Takasaki – Byakue Dai-Kannon and Daruma-ji

Posted on November 4, 2024 by borysSNORC

Went to see the renown Takasaki Byakue Daikannon – or ‘Giant Takasaki White-Robed Kannon’, today. It is located on top of a small mountain, Mt Kanonyama in Gunma Prefecture and has an elevation of 190m. Colloquially it is called Kannonyama and sometimes they call it Byakui, and it is also known as the Goddess of Mercy… so I am just thinking of it as Kannon Of the Many Names! The Kannon (not the actual statue, but rather the concept of the Kannon), came originally from China where she is named, Guanyin, and people come to the Kannon to pray mostly for protection and peace, particularly for protection from natural disasters… which makes a lot of sense when you live on islands prone to volcanos, earthquakes and tsunamis.

The Kannon can be seen from quite a distance away as you approach as it is 41 metres tall on top of Mt Kannonyama. You can see the whole of Takasaki City proper in addition to all the most well-known mountains in Gunma from the top. You can go inside the Kannnon and climb up as high as its shoulders – there are nine floors inside that house 20 Buddhas along the climb.

The Byakue Daikanno was built by Yasuaburo Inoue in 1936, originally as a memorial for fallen soldiers of the Japanese Imperial Army who were stationed in Takasaki. It was always intended to eventually serve as a tourist attraction, and the promotion of the Kannon for tourism began as early as 1937. At that time it was the tallest Kannon in Japan, but has since been superseded by a number of other Kannon (the tallest is currently the Sendai Daikannon), and it is now the tenth tallest in Japan. At 41.8m tall, it has a 48m waist measurement and a 0.4m thumb circumference (though why tourists need to know that, I’m not sure!); she weighs a whopping 6000 tonnes.

Stunningly gorgeous day today. Blue skies, cool breeze, 20°C… just like a Brisbane winter!

We chose not to select some fortunes today… it looked like there was a lot of bad luck being left behind at this shrine! And I, for one, do not need any bad luck.

Every Valentines Day, a giant red string is tied around her finger and couples come to pray for blessings and happiness as well as longevity in their relationships.

Mr K looking chill under a Japanese maple tree… busy deciding how empty my cup is. Apparently, one shouldn’t remark on the fact that the maples haven’t turned this year and they should be bright orange by now, as this means your cup is half empty all the time. Le sigh… 🙄

Takasaki off in the distance there.

Around the base of the Kannon were some smaller shrines which (from what I could understand from the poorly translated signs) housed the graves/remains of much beloved temple authorities.

Nearby was the ubiquitous souvenir shop selling Daruma dolls. The Shorinzan Daruma-ji temple is nearby (and our next stop), so it’s not surprising to see them everywhere in Takasaki. The Daruma doll are a hollow, papier mache, round traditional doll modelled after Bodhidharma – the founder of the Zen tradition of Buddhism. Traditionally, they come in red and are designed to represent the Indian monk, Bodhidharma, but now they come in a wide range of colours and vary greatly in designs depending on regional variations and artistic interpretation. Lots of people consider the Daruma dolls to be a toy, but they are also believed to be a good luck talisman for many Japanese.

You can see in the images that the dolls have blank eyes – I’ll explain this a bit later below. The dolls have become a bit commercialised by many Buddhist temples and even co-opted by politicians as aspirational images for their campaigns. Now, you can buy your fav colour to meet your fav goal… vicarious airy-fairy meanings applied to each colour for the rose-quartz crowd.

This morning as we left the ryokan on our way to the Kannon, I had mentioned to Mr K that we may need to hunt down a supermarket to buy some Japanese pickles… generally speaking I abhor pickles (particularly American gherkins!) and other pickled things at home. Even in Japanese restaurants in Aust they are really ordinary, but here, they are so flavoursome and come in such varieties, that I wish we could get good quality Japanese pickles at home. Wouldn’t you know it? Mr K parks us to go visit the Kannon right beside “The Pickle House”… home to a wondrous selection of Japanese pickled EVERYTHING!

Well, once you are buying stuff that needs declaring at customs (something we usually avoid like the plague!), you may as well have STUFF to declare at customs! So in for a penny, in for a pound, I stocked up on pickles and am now free to peruse the Japanese marquetry too. Bonus! 😀 If we are going to be standing in the queue at Sydney Customs with pickles… may as well stand there for timber products too!

