Day 6–Kuon-ji, the Temple of Eternity

Today’s thought for the day is a little technical, perhaps. You might want to skip the two paragraphs if train ticketing doesn’t interest you.

Since I don’t have a JR Pass for this trip, during the planning stages I hunted down and printed out the map of the exact limits of where a Suica card can be used. The Suica Area includes only lines in the region around greater Tokyo, plus smaller regions around Sendai and Niigata, so I carefully made a list of where I could use the card and where I’d have to pay cash. (Happened to notice in passing that the Chichibu Line, where I had to pay cash last trip, is now in the Suica area – as of March 2022, according to Googling). It occurred to me three days ago that I can also use my Suica in the Toica Area (JR Central’s IC card, which covers the region surrounding Nagoya), as cards are interchangeable, so I hastily revised my list to include that.

However, I realised two days ago (the night before travelling here to Minobu) that there’s one little quirk I hadn’t considered: although the cards are interchangeable, you can’t cross an area border while using a card, even when the border is seamless. For the Tokaido Main Line, this border is at Atami Station (it’s technically in both the Suica and Toica areas, if I’m reading these maps correctly) – but the Shinkansen leg of my journey would take me to Mishima Station, two stops beyond the border. Took me a fair bit of reading fine print to find the the solution to my problem (which in hindsight should possibly have been apparent): even though I used my Suica card to enter the Shinkansen ticket gates, I hadn’t paid for the Shinkansen with my Suica – I’d paid with my credit card. So when I tapped the Shinkansen gates at Shin-Yokohama, I was tapping off the Suica, and onto a pre-paid ticket. When I tapped out of the Shinkansen gates at Mishima, I was starting a new IC trip, but this time fully in the Toica area. Whew!

Anyway, on with the show. Discovered last night after I finished blogging and went to perform my evening ablutions that there’s no washlet on the toilet in this room. How barbaric! Perhaps to make up for the lack of a heated seat, it had these two cloth pads friction-stuck to it instead. Uh, nope. Not going there. I decided I’d just cope with the unheated toilet seat the same way my caveman ancestors did, carefully peeled them off and put them aside.

Slept fairly well. After the morning ablutions, I headed for breakfast. Breakfast in this hotel is pretty ryokan-style (albeit lower-end ryokan). Big tray of little dishes – fish, rice, tofu, rolled omelette, pickled thingies, vegetable matter, a whole mandarin. Tub of natto. Someone suggested to me recently that mixing the natto in rice tastes quite nice, so I tried that, and it wasn’t bad. Still left strings of slime going everywhere, but perhaps I needed more rice. Also, the view out my room’s window.

Today’s plans were pretty light, so I had a leisurely breakfast, and took my time getting ready afterwards. While I’m having a relaxing morning, lemme tell you about Yuru Camp, which I mentioned yesterday. Originally released as a manga, it’s received a two-season anime adaptation (with a third season on the way), an original-story anime movie, and a two-season live-action adaptation. The genre is slice-0f-life, with a sub-genre of “iyashikei”, which means “healing type” – basically, just watching it heals your soul. Why’s in relevant here? Because the whole thing is set in and around Minobu and nearby areas.

Basic story is this: Kagamihara Nadeshiko, who has just moved to the Minobu area, meets Shima Rin, a girl who enjoys camping, but prefers to do it alone. Rin helps Nadeshiko out of a tight spot, and in doing so, gets her hooked on camping. Starting at her new school, Nadeshiko joins the Outdoor Activities Circle, the less full-on of the school’s two camping clubs, which currently consists of just Ogaki Chiaki and Inuyama Aoi. Along with Rin’s friend Saito Ena, and the club’s new advising teacher Toba-sensei, they have many adventures camping in the Minobu area. And also shenanigans.

This is they. From left to right, Nadeshiko, Aoi, Rin (at the front), Chiaki, Ena, Toba-sensei.

So yeah, Yuru Camp is what brought me to Minobu. I mean, I’m not going to try any camping, but watching the series more often than not made me go “wow, that place looks great – I wanna go there”. The town has certainly taken to Yuru Camp as well, with goods in many shops, posters of the series in almost every shop, and banners depicting the characters flying on the street. One shop even had a motor scooter the same as the one Rin rides parked next to the door.

So for me, today’s plan was to focus on trying a few local specialty foods here in Minobu that get showcased in Yuru Camp, before taking the train a few stops south to visit locations in Utsubuna (where Nadeshiko’s house is).

