you have to walk through the biggest graveyard in Japan, which has (estimates vary) up to 500 000 people buried in it. The neat thing about this is that you have everyone from former elite samurai, to political leaders, to local unheard-of peasants buried in the same area.

We stayed in a traditional Japanese inn (run by monks), and ate traditional Japanese food. It still boggles my mind how most Japanese people really have no concept of vegetarianism now ("you can eat sausage, though, right?"), yet at one point in Japan's history, the entire populace was vegetarian. How quickly we forget.

Anyhow, Takahashi-sensei (a former teacher at Lisa's school) took us there last weekend. It was his going-away present to us. It was great because we probably never would have gone to this place on our own, and it was a great way to spend one of my last weekends here in Japan. We also met some fellow tourists (a fairly rare occurence) and invited them to our place to drink the local sake and play cribbage. Another interesting note was that a boy's choir was also staying in the same place as us, and I couldn't contain my laughter of the funny/cheesy descriptions of Japanese food and traditions given by the leaders of this group.

We also joined the monks in a round of meditation (where my legs fell asleep, and I couldn't walk for several minutes afterwards), and them chanting some religious verses (although the "head monk" was away on business in Tokyo, so he was replaced by a monk that coughed every 2 minutes, and another one that kept losing his place). All in all, though, it was a very interesting insight. We also had an 80 (85?) year old lady come in and describe her life in the city back when it was still a town. Hearing about the conditions after the War was particularly informative.

Enough babbling for now; enjoy the pictures.

ps the last 3 pictures (in case you couldn't tell) are completely random.