Tokyo!!

Tokyo has been really interesting, and has been a thoroughly enjoyable experience. I have visited a Buddhist Temple, a Shinto shrine, a couple of parks as well as the Tokyo National Museum. Less exciting has been the weather, mostly rainy and overcast, which has unfortunately prevented me from really seeing Mt Fuji which is quite sad.

The Shinto shrine was really amazing though, and despite being fairly busy seemed to be quite quiet and serene. I think that the fact it is set within an amazing forest with over 170,000 trees helped promote that feeling, and it was hard to believe standing there that the forest had not existed before 1920 when the shrine was built. THe shrine itself is a reconstruction of the one built in 1920 as the original burnt down during WWII - it is quite simple, far less ornate and loud than the Daoist shrines of Taiwan, but I really enjoyed visiting it.

The Tokyo National Museum was really good too; it shows the evolution of Japanese culture and art across a number of different years, and shows the influence that other countries have had on its own development too. There were some really interesting exhibits, including a separate building with an archaeology of Japan exhibit, which I particularly enjoyed.

The next few days are now all planned as we set off on a tour of Japan using the JR Pass before ending up in Kyoto and Osaka - it seems as though the end is both really soon and really far away.