But as I headed down the street, enjoying today’s sunny weather, it suddenly occurred to me that today’s the last day for most of a week that rain is not forecast. And, well, my plans for Friday involved visiting a place with a view of Mount Fuji. Which wouldn’t happen if it were raining. Or even cloudy. Unfortunately, rearranging my my plans for this section of the trip aren’t completely straightforward – most things are placed to avoid specific days that locations I want to visit are closed, restaurants were chosen for dinner each night based on where I’ll be that day, and Friday’s plans were specifically decided because of where I will be staying on Friday night.

But, well… sunny weather. So I decided to switch my plans, and headed for the station to catch a bus. I’d make it work somehow. In front of the station I discovered a bunch of men in suits – and a trio of mascot characters – holding a ceremony to unveil some sort of new bicycle share thing. They do love their ceremony rituals here. The mascots are (from the left), Minowan from Minobu, Yuzunyan from Fujikawa, and Takeda Ryoumaru from Yamanashi Prefecture in general.

When the bus pulled up, I abruptly learnt that even though Minobu Station is outside the Toica area, the buses are not, and I could have used my Suica card. Unfortunately, I’d made a point of leaving it at my hotel, since I wouldn’t need it today. Couldn’t go back to the hotel without missing the bus (and they might have been cleaning my room already) so I paid with cash as I’d originally expected.

So where was I going on the bus? To Minobu-san, Mount Minobu, which is also the location of Kuon-ji. Kuon-ji was founded by Buddhist priest Nichiren in 1281, and today it’s the head temple of the Nichiren sect in Japan. By 1712 it consisted of some 133 separate buildings, but most of them have since burnt down, though it’s still a fairly large complex. More than 1.5 million people visit each year, apparently. It’s also known for the number of sakura that bloom in the spring, including a four-hundred-year-old weeping sakura in the garden, so that’s a major drawcard too. The town of Minobu began as a temple town outside of the main gates, so yeah, the main part of the town is over by the temple rather than here where the station is. In any case, the temple can be reached by single bus which departs from the station, so that’s what I did.

Hopping off at the end of the bus ride, I walked up the hill to the Sanmon, the largest and innermost gate, stopping on the way at a shop with a Yuru Camp gachapon machine, with little figurines of each of the main characters sleeping in sleeping bags. I got Aoi. (The bus actually drives through the Somon, the outer gate, but since it’s uphill all the way from there to the temple, I decided to visit on foot last rather than get off there and have to walk up.) This temple’s Sanmon is apparently one of the three largest gates in the Kanto region.

Behind the Sanmon is the Bodai-tei Stairs, the main access path for worshippers. Looking at it through the opening in the gate, I went “oh, that’s pretty high”. Once through the gate, I looked up at it through the trees, and I went “whoa, that’s actually higher”. But as I got closer and closer, the top of what I could see kept moving higher and higher, until I finally saw sky above, and whew, those stairs were absolutely towering. There’s apparently two hundred and eighty-seven of them. The name means “Ladder to Buddhahood”, and while it wasn’t a literal ladder, each step was noticeably higher than your average modern-day step.

I made it to the top, fortunately without dropping dead, though I certainly stopped for a breather more than a few times. For those who don’t want to climb the stairs, there’s a snaking path that winds its way up too (called the “women’s slope”), and there’s also an inclined elevator that runs from the car park behind the temple (though walking to the car park, if you happen to be on foot, also entails a lot of uphill). Alternately, there’s a paid shuttle bus. In any case, at the top, there was the temple. And several sakura trees. I had a look through a trio of internally-connected buildings, but then had to backtrack the whole way because I’d left my shoes outside the first one. Took some photos of sakura. There’s also a five-storeyed pagoda which is the fourth-tallest pagoda in Japan.

After hanging around there for a while, I decided it was time to take the Minobu-san Ropeway up to the summit of Minobu-san. (Also, it was well past time for some lunch, and there’s supposed to be an eatery up there.) There’s a raised wooden walk leading there so that you don’t have to clamber down to the car park and then back up again. The ropeway has a vertical separation between stations of 763 metres, described in both the in-car voice narration and the Yamanashi tourist information website as the highest in Kanto, though I’m not sure where that ranks in all Japan. (Googling suggests Japan’s highest is the Komagatake Ropeway in Nagano, in the Chubu Region, at 950 metres.) The upper station is at an altitude of 1153 metres, and it takes seven minutes to get there. Unfortunately, I wound up in the middle of the cabin, so I don’t have any good photos of the ascent.