Just outside the pickle house was a steamed bun shop making miso steamed buns. Thankfully, they warned us that ’1 is cool for one person’, and as we were only after a wee snack, we decided to share a stick, rather than have one each. Delicious, burnt miso flavours; but rather starchy.

I loved this little guy on the bridge that crossed over the river to the temple area of town… good thing they don’t sell big stone painted Daruma like this one or I would want to take one home!

When we arrived at the Shorinzan Daruma Temple, the first thing that we were met by near the car park was a cemetery… complete with a little booth containing a sales representative that was ‘selling plots’. Hmmm… I’ve long been looking for a place to sprinkle my ashes, maybe this is the place! 🙂

The Shorinzan Daruma Temple is a small temple not far from the Kannon in Takasaki. It was built originally in 1697 but the Obaku Zen Buddhists as a school. It is known as the original birthplace of the Daruma and it is believed the original Daruma dolls came from this region. Legend has it that the Daruma of Shorinzan are especially lucky, so much so that the city of Takasaki has been leaning on that reputation and Takasaki is known as ‘The Lucky Town’.

Originally the temple was believed to have been built for the Soto school of Zen Buddhism, but int he Meiji era was converted to the Obaku sect. In the late 18thC, the 9th generation Zen Master of the temple offered aid and comfort during the Great Tenmei famine, for whatever reasons, he taught them how to make papier-mache dolls based on the Daruma dolls. These become known as the Shorinzan Nanakusa Taisai Daruma Market Festival which is held every January. In more recent years, the festival has attracted thousands of visitors who come to buy new Daruma dolls and burn their old ones as offerings.

The Daruma dolls are often associated with the phrase, ‘Nanokorobi yaoki’, which means: ‘seven times down, eight times up’, which speaks to the resilience of the dolls – the Daruma are light due to their papier-mache construction, but they are weighted in the bottom so they always bounce back up to an upright position when they are tilted or rocked over. In Japan, these are called ‘okiagari’, which means to get up (oki) and rise (agari). They symbolise the ability to overcome adversity and recover from falls or find success and uprightness.

The eyes of the Daruma are often blank when people buy them. They have large oversized symmetrical round white eyes. The purchaser is encouraged to paint in one of the eyes, and focus on a goal. The aim is to complete the next eye when one meets the goal or finishes the big task in mind. They are commonly given as gifts at the beginning of the year or to students, and the recipient of the doll will fill in one eye upon setting their goals, then the other upon fulfilling it. This way, every time they see the one-eyed Daruma, they remember the goal and hopefully work towards it… steadfastly in spite of possible setbacks.

When dolls have both their eyes filled in, marking the completion of one’s goals, some people return them to the Shorinzan Daruma-ji Temple… hence the large collection here at any given point in time. (I wonder if they are cleaned out once a month, like locks on a Florentine bridge or coins from the Trevi Fountain).

After the temple visit we stopped at a konbini to grab some saké and beers – as you do! And I was curious to know what was in these steamed buns… gotta love Google Translate. It comes up with some real corkers.

Another quick and accessible sight in the Takasaki area are the Doukutsu Kannon Caves. These are a 450m deep man-made cave system that have 39 statues of the Kannon Goddess of Mercy on display. Each piece of sculpture is an artwork by the sculptor Rakuzan who devoted his life to creating this unique gallery. The caves appear to be a philanthropic project of a wealthy kimono maker and trader named Tokuzo Yamada. He was apparently quite generous with his fortune and spent half his life on this huge undertaking with the goal of making Takasaki a pilgrimage destination, such that visiting the Doukutsu Kannon would confer upon visitors the same blessings as visiting prestigious temples.

Tokuzo was reputed to have been quite knowledgeable in the design fields and was heavily involved in the layout and design of the Doukutsu Kannon statues he commissioned from teh sculptor Rakuzan. The statues and their posture and clothing are very similar to the aesthetic used in Buddhist art to this day. The entire cave system is considered a masterpiece of modern Buddhist art.

