The New Year Shrine Visit: Meiji-jingû

Coot chicks in Schaffhausen and herons in flight at Konstanz. That is all for today.

To keep or not to keep? The case of the Kyoto Imperial Palace

Completing the set of former Imperial palaces that I've visited, the question regarding Kyoto was a different one, when, after the Meiji Revolution, the throne of Japan was moved to Tokyo, ending Kyoto's 1000-year tenure as Imperial capital. The answer came swiftly: keep it. After all, it had only been rebuilt in 1855, fires having destroyed the palace multiple times in the Edo period alone.

The Shishinden throne hall, with its courtyard and traditional tachibana orange and sakura cherry trees either side of its grand staircase, was used for the coronations of Emperors Taishô and Shôwa (Hirohito) in 1915 and 1928, but since the accession of Emperor Akihito in 1989, coronations have been held at the active Imperial Palace in Tokyo.

Today, the palace is preserved and can be visited for free, albeit on a fixed tour route. Only the exterior of the buildings can be accessed, still allowing good views of the Shishinden and the gardens to the East of the palace.

It's time to go back to Kashihara, and let's start by meeting the local animals!

I'm getting real "fancy pants" vibes from the cat! But to be fair, it is a darn good looking cat.

That is all until I think of something more intricate to talk about.

I promised more impressive views from the hills above Toba, and here they are. They're not very hard to reach: the Hiyoriyama circuit is only a couple of kilometres long around the station and involves climbing around 50 m. Hinoyama is further away, further South and a little higher.

The views of the coastline at Toba were good enough for Hiroshige to use in his Famous Views from the Sixty-Odd Provinces to illustrate Shima province (though there wasn't much else, I presume, Shima province was tiny, it was just Toba and the neighbouring town of Shima - also Shima is 志摩 and not 島 "island").

Beyond the islands near Toba, lies the mainland again, the Southern part of Aichi prefecture across the Ise Bay (Minamichita and Tahara), which the car ferry in the above picture traverses.

When I have the inspiration, I stage an Easter Bunny Massacre. Also it's April Fools' Day, so I wanted to post something funny. Lacking inspiration at the moment, I looked back at a previous Easter weekend.

My favourite cherry blossom spot in Strasbourg is the Citadelle. The remains of the garrison built under Louis XIV are now a gorgeous park by the Rhône-Rhine canal, and the cherry blossoms there are of the variety that bloom into pompoms.

I haven't been to the park this year, only spotting from a distance that the trees are currently in bloom, somewhat earlier than usual. So here are some pictures from a previous year - the year I first saw this wonderful tree at the ruin's entrance.

Daylight Saving Time, Edo style

These Edo-period clocks are on display at the National Museum of Nature and Science in Ueno, Tokyo. They are unusual in two ways: the display looks kind of like a ruler, and you may notice on the left example that the marks are irregular. This would seem to suggest that hours in one half of the day are considerably shorter than in the other half.

The basic idea is that the Sun always rose at 6 in the morning and always set at 6 in the evening. In between, the same number of hours, no matter the season. This means that in the summer, an hour was quite a bit longer than an hour in winter, and vice-versa for the nights. It turns out the Romans were doing this too, on a more elementary scale as their clocks were sundials, and soon noticed that they weren't getting as much rest at some times of the year...

Today, most of Europe and the US have Daylight Saving Time, and we're going through the "ugh, clocks forward, less sleep" movement in Europe tonight. But let's take a moment to consider that the owners of these clocks would have owned a set of rulers and changed them each month!

The Fog on the Rhine (is all mine, all mine)

After three weeks of marking, I finally managed to get out of my hole in late January. I was beckoned out by dense fog, seizing the chance to enjoy the misty atmosphere. When I reached the park that straddles the French-German border, I found it on the edge of a fog bank, with haze on one side of the footbridge and perfectly clear skies on the other.

While not among the most outstandingly beautiful parks, the Jardin des Deux Rives has things to offer on both sides of the border, and, just for that ability to hop over to another country, it ranks very high on the cool factor.

Not that the birds would know. They were just taking in the winter sunlight while they could.

Before Hello Kitty, it was Evangelion

The Joyful Shinkansen made its debut between Ôsaka and Hakata in 2015, and marked two anniversaries: 40 years of the complete opening of the San'yô Shinkansen, and 20 years of the mecha anime Neon Genesis Evangelion. And it's safe to say the mash-up of a 500 Series rocketship and a giant robot was bound to work!

For two and a half years, this train ran one daily return on a Kodama service, until it became the Hello Kitty Shinkansen. When I visited Japan in 2016, I made a point to see it en-route to Hiroshima. Timetable-wise, Fukuyama was the right spot.

As a Kodama train, the 500 TYPE EVA wasn't the fastest, and would often wait for Hikari and Nozomi trains to pass before continuing. This was the case here, and here's an N700 overtaking.

Erm, that didn't look blisteringly fast, did it? Well, taking into account the size and distance it may not, but a very rough calculation (length of a 16-car N700 set: 400 m, in 6 seconds) yields a speed of 240 km/h. The speed limit on the San'yô high speed line is 300 km/h.

Back to the Evangelion train! As is the case in the Hello Kitty train, two cars received particular attention. Car 2 was a decorated seating car, and car 1, with windows covered, had a mock-up cockpit and simulator game!

With the overtake done, the 500 TYPE EVA set off. Riding it didn't fit into my schedule on that voyage, but it was great to see it. Best livery on a 500 in my opinion!

Heading towards Tokyo, two high-speed Shinkansen lines join up roughly 8 km North of Ômiya. I am riding an E7 train from Nagano, and at the junction, a red E6 coming down from Akita on the other line appears, coupled to a bright green E5 which has come all the way from the Northern island of Hokkaido. Another E5 shoots in the other direction, having just left Ômiya.

My train is overtaking, and I exchange amused waves with the passengers who have just seen an E7 appear out of nowhere in their window, but the long nose of the E5 just gives it the win at Ômiya station.

There could be clearer pictures of these impressive trains in the future, but for now, that's the story behind the blog's banner picture!

Location of the first photo (link to OpenStreetMap)