Nara: Where Japan Began Options

[jackychan]

If you think of Japan as a land of bullet trains and J-pop in Shinjuku storefronts, come to Nara—a city filled with rolling hills, ancient temples, and 1,200 entitled Bambis roaming its old streets. Pico Iyer reveals the Land of the Rising Sun's silent, sepia side

If, when you think of Japan, you imagine bullet trains and capsule hotels and narrow lanes ablaze with winking lights, then replace those images with empty space. Put aside every dystopian thought you've ever collected from Blade Runner or Lost in Translation and, instead of yellow-haired punks and gothic Lolitas, picture heaps of autumn leaves. Bundle together the din of J-pop, baseball fanatics, and the world's most crowded train stations and superimpose upon them pure silence.

Now you're in something like the vast open space that is Nara, twenty miles south of Kyoto. The little sign in my engagingly unglamorous room at the Nara Hotel reads please, no fire in the fireplace. The photographs on the wooden walls of the creaking two-story room are of earlier visitors—emperors and their families, some offering ghostly waves as if from another world. Behind the wooden front desk stands an enormous old black safe, almost as tall as I am, and across from it, in the lobby, is what could pass for a little Shinto shrine complete with growling leonine temple guardians. The hotel, which could stand in for a Scottish hunting lodge in a local production of Ivanhoe, is more than a hundred years old, and the only staff in evidence this sweaty midsummer dawn are two deer, waiting at the entrance where doormen might be expected. I walk along the driveway, under the Prussian-blue skies of 4:45 a.m., and orange lanterns lead me deeper into the silent dark.

A hotel close to the middle of a deer park? A bustling city of almost 400,000 people—more populous than Pittsburgh—that has at its heart nothing but rolling hills, ancient temples, and 1,200 imperious Bambis walking through its central streets at their whim? Nara is not your usual 1,300-year-old ancient former capital. The signs on its narrow roads, not far from City Hall, direct you toward the Kasugayama Primeval Forest. My map pointed out ancient burial mounds all around downtown. Centuries before anyone had heard of Delhi or Shanghai or London or Paris—and long before anywhere called Kyoto (let alone Tokyo) existed—Nara was the first permanent capital of Japan, and the place where the country began to establish itself as a Buddhist kingdom. But in a.d. 784—seventy-four years after the court arrived here—the capital moved to Kyoto, and over the next thousand-odd years, Nara's neighbor became the center of imperial refinement, where kimono and Zen gardens and geisha and tea ceremonies flowered and came to define the spirit of Japan.
Holidays in vietnam |Jakarta Hotels, Hotels in Jakarta| Princess Junk

This post has been edited by jackychan: Feb 25 2012, 10:57 PM

[mailan]

a band from Nara:

http://sayaconcept.com

[Cha]

Coincidentally (or not), 'nara' means country in Korean.

[iganinjaF]

No one would call the city they live in by a common noun like "country." Did the immigrants from Europe call any of their settlements in America "Country"? No, that's ridiculous. Immigrants would name their settlements after their home towns or home lands.

The official Nara City website used to tell that "Nara" is derived from its terrain with flat land profile with some gently sloping hills. Another site says that the name is derived from Mount Nara (那羅山) where some ancient emperors were entombed.

I noticed the description of the origin of "Nara" has been pulled down from the Nara City website. It is most likely that the City yielded to violent pressures from the Koreans who schemed to forge a story that Nara was one of their ancient settlements.

In reality, however, Korean immigrants to Japan would be driven away to eastern provinces where they engaged in land development. Some of their ancient settlements are found there today by names such as 高麗 and 新座 (former 新羅) in Saitama prefecture located just north to Tokyo. These are the veritable names of their home lands.

The Koreans' claim that "Nara" is derived from the Korean word meaning "country" is now deemed as bull$hit by the Japanese public.

You're retarded. Don't eat dogs.

This post has been edited by iganinjaF: Sep 29 2012, 10:50 PM