Usually depictions of the Buddhist goddess, Kannon will depict her with a varying background – among rocks, waterfalls, upon mountains, in the snow…. the Doukutsu Kannon created by Rakuzan and Tokuzo are the only Buddhist artworks where the ‘world of the gods is made real’. That is the backgrounds are created by using materials like local Gunma Prefecture volcanic rock and Sanbaseki stone, to create entire environments to glorify the Kannon.

Some of the statues and their vignettes are said to have take the artist more than a year to create.

The work on the caves and their artworks continued until Tokuzo passed away in 1964. The goal had been to make a 800m deep cave, but encountered limitations when they discovered hard ground, which hindered the continuation of the project. They current walk through the caves is 450m and is completely accessible… very unusually for a manmade cave system, it has not steps, but rather is cut into an existing mountain.

This wall may exemplify the difficulty that was found with the tunnelling project.

Right by the caves are the Tokumeien Gardens – considered one of the best Japanese gardens in the northern Kanot region and covering a 20,000sqm area. It is built on the slopes of the Kannonyama Hill using a large amount of the of rocks, soil and sand that were excavated during the creation of the cave.

The garden was designed by Yamada Tokuzou and the master Japanese architect, Kaneko Seikichi. The landscaping was completed by Goto Sekisui II, who was also involved in the beautiful gardens surrounding the Meiji Shrine in Tokyo.

The garden is a beautiful relaxing space filled with giant Sanbaishi stones, a huge amount of lava stones transported from Mt Asmara, red pines, Niigata black pines, and seasonal plants.

Sadly, the autumn foliage is late this year – like, concerningly late. The predictions have been put down to a particularly hot and unusually long summer. The tourism industry each year tries to predict the turning of the leaves in Japan, much like they do for the sakura – cherry blossom season, but thanks to climate change it is getting harder and harder to predict.

The garden should have been full of deep orange and red colour at this time of year, but hardly any of the leaves have turned at all. I have heard news reports that the tourism industry is fearing that the leaves won’t turn at all, but that the weather will turn cold so quickly, the leaves will simply fall dead from the trees rather than give the month long colour people come to see.

The gardens were lovely – though unfortunately, not the vibrant colour way that you can normally expect in November. Below, November pic of the gardens stolen from the internet:

After this we opted for a quickie late lunch. Now, we have been in Japan a number of times, but have never been to a regular ol’ sushi train. So we thought we seek one out. Kura-Sushi is a reliable and well known chain across Japan.

It was exactly what we were expecting! Fantastic (and cheap!) food, quick service, hardly any interactions with the staff at all. It was also super noisy because today was Culture Day, which is a public holiday, and there seemed to be lots of families out who would probably normally at school and work. Was good fun though; I’d go again… lunch for two including drinks was barely AUD$30, and we were trying all the strange things on the menu.

Not a bad morning out – now back to work!

Bangkok snippets

Posted on March 19, 2024 by borysSNORC

For a ten day trip, it didn’t feel like we did a lot of truly touristy stuff in Bangkok (which is probably because I smashed a couple of days in Cambodia into the middle of it)… but some of the highlights were 1) Gamer booking us a fancy dinner at Aksorn – a really nice Michelin star restaurant that does traditional Thai food in a small rooftop, open kitchen restaurant. The food was amazing! Red duck curry has now been officially ruined for me for life – as the insipid pathetic offerings that pass for red duck curry in Australian restaurants is truly dismal in comparison. *sad face*. There was a fair bit of wine twonking as Gamer is fond of international wines, whereas I am mostly familiar with boutique Australian vineyards.

Afterwards, we went to some weird tropics bar where everyone was ordering weird umbrella encumbered cocktails served in carved out baby pineapples (Thai pineapples are a fraction of the size of the ones we usually get at home – and much much sweeter)… at the time I remember thinking, ‘Why the fuck are all these highly intelligent people choosing to spend their time and money in an OUTDOOR venue when it’s stinking hot and humid?!? Where’s the AC people?’ As it turns out, I should be thanking them, the guy I was sitting beside and chatting with, tested positive for Covid like two days later! Yay, hot and sticky outdoor drinking, I guess? *shrug*

