Nara Part 2 - Sumi Ink and Fushimi Inari Shrine

Thankfully, Japan has NOT been like China or Turkey in that no surprise visits to artisan factories or lunch stops conveniently located on the ground floor of a government-sponsored handicraft goods warehouse have occurred. We have done exactly one traditional crafts outing and though undoubtedly Japan Society paid for our experience, we thankfully were not escorted through a gift shop on our way out. We visited a traditional sumi ink maker, one of only 10 in Nara, and it was pretty great, actually. 

So here we're being shown a block of ink just removed from the mold. As you can see--still squishy and twisty! Kind of a strange texture. Sumi ink apparently comes from only a couple of sources, the main one being the soot gathered from smoking pine wood in a long and painstaking process. The liquid kind is from carbon, and has a lesser quality in that it's actually more uniform and will not show light or dark as easily. Additionally, it's difficult to make beautifully artistic rough individual hair lines with the liquid stuff.  In any case, the stuff that he's holding right here takes a long time to make because not only do you have to gather the soot, etc, you also have to let the block of ink harden for at lest 3 months after removing it from the mold. 

We all got to hand-squish a roll of sumi ink to create a the ink bar you see here, in the shape of our grasps. Most people use this as art, apparently, or they place it in their front door as a scent (the ink is perfumed) and a decoration.

After the sumi ink experience, we went to Fushimi Inari Shrine, another Shinto shrine. This is the #1 ranked shrine in Japan, apparently, and is really centered around wealth and dinero.  Quite a different vibe from Kamigamo, as you can see. Bright red and gold for starters. 

 See the fox with a red bib? These little guys were all over the shrine. The red bibs have something to do with children and protection, but Kazuko didn't really know more than that. I actually asked my host family in Obu about the red bib, and she didn't know, so she asked the guy at the office of the shrine we were visiting that day. He said that "it looks good." Right.

 The path up the mountain was lined with torii like this, some big and some small.

 Companies donate money to the shrine to have a torii erected in their honor. Here you see the company names on the left and the date on the right.

 Here's a breaking point in the path where you can see the city further down. I opted to continue and trek the rest of the loop through a mountains. Naturally, a downpour occurred right when I reached the point where it was too far to turn around but far enough to be caught in the rain for a significant amount of time. The little foxes that had looked kind of cute and sly started looking seriously sinister as the sky more or less blackened within minutes and a sheer gush of about an inch of water covered the pavement. I think under normal circumstances, I would've been distraught to be caught out like that, but here I actually found it pretty soothing. I was alone, and the only sound was running water and rain spatters. The air kind of took on that dewy, damp smell that you get in the countryside when it's raining.  I didn't have anywhere to be, and it didn't really matter if I got wet or not. Definitely one of those rare in-the-moment moments.

That said, it's totally unnecessary to ever hike that mountain again. Seen one red torii, seen 'em all. Seriously. They're all the same.