Day 9 in Japan: The Long, long railroad to Nikko

Our small group – consisting of Brent, Joel, Ciaran, and me – agreed last night that we would wake up at five thirty in the morning to catch the first express from the train station near the Tokyo Skytree to Nikko. We bought our breakfast at a 7-Eleven, which in my case consisted of one egg onigiri, a few little sweet breads with chocolate nibs, and a banana inexplicably wrapped in plastic. We arrived at the station in good time, but when we clicked through the options on the machine to purchase our tickets for the express, we discovered that the first train of the day had been cancelled and the next few had been booked out.

Scrambling to figure out an alternative, we put together a route that would involve changing trains at three different stations but would somehow take only half an hour longer than our original plan. I do not know if any of us truly believed this. We spent a few minutes waiting for the slow train that would take us part of the way to Nikko, but walking down the platform, Joel noticed a red chyron running across the screens announcing something in Japanese. With our combination of language skills – none of which involved very high-levels of Japanese but considerable competency in written Chinese – we figured out that there had been an accident on the tracks affecting both the express train and every train going roughly in the same direction. The words used to describe this accident implied an injury, which in our understanding usually means a suicide attempt.

Despite this incident, it seemed that there were still trains that at least went part of the way to the station where we needed to transfer for our backup multi-leg plan. We boarded one of them and hoped for the best. When we arrived at the station, we saw that people had already begun to queue for another train across the platform from us, and that it would get us to the next place we needed to be. None of this was on Google Maps, so we figured it was a replacement train and joined the queue, which grew longer and longer as more trains kept coming from the centre and as our train’s delay kept growing. Long story short, we made it to the temples of Nikko a full three hours after our initial plan.

We visited three shrines in Nikko: Toshogu, Futarasan, and Takinoo. The first of these is the most famous and the most important shrine in Nikko, housing the mausoleum of Tokugawa Ieyasu, founder of the Tokugawa Shogunate. It was also the most visited. An expansive complex, it contains several ornate temples with detailed carvings of various animals across the panels on its walls and under its roofs. In one of them, we were shown the roaring dragon: a painted ceiling that produced a shattered echo when the temple guide beat two wooden blocks against each other very loudly. The blocks only had this effect when the temple employee stood directly under the dragon’s face.

When we had finished visiting all the shrines, we ate lunch at a little stall selling a type of tofu popular in the area. It made me glad that Joel and I are both vegetarians, as I would hardly have lobbied for such an idea in a group of carnivores. We ate pudding out of cute little jars with drawings of cats while waiting at the bus stop for our ride to our last destination – Kegon Falls. As the tallest waterfalls in Japan, these have inspired many poets across the centuries including one who, famously, wrote his farewell poem there before jumping off the falls to commit suicide. The falls have become a popular spot for this activity among people outside the literary community as well.

The bus to the waterfalls took some forty minutes and the bus back to the train station took the same amount of time. We were very fortunate that, not having learned our lesson and leaving our purchase of tickets to the very last moment again, we were able to get on the eight-forty express back to Tokyo. The waterfalls themselves were unfortunately a little underwhelming due to droughts, and the grey sky made the whole late-winter mountain landscape seem very dreary. As we made our way back, dusk began to descend, and I composed the following accidental rhyme:

“The forest is so dark and spooky,

Keep an eye out for tanuki.”