Another interesting stop we did was to the ICONSIAM shopping centre which to me if more affectionately known as the Brand Whore Mall – there was everything from Armani and BVLGARI to Burberry to Yves St Laurent and Zegna, plus every expensive twonky thing in between. Floors and floors of huge, largely empty but over staffed luxury brands everywhere. The most interesting area of the centre though was the ICONSIAM Floating Market that was built in the bottom of the shopping centre, which was less ‘floating market’ and rather more, ‘we build a fucking fish pond and plonked some colourful Thai-looking boats in it’! Totes for the tourists… but cute enough. I think we probably dropped a grand total of about $20 there grabbing a bite to ear. Not so exciting imho… but I’m not their target demographic; my clothes and shoes are chosen 100% for comfort and preferred colour, not name brands, and I’ve been using the same $90 nylon cross body handbag for probably close to 8 years now. 😛

We did manage to go visit the HUGE temple complex at Wat Pho which is the home of Bangkok’s famous Reclining Buddha. The temple has loads of funereal monuments all over the place and seems to be a rabbit warren of monasteries and smaller temples covering an 80,000sqm complex. From what I could find, not a lot is known about the origins of the temple being on this site – they don’t know exactly who founded it and aren’t exactly sure when construction started. It is thought to have been built and heavily expanded on during the reign of King Phetracha, (1688–1703)… hmm never heard of him; oddly enough Thai rulers were never covered in my various history lectures at uni.

Cool statues lined the outside of some of the temple buildings… Yale for scale:

The Reclining Buddha is HUGE! And of course, being such an internationally recognised monument of Bangkok, we ran into a line of people waiting to go in… a line that was slowed down by the need to take off shoes. Now, I travel a lot, and in no small part due to my experiences in Japan, I often travel in slip on shoes – Sketchers are perfect for this sort of light walking in fair weather – and I tend to carry a reusable shopping bag in my purse that can be used for throwing my shoes into in a pinch… seems that this sort of thing isn’t common practice. There were soooo many people with either lace up boots on, or stupid strappy sandals, that needed to sit down in order to take their shoes off and my god did it clog up the entrance and exit areas.

But once we got inside it was spectacular, and not just the statue of the Buddha itself, but the intricate artwork on every single interior surface of the building.

There were several small shrines in between the columns that supported the enormous roof that houses the 46m long Buddha, but I couldn’t find any information on what these particular shrines were dedicated to. I find this so frustrating – the main reason I love to travel is to learn about different cultures and traditions, so when you visit a place which is obviously set up to cater for tourists (and you know they are because there’s a fucking cash register selling tickets on the way in!) there should be information readily available… and I don’t mind if the info plaques aren’t in English – Google Translate is so good these days, you can just take a picture and import it and get the general idea. Grrr.. spoiled much?

As we all slow marched down the length of the Buddha and tried not to lose an eye to some oblivious selfie stick wielding tourist, I found myself more fascinated with the artworks on the walls, and columns of the building – they are extremely intricate and no doubt are full of religious iconography that I (as an exceedingly lapsed Catholic type) am really unfamiliar with. These painted frescos are certainly worthy of consideration as artworks in their own right, but 99% of visitors were walking past them either with with their backs to them, or if they did turn to face them, they were looking at their phones and trying to compose their 43rd selfie in that spot! lol. The walls are covered in these beautiful artworks…

Also, for reasons I am not quite sure of, I did find myself somewhat obsessed with the Buddha’s enormous and very precisely crafted feet. They appear to have been made of ebony and mother of pearl and must have taken a huge amount of man hours. I had seen many, many pictures of the Reclining Buddha before – but don’t recall seeing images of his feet! They were enormous and very impressive.

A detail of some of the designs painted on the columns… it seems depictions of Buddha’s life were on the walls of the building and the columns were all adorned in repeating patterns of floral motifs.

On the way out behind the Buddha, there was a place to make a donation to the temple – you could just give them you notes I guess, but instead there are 108 bronze pots lining the wall as you exit. I took a photo of the sign entreating donations, which I translated later. Apparently the 108 pots represent the 108 auspicious characters of Buddha. Visitors trade their notes for a cup full of coins and walk along dropping coins into each of the bowls as it is believed to bring good fortune. The donations also assist the monks in the day to day maintenance of the temple complex – so yes, tangible evidence that putting money into the pots at least brings someone good fortune!

