Nagano is a city of about 400,00 people. It sits up in the mountains in a big valley – the trains run through orchards of apples and grapes. The Winter Olympics of 1998 were held in Nagano. The parts of the city we visited were well signed in English – a legacy of their Olympics?
We stayed at the Dormy Inn right near the train station, which was super convenient. Trains and busses handy by, lots of shopping and restaurant options. The Dormy Inn is a national chain – a step above the basic salaryman hotel. Maybe more where the middle management might stay! Morning buffet breakfast. From 9:30 pm til 11:30 there are free servings of ramen in the restaurant. People tend to show up post bath, in their hotel issued pjs for a bed snack. There is a public bath on the roof, with both indoor and outdoor baths. And the rooms are a little bigger than the most basic hotels. We’ve always been happy with them and this was no different.
Not only is there a 7-11 right next door, next to the 7-11 there was a little microbrewery. Bonus. We rely a lot on Google and Google maps to find our way around while in Japan, and it works pretty well. The major issue is usually getting it to figure out where we are. We had a major fail in Nagano. We were looking for a gyoza restaurant. Google seemed to think we were one street over from our hotel which led us on a big circular goose chase through the entertainment district only to wind up – next door to our hotel. On the left side, as opposed to the brewery on the right side. Grr. Had to have two beers to get over that one.
Nagano actually started out as a service town to the temple of Zenko -ji, which has been hosting pilgrims for 1400 years. The temple holds a sacred statue that is too sacred to be seen, and so has been hidden away for a millennia or more. A replica is brought out for veneration.
The grounds have many buildings, and many of them are big!
The approach to the temple is a shopping street – the scale of the street tells you that it can be crazy busy at times. On this day it was early but unseasonably hot – 30C by mid morning. We were ahead of the crowds, thankfully.
The main building – the Hondo is also very big!
No pictures inside, but I can attest that it is a vast space filled with golden lanterns and pilgrims coming to pray.
One of the interesting things about these places is the little quirky stories that are represented amongst the big historical buildings.
Like this little statue:
The story was that a raccoon dog wanted to come to the temple to pray, and to dedicate a stone lantern to the Buddha. The raccoon disguised itself as a human (as they do) and came to Zenko-ji. It went for a bath, and was so relaxed that it let slip its human disguise and ran away in embarrassment. A monk saw what had happened and dedicated the lantern for the embarrassed raccoon, and this statue shows the raccoon with its rosary.
The other story is about this cow:
The story is that there was an old woman who never went to Zenko-ji to worship. One day a cow wandered by as she was doing her laundry in the stream. A gust of wind blew her favourite piece of red fabric into the horns of the cow, which then ran away. The old woman ran after the cow all the way to the temple, where it dropped the red scarf – and disappeared. The old woman realized that the cow had been the Buddha, leading her to pray and she became devout. The statue lives in a little building with benches where people can rest out of the weather. In this case – the heat. But they get winter up here in the mountains!
By the time we left the temple the tour groups were streaming up the street. We stopped for gelato – including grated apple flavour made from the local apples, before heading back to our hotel to escape the heat.
That evening the local news basically led with ‘WTF it was sure hot today!’, and as we were watching the thunder began and the skies opened with a big whoosh of rain.
That broke the hot spell and made our next excursion a little more comfortable..
Where I'm At 