This week was one such week. After the Arrow shooting day, we had two more days of holiday. The Golden Week celebration lasted until Wednesday and because it was a holiday we didn't have class until Thursday. Tsuchiya kyodai came Thursday morning and became my roommate. We had class from 8 oclock and tsuchiya sensei had us write a news article about the person next to us. I really didn’t know much about the person next to me; only that he had gone to Osaka the day before to the aquarium and to the big ferris wheel. So I wrote a news article about how he was a famous American shark charmer who could make sharks want to eat by playing a musical tune under the water. Random, I know, but fun all the same. I got a good laugh out of that and Mark and I got closer after that. Heis a funny kid. He served his mission in the Tokyo area and we are going to hit up old areas when I get back there. It will be awesome. We both served in Fussa so it will be cool to go back there and see everyone. The lesson we had was to read and write different articles and from here on out we have to write 20 articles about Japanese stuff. It will be really cool, but busy. That day we went to honno-ji (my 4th attempt) and this time it was open! Although there was a Buddhist service going on at the same time so we really couldn’t walk the grounds without disturbing it. But the museum was open so I was happy about that. Honno-ji is a famous Shinto temple that was the place where Oda Nobunaga the first of the three unifiers of Japan in the 16th century was forced to commit suicide. His retainer Akeche Mituhide had betrayed him after he (mituhide) had been ordered to burn some Buddhist temples housing enemy threateners. Instead he circled back around and attacked Nobunaga with 13000 men. Nobunaga then only had 100 men standing guard and they fought valiantly being lead by a man named Mori who was the last man standing during the fight trying to give Nobunaga time to escape. Nobunaga got out and made it to honno-ji temple which was a couple of blocks away and there he took his own life in same of defeat. I wrote one of my history thesis’ on Nobenaga and how without him and his determination to carry on Japan would never have been unified even with the aide and efforts of the other two they did not have his level of motivation. Anyways the museum at honno-ji had artifacts from the 12th century that had been preserved such as at works pottery, as well as remnants of the battle that took place there; the swords of Mori and Nobunaga are kept there.
Friday class was interesting being culture class. My friend Sara and I may or may not have played checkers on her ipod touch during the lesson…but it was a good lesson. Afterwards we went to Nijo-jo The castle built by the last of the three unifiers in order to keep pressure on the Emperor (one of the ways the Shogun kept power was to control the actions of the Emperor, the word that comes most readily to mind is PUPPET.) Having been there before I told the other students most of the information I could remember. We walked down the nightengale floor (a floor designed to squeak as one walked on it to alarm the shogun of anyone’s presence) we saw where “the last samurai” was filmed (in the main room that the shogun used to have an audience with his retainers and daimyo, known as the first and second grand council rooms) then we went around the stucture of the castle. It is built with two moats surrounding it making it very hard for an attacking force to actually get to the center structure it self. Other defenses include arrow turrets and walls built and sloped so that they are always visable to the turrets and thus vulnerable to defensive action. The outer moat only has two entry paths and each of those is closed off by a gate that is reinforced wood by copper. It's about a foot thick and has a locking device that extends into the top and bottom of the gate doorway. Once you get in from that there is a long corridor-like pathway that is protected by another inner wall that also has turrets and is 25 feet high or so. Once you get into the middle doors which are of the same design as the outer doors some buildings are exposed, but the main castle is still protected by the inner moat (a 100 foot wide 20 feet deep water way) and walls 50 feet high with only 2 passageways into it also guarded by bronse/copper covered doors. Needless to say it is very tough to invade and never was captured.
After Nijo-jo we headed to the manga museum. Its this museum that has over 30,000 comic books in it and the history of how comics in Japan became so popular. It was interesting to see how they created these comics and the storylines that have come out in them. They have everything from comics about sports for both girls and boys all the way to really explicit adult only stuff. (luckily that stuff as all on the third floor so we stayed on the 2nd floor and first.) It was interesting but not as interesting to me, although I had a funny thought. I had a poll in my head of who in my Study Abroad group would be more interested in the Manga Museum than the history of Nijo-jo. I guessed that 5 basically could leave Japan fully satisfied of their experience here after having gone and could go on living, and that the rest of us would be ok seeing it but wouldn’t really care. I was totally right. It seemed that those 5 was so excited to go there were counting down the time to leave nijo-jo. Once we got to the manga museum I left after about 1-2 hours…they would probably still be there now if they were allowed. I don't know what they did I told them I was leaving and they said ‘bye.’
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