It really is an unusually designed temple complex with beautiful and creative architecture.

I gotta say though, walking around Bangkok in the Outside is not my cup of tea. I’m from Brisbane where we have heat and humidity and I found it draining – I can’t imagine how your average tourist from Manchester in the UK or Minnesota in the US would handle this sort of heat. ‘Feels like 43C, more like!’ At 6pm!

Another very cool stop we made was another rooftop restaurant! There seems to be a bit of a running theme for this trip. We made a booking to go to Akira Back, one of Bangkok’s best rated Japanese restaurants… had to be done. There is only so much Michelin Star Pad Thai Poo that a short blonde can consume in a week! Google it.

The ambiance was really kinda cool, from the muted lighting of the lift lobby that was also somewhat surprisingly adorned with what looked suspiciously inspired by Shibari rope work…

… to the ladies room with the fully glass wall that was sheer drop 28 floors down! It was so freaky I had to call Yale in to investigate. (After making sure the bathroom was empty of course!).

We opted for the Omikaze menu, which weirdly only came with a wine flight, not a saké flight, so we skipped that and bought a nice bottle of saké to go with our dinner, and the food was delicious. Even though I find myself becoming increasingly disappointed with Japanese fusion restaurants adding fucking truffles to Japanese dishes… to me, truffles are a really over powering flavour compared to a lot of the subtle but complex flavours of high end Japanese cuisines. There seems to be a fashion for adding truffles nowadays, it’s happening at home in Australia too.

On the menu was tuna carpaccio with, you guessed it, truffles. Hakodate scallops served with kiwi and strawberry and jalapeño salsa and a garlic and citrus soy sauce, miso Black Cod with yuzu saké foam, special crab miso soup, hot stone grilled Kagoshima Japanese A5 wagu steak with Ishiyaki sauce, shrimp tempura on a Bubu arare cucumber roll, with a grilled eel sauce, and a desert that looked like a banana and a lump of ice cream but which was actually a banana shaped cheese cake! It was obviously designed to be some sort of signature Instagrammable desert, but it was kinda fun – the yellow ‘skin’ of the banana was banana flavoured chocolate and inside was made of a light vanilla style cheesecake, and the usual crumb base seemed to run through the centre of the banana with a slight caramel flavoured syrup. Very novel and fun. All up – was a fabulous dinner out, even with the disappointing truffles. lol.

For special torture, Yale told the restaurant that it was my birthday – and they gave me a fabulous little chocolate cake as a gift…yay?! Chocolate! Bleurk… but Yale was happy, and thankfully they didn’t sing to me.

The view from the restaurant was also just simply amazing…

The only other stand out weirdness that night was a pair of Chinese girls who were beautiful young women, dressed to the nines in fancy designed clobber, dining together who – like me! – were taking photos of the beautifully presented food, but they were celebrating one of their birthdays. I say ‘one of their birthdays’ because for the life of me I couldn’t tell which was the birthday girl – they had provided the kitchen with a very photogenic cake (I mean, it must have been there was soooo many pictures taken of the damn thing) and a large bouquet of tightly arranged pale pink roses – probably two dozen put together like a tight bridal bouquet. Seriously – there’s nothing special about this cake – or this bouquet of flowers…

And they both seem super excited when the cake came out (even though they bought it with them) and the phones were clicking away like mad, and lots of taking each others photos with the cake, and then lining up the flowers in front of the cake and one of them, flowers beside the cake and one of them, flowers behind the cake… and so on. You get the idea. As it happened I had glanced at my watch just as the cake was arriving, and I was enjoying my meal, but also kind of distracted by the over the top, weird arse, photo shoot going on directly in my line of sight. No shit, they must have taken 500 photos EACH of this ordinary looking cake and a possibly pricey bunch of flowers – they were at it for a full 45 minutes. I shit you not. Then, OMG, then… they asked a staff member to some photos for them. Fucking wannabe influencers, man. Give it up! How many pics can you take of a cake and some bloody roses!

Tourists huh? They’re the worst! 😉

Overall, I had a great time in Bangkok, and 10/10 would come back for another visit – though would definitely never want to be visiting in high summer or monsoon season! That shit sounds like it’s for Other People!