Mt Takao

About half an hour to the East of me is where one of Japan’s many mountain ranges begins and since it is one of the few things in Tokyo that is close to me, it’s quicker to get to the mountains than the city centre, it seemed a good day out. Actually I think I passed the evil lair of the Hood from Thunderbirds on the way as i could find no other logical explanation for this:

Mt Takao is only 599m high but it rises rather steeply with no gentle hills to ease the walk. The theory is that those who go up the mountain and pray at the temple will have good luck and there were a lot of people going up although I think it was more for a nice walk and the scenery than anything else. The path is full of Shinto shrines and there are several Buddhist temples at the halfway point. The strange thing is that although if you study religion in Japan you will always learn that they are Shinto and Buddhist but really they don’t seem to have any religion at all and even here on the pilgrimage trail any motions that they perform, such as washing their hands (purity is important in Shinto) or burning incense seems more from tradition than any actual belief. Of course it is completely arguable whether Shinto, which has no religious texts or dogma is actually a religion in the first place which may be why there is so little of it in Japan.

Also the bugs in Japan are enormous. If you ever watch any old Japanese monster films and wonder where they got the idea for the monster from then it’s bugs. The flying ones are easily the size of a small bird, a robin for example, and also really fast so I haven’t been able to get a picture of them yet. But just to prove that the insects are one thing that are actually bigger in Japan than elsewhere, here is an ant: