japan 09 - day 8

A manic last full day in Kyoto before we head off to Hiroshima. After another lovely breakfast with our hosts, Keiko and Juno, we headed off to the Silver Pavilion. Officienados will be disgusted that, at this point, I admit we never got to the Golden Pavilion, but there’s only a certain amount of temple an eleven year old will stand. The heat forced us into another café, having missed the stop on the bus and needing to retrace steps. The place itself was rather touristy, and in the midst of renovation, but still utterly beautiful. Even the sticky heat couldn’t diminish the elegance and intricacy of the building design and garden layout. I cannot tire of Japanese gardens and realise again why it is that so many of the world’s great religious traditions depict the afterlife as a garden.

Our walk down the Philosopher’s Path was less inspiring. Another attack by an errant cicada and their incessant noise that deafens more than lulls rather detracted from the scene. Thankfully, we had fortified ourselves beforehand with a healthy dollop of green tea flavoured ice cream.

Much walking and a cooling subway ride later, we pitched up at the Nijo Castle, former home of the Tokugawa Shoguns who ruled Japan up to the mid-19th century. For hundreds of years, this clan had dominated political and military life, reducing the emperor to a puppet. The castle was double-moated (eat your heart out, Douglas Hogg) and we were even able to look inside, albiet unshod, which led to a rather nasty toe-stubbing for Dom. The guidebooks tell with some glee that it was in this Castle that the Emperor Meiji received the formal surrender of the final Shogun in the 1860s, restoring power to the monarchy. No wonder then that he almost immediately removed the capital to Tokyo.

Our final stop of the day was the International Manga Museum, a new museum founded in part by a local university. What an amazing idea! The walls of the former primary school were completely lined with manga books, including a section in various foreign languages, for visitors to take and read at their leisure in one of the many reading areas or outside on the astroturfed lawn. The exhibits were pretty pants, but the scene of dozens of children and students, parents, grannies and grandas sat, lain or sprawled over the place, reading, would bring a tear to the eye of any teacher. I even read my first manga! It would be an understatement to say this is a phenomenon, but does highlight the fact that Japan has been a highly literate society for over 250 years. Reading, apparently, has never been seen as an elite pursuit, in fact almost the opposite. One book I read said that in the 1950s surveys showed that about 80% of the population wrote haiku. 80%! But it also said that over 90% of the population watch at least three and a half hours of TV per day.

I continued to ponder the relation between literacy, TV and mange as I slurped my way through a bowl of soba noodles downtown before heading back for the final night in Keiko’s house.