Disney Sea, My first Shinkansen and Kyoto

Unfortunately I don’t get all that many holidays off at my current job. On the other hand, Japan has so many public holidays and I get several school holidays, so I shouldn’t complain. Anyhow, The one day I chose to take off, while Kevin was here, we decided to go to Disney Sea. It made sense to go on a weekday that wasn’t a public or school holiday, unless we wanted to spend the whole day in a queue. It was a fun little day trip. Disney’s theme parks (outside the US) are never the biggest or best but there really is an attention to detail that makes them a little more special than most. It was as if the theme park was designed so that the Japanese didn’t need to leave the country to see the world. They recreated a New York dock, a Middle Eastern square, Venetian waterways and a South American Jungle. After whizzing around on few measly roller coasters we headed into Tokyo for the fastest ride of the day, the Shinkansen. That is, the high speed Japanese railway line. The plan was to go to Kyoto, Japan’s cultural and historic capital.

This was my first experience of going on the Shinkansen, and for good reason, they’re pretty bloody expensive. It cost over £100 to get down to Kyoto and over £100 to get back. Nonetheless I’d sooner see a similar system put in place in Britain to reduce domestic flights. The distance between Tokyo and Kyoto, is comparable to London to Edinburgh and yet it doesn’t take much more than 2 hours on the Shinkansen. The carriages are fitted more like planes than trains with all the seats facing the direction in which you’re travelling. It was quite a scenic ride down, with the sun setting over the horizon and the various views of large rivers, seas and waterways. Part of me hoped I might see Mount Fuji but sadly it was not to be.

There are countless buildings across Kyoto that have qualified for the UNESCO world heritage status; more than anywhere in England and probably more than anywhere in the world, bar Rome. It’s impossible to do Kyoto properly in anything less than a week but it would also be rather tiresome to spend a week looking at all the shrines and temples. They all begin to look the same and a thus less impressive. Me and Kevin hired bikes at the hostel we were staying at to maximise our sightseeing potential (Kyoto’s quite a flat city so it was the perfect mode of transport). I think I managed to see around 10 temples and shrines, half of which were UNESCO and many of which were free. My favourites were probably the Shimogamo Shrine, at the confluence of the rivers, Kinkakuji and Fushimiinaritaisha Shrine.


I’d heard of Kinkakuji as a temple that my students had been to, on their trip to Kyoto but I didn’t realise quite how famous it was until I noticed it on the front of my Japanese phrasebook, and have seen it in several places since.
It’s covered in glittering gold and is something of an icon of Kyoto. Sadly like many of the temples and shrines, it has been re-built in the last 100 years, this time due to an arsonist monk. Around my region you will often find that temples and shrines have been rebuilt because they’ve been flattened in earthquakes. This doesn’t seem to be the case with Kyoto, probably due to the location of fault lines. Neither was it affected by American military bombardment. It would seem the main reason that buildings are rebuilt in Kyoto is fire. This would probably be much more the case of European churches too, if they were all built out of wood.


The Shimogamo Shrine was nestled in some woodland in between the two main rivers in Kyoto. The colours were so vibrant; the vermilion red of the temple and arches against the lush green of the forest and the deep blue of the sky. It really was breath taking, even after a day of shrine viewing. I saw the Fushimiinaritaisha Shrine on the Sunday. It grounds are huge and contain hundreds and hundreds of torii gates that lead all over wooded hillsides to various shrines, lakes and cemeteries.

However, what I enjoyed most of all in Kyoto, was riding the bikes down by the river. The weather really was perfect, the scenery; spectacular and there’s still some childish exhilaration that I get from riding a bike. Breezing downhill with the wind in your hair, it gives you such a sense of freedom. It was one of the few moments where you want to take a step back and appreciate how happy you are because you know it won’t last forever.