Day 18, Nagano

And now for something completely different… Today no history going back a thousand or hundreds of years. It was only 8 years ago, in 1998. The Dutch heroes were called Romme and Timmer. And the location was of course Nagano. As a real ‘Oranda-jin’ I simply had to have been there. (For all non-Dutch readers: I am of course talking about the Winter Olympics).

However, while Nagano is famous among foreigners for the Olympics, within Japan it is more famous for something else (can you see a pattern emerging?). Namely the Zenko-ji, a beautiful 8th century temple, which attracts 4 million visitors each year. Of course, Nagano is also known for its winter sport areas, a number of mountaintop shrines, its many onsen (hot mineral baths), and a park where you can see Macaques (the monkeys that I saw in the wild yesterday) in their own onsen.

When I entered the temple, I witnessed the end of some ceremony. A few monks were chanting their prayers, while another was banging two sticks together. At a certain moment some curtains or shutters at the side of the temple were opened, which let sunlight fall on a part of the altar. And finally, at the other end of the temple another monk started beating on a huge drum. I don’t know what everything meant, but it felt very spiritual.

Apparently the temple contains the first images of Buddha in Japan, imported from Korea in the 6th century. Almost nobody has ever seen them, and they are stored in a chest and wrapped on cloth. The last person to see them was a priest at the beginning of the 18th century who had gotten permission from the Shogun, after rumors that the chest was empty had gotten too loud.

After the temple, I went to see the M-Wave speed skating stadium. Inside, they have built an Olympic Memorial Museum, which has all kinds of interesting Olympic things on display. First they show you a 3d movie, however, with a lot of Japanese sports(wo)men winning medals, and some fragments of the opening ceremony. One of the fun objects on display is the voting form for deciding which city got the Winter Olympics (Salt Lake City got second place). Also they have some original medals, the torch, and the skates on which Shimizu won the 500m. I didn’t see even one other tourist, by the way.

As usual for Japanese sights, there was also a shop built half into the museum. They do this everywhere, even within the Imperial villa in Nikko, or the Chuzen-ji temple in Hiraizumi. At a certain moment you start to expect that the ‘route’ eventually ends up in a section that has price tags on the objects. Of course you can always buy food there as well. Not for eating at the spot though, because in Japan you are not supposed to eat while walking.

Finally, you could also view the inside of the stadium (see photo). It was kind of funny to see. There were a lot of people skating, by the way, probably in preparation of the first race of the season (which was last weekend in the Netherlands). I’m sure that some of the famous Japanese skaters were training here as well, but it was too hard to recognize them as they were wearing skating suits.