At the top station, there’s a viewing platform which lets you see Mount Fuji poking its head over the top of the Southern Japanese Alps (yah, I neglected to mention – despite Minobu’s proximity to Fuji-san, you can’t actually see it from the town, as Minobu is in the middle of the Japanese Alps). Though when I first got there, I was perplexed that I couldn’t see it, until my eyes suddenly re-focused on something that I’d taken to be a cloud, and realised it was a snow-covered mountain peak. Still partially covered by cloud, though, but it mostly emerged over time. (I could also see my hotel, though as I couldn’t spot it with my naked eye, I didn’t take a particularly close-up photo of it. It’s in the second-last photo below, about one third of the way in from the right. Last photo is the reverse shot – the peak of Mount Minobu taken from my hotel.)

Tragically, the eatery was closed, for some reason, but fortunately the souvenir shop beneath sold some hot snacks, and also kushikiri dango cooked over a charcoal fire. Dango are rice flour dumplings usually served with three on a skewer – kushikiri dango are a local tradition, where the shopkeeper cuts (“kiri”) the bottom end off the skewer (“kushi”) before he hands it to you, because while “kushi” means “skewer”, it’s also a homophone for “suffering”, so he’s also cutting off your suffering. Anyway, I had a curry bread (long roll filled with curry… though I’m not sure this one was actually bread), and a yuba dango. Dango was very tasty.

Stood out on the viewing deck munching while watching Fuji-san. Minobu-san is actually a popular destination for watching sunrise Diamond Fuji – this is the “one of the places I’m visiting later this trip” I mentioned back on Day 4. And on Diamond Fuji days, the ropeway opens before sunrise so that people can get up here to see it. Unfortunately, that was last week, and the sun has long moved on by now. It’s while researching alternate possibilities that I discovered the one in Yokohama.

(The characters in Yuru Camp come up here to watch the sunrise on New Years’ Day. They had amazake and dango – Chiaki had the same yuba dango than I did. They explain the meaning of cutting the skewer in the manga.)

Lunch substitute finished, I headed to Oku-no-In, the inner temple. Plus another viewing platform looking north over more mountains. There’s a whole bunch more buildings on top of the mountain, though save for the ones right at the top, most of them seemed to be unoccupied (maybe there’d be people in them at busier periods). This part of the temple had Yuru Camp ema for sale, and also a shuincho with a Yuru Camp cover (though the price was a bit steep). Plus, their offertory box was a folding camp stove, based on a joke in a single chapter of the manga – Rin buys the same folding camp stove by mail order, and when two other characters see it, they both independently take it for an offertory box.

Eventually, it was time to head back down the ropeway. Made a point of standing at the front so I could get a view. Considered having another dango, but I was still fairly full from the last one. Back at the lower station, I walked down the road rather than back into the temple. The road was also lined with sakura, including one lodging temple that was strewn with them. My next stop was Gobyosho, Nichiren’s mausoleum. Nichiren died in Ikegami, just outside Tokyo, but requested that his remains be returned to Kuon-ji. It was a very serene location.

From there, I walked down the river-side road to the Somon Gate (though while also starting the monthly formerly-known-as-SpockSoc book club on Discord en route). Several sakura were blooming around the gate, which I kind of already knew, because my hotel posted photos to their Instagram page a couple of days ago. Waited at the bus stop for my bus back to the hotel – with a minute to go before the bus was due to arrive, I saw it heading the other way, uphill towards the temple. Running rather late, there.

Back near the station, once I’d finished up the book club, I headed for dinner. My switching of plans between today and Friday actually left me with no dinner plans at all for today, though fortunately last night’s plans came to the rescue – the Chinese restaurant that was unexpectedly closed yesterday was open today. I had pork and cabbage stir-fried in miso (though I definitely made an absolute hash of trying to understand the waitress describing the options that came with it).

Just about ready for bed now. I’m quite hoping the rain which is forecast for basically the entirety of the upcoming week is mostly on-and-off showers (or I could even live with sustained showers, to an extent… or, no rain at all?) rather than torrential rain, because basically everything I’ve planned is outdoors with no plans B available. Guess I’ll find out soon enough.

Today’s photo count: Four hundred and fifty-five.

Today’s step count: 14,696 steps, for 10.3 km. 42 flights of stairs, though most of those were probably all at the same time.

Today’s goshuin count: Three – Kuon-ji main hall, Oku-no-in, and Gobyosho. The first and third of those cost me a thousand yen each, easily the most I’ve ever paid for a goshuin. (Though as I paid for them with a thousand-yen note each time, and simply didn’t receive change back, I do idly wonder if this area takes the “goshuin in exchange for a donation” idea completely literally, and were simply going “thanks for the thousand yen”.)

Today’s stamp count: Two – one of the Minobu-san Ropeway that I found at the top station, and another one nearby with Chibi-Inuko (aka Aoi’s little sister Akari), though with no words on the stamp or anywhere nearby explaining what it was for besides looking nice. Half makes me wonder if I could have found stamps for all the characters if I’d looked hard enough.