A Few Pictures Of Bastille Day Fireworks... At Least Whatever Got Above The Roofline.

To rebuild or not to rebuild? The case of Fujiwara-kyô

While travelling along the Rhine, we've covered a few castles which have been rebuilt and repurposed, unlike many forts in Alsace (links to some of those in that post). In Japan, the rebuilding of castle keeps to house museums was common after the Second World War, though some have remained ruin sites (further links in there). But what about a whole Imperial palace - scratch that, an entire capital?

Well, let's not get too excited: Kashihara, which was the Imperial capital for just 16 years between 694 and 710, has not rebuilt the old palace. By the time excavations began in the early 20th century, this area to the East of the town was farmland, and actually locating the lost palace and city was part of the problem.

It turns out Kashihara was the first city to be planned in the Chinese style: a grand palace at its heart, and a grid of parallel and perpendicular streets around it. In 710, the capital was dismantled and moved to Nara, before moving again to Kyôto in the late 8th century - and the grid street pattern can be found there, with numbered parallels going North to South (Nijô, Sanjô, Shijô...).

Today, the site of palace buildings are marked with these arrays of pillars (photo above with Miminashi-yama in the background), and a small museum sits on the side. There don't appear to be any plans to develop further, unlike what has been done at the palace site in Nara, which we can talk about next time.

Two crossings of the Rhine

The Swiss city of Basel lies on the border with France and Germany, and, as it's Switzerland, it hasn't changed hands or been attacked much (though the French did use Basel as target practice for a new cannon from their fort at Huningue once). It has a well-preserved historic centre, and, with the Rhine's current being consistently strong, it has a rare form of transportation.

This little ferry has no motor. It is tethered to a wire that crosses the river, and a lever at one end of the tether on the boat is all that's needed to turn the boat into the current which does the rest.

It's incredibly simple and easy! For a more engaging version of the story, here's a video by The Tim Traveller.

While I rode the boat with my sister, I continued upstream alone to another crossing, a bridge which doubles up as a dam for hydro-electric power stations on either side - or Kraftwerk as it's known in German.

Unlike in Basel, the Rhine at this point is an international border: Germany on the right-hand side, and Switzerland on the left-hand side. But with Germany and Switzerland being signatories of the Schengen agreement, this is what the border looks like:

The Rhine sees some impressive barges navigate roughly between Schaffhausen and Rotterdam, so there is a rather impressive lock next to this dam and the Kraftwerken. This is the view downstream from the top of the lock, with what I suspect was a border post on the right? I don't know, but I seem to remember that black and white stripes had some significance.

As the maths problems take a break, maybe we can have a brief pub quiz. So...

Q. What's that building on the 10-yen coin?

A. The Phoenix Hall at Byôdô-in, Uji.

Initially built as a villa by a member of the Minamoto clan just before the year 1000, the land was sold not long after to members of a rival clan, the Fujiwaras, who turned it into a Buddhist temple named Byôdô-in in 1052. The most striking feature of the temple is the Amida Hall, which with time gained the name Phoenix Hall due to its overall appearance: the two outer corridors are the wings, and a corridor extending behind is the tail.

At the same time, tea production was picking up in Uji, and by the 14th century, Uji tea had become well renowned. I need to go back there someday, my first visit was just an afternoon flick after completing the climb of Mt Inari in the morning. I thought of going back there in the summer of 2023, but couldn't quite make time for it.

Japan's biggest shimenawa: Izumo Taisha Kagura-den

We've seen larger and larger sacred ropes in our previous posts, and here's the largest of all: the shimenawa adorning the Kagura-den at Izumo Taisha. It is 13.5 m long and weighs 5 tons!

Shimenawa ropes are made with hemp or rice straw. This shot shows just how densely packed Izumo Taisha's shimenawa is - it's almost like a tree trunk, truly an impressive and imposing feature.

Here and in previous examples, we can see folded paper shide streamers, another symbol of sacred items in Shinto, on the first picture. Knots also appear, particularly on the ropes on the Meoto Iwa at Futami, as paper would not fare well by the sea... These ropes and streamers indicate a demarcation line between our world and the realm of kami spirits.

The Kagura-den is a hall just outside the main compound of Izumo Taisha, to the West. It was built to house kagura rituals, traditional dances which retell the stories of the early gods. As Izumo, formerly in Iwami province, is one of the most ancient shrines in Japan, Iwami Kagura is one of the major forms of the dance.

As a bonus, here's a train decorated with characters of Iwami Kagura.

The Montech water slope

At around the same time as the "Inclined Plane" of Saint-Louis-Arzviller, other types of boat lifts were being engineered in other places. One of these was the Montech water slope, situated in Southern France on the Canal Parallel to the Garonne (Canal Latéral à la Garonne), the canal from Toulouse to Bordeaux which most people would probably refer to as the Canal du Midi - a better-known term though strictly speaking, the Canal du Midi is only the section from Toulouse to the Mediterranean.

From what I can garner, the two-headed vehicle used on this slope is a conjoining of two Diesel railcars built by Soulé in the early 70s, running on tyres and featuring a daunting-looking shield. This shield would be lowered behind a boat, and the machine would travel up and down the slope, carrying along the boat and the water it bathed in!

However, the performance of this system is less impressive than the Inclined Plane. It bypasses 5 locks, and saves 45 minutes of travel time. That's not nothing, but if you arrived at an end and just missed the train, then going straight to the locks wasn't going to be much longer than waiting for the next one. Also, far more power is required to make this work (I'm reading 1000 hp motors, versus 125 hp for the Inclined Plane), and it's Diesel.

These photos were taken in late 2017, 8 years after the water slope closed. It was only serving leisure boats by then, and, as I've insinuated, it wasn't very economical to run. As far as I can tell, the 5 locks beside it never closed, and are in use today.

The slope and its tractor have since been renovated, and the site's current state can be seen in a Tim Traveller video published in 2021.

Ruine Schauenburg

My hike in July took me to the South side of Oberkirch, while on the North side sit the ruins of Schauenburg castle. It's a short, but steep, climb from town centre (or you can drive up).

The castle was built at the end of the 11th century by the Duke of Swabia. It saw action mainly in disputes between local lords, most notably after much of the land around the castle was sold to the Margrave of Baden-Baden, around 35 km to the North. It became a ruin following a French invasion in 1689.

Today, a restaurant sits beside the ruin. When I was last there, there was a camera stand to take a clean selfie - you know, the one where you set a timer instead of holding at arm's length. That's where my photo on my professional website comes from.

As is the case from the South side, the castle has a good view of the Rhine plains, and Strasbourg cathedral sticks out. It would have stuck out even more back in the day, without the modern tower blocks. The lords of Schauenburg would have seen the massive gothic cathedral and its monumental spire being built... over the course of a few centuries.

As any jagged coastline should, Shionomisaki has a lighthouse. Many were built across Japan during the modernisation of the Meiji era, and Kushimoto town has two.

After passing through the shrine in this picture, a trail continues to the left to a cape out of frame. People from the nearby port of Koza would go out there to watch for the arrival of pods of whales when their migration was due, and return home to basically say that hunting season had begun.

As such, Shionomisaki has always had a bit of a lookout role. And, according to the Akari no Moribito story, this guy below will be looking out for us against the forces of darkness in the future! The project has aimed to give all of Japan's main lighthouses a character, complete with a voice actor! I don't understand much, but on the surface, I think it's neat.

Temples on the high street: Kyôto Teramachi and Shinkyôgoku

A typical Japanese covered high street, right? Yes, there are lots of shops left and right, but this is Kyôto, a millennial capital and centre of cultural and religious tradition in Japan. So what happens when a modern high street encounters a centuries-old temple, bearing in mind that it would be very bad form to ask the priests to sell up?

Well you leave the temple alone and build around it. So, in between the big name drugstores, Animate, clothes shops and cafés lined with the street's signature bricks and tile floor, here's the entrance to Seishin-in, with traditional wooden doors and tile roofing. It is also just visible in the first picture - see if you can notice it.

Seigan-ji is easier to spot, further illustrating the contrast. Online maps show that this temple even has a cemetery in the middle of the next block, completely encircled by shopping streets and businesses.

It's a similar situation for Tenshô-ji, though, this far up the high street, the commercial tissue becomes less dense. These temples seem a bit larger and own more land. Still, we've gone from a towering, mineral, covered street in the top photo, to an open path with low buildings and plenty of vegetation, with no transition.

These scenes of coexistence fascinated me when I first visited Kyôto in 2016, with a hotel in this area, so it was great to see them again on my brief return to the city in 2023. More fascinating still is the fact that one of these "just off the high street" temples is not only very old, but hugely historically significant... and I'm yet to mention it!

While some wait for cherry blossoms as a sign of spring (and this includes me), another sign of the season in Alsace is the stork. Saw my first one in the sky this week - but this photo is from a previous year.

E10 Shinkansen coming soon!

NHK WORLD

JR East to launch new bullet trains, cargo-only cars | NHK WORLD-JAPAN News

East Japan Railway, or JR East, says it will launch new bullet trains with improved anti-earthquake features and other services in fiscal 20

The Japanese railway companies don't make prototypes for the lols. JR East's ALFA-X project will come to fruition with the E10, due to start testing in 2027 and enter commercial service in 2030.

Also of note in the announcement, is that JR East will run freight-only high speed trains, using retiring E3 Series trains (these are currently being replaced by new E8s). I remember that during the pandemic, the empty Shinkansens were used to transport fresh fish. As far as I can tell, this would be the first regular high-speed freight service since the French Post Office's TGVs which retired in 2015.