As it is still relatively early we decide to do a short detour to Kamakura which is a former capital of Japan. On the way we stop at a rest area to refill and for the first time in our trip decide to try the automated ordering system – you press a button with an image of the food you want in a central ordering location, pay for it and then receive a ticket that you take to your food stand. It works just fine and the food is very good. At this point we are already used to eating with chopsticks – it seems so long ago when we had no idea how to use them and were afraid of starving:).
The drive into Kamakura is slow after leaving the main highway and driving on surface streets that become more and more congested as we approach Kamakura. It seems that Kamakura is a major destination which makes sense from a tourist point of view as it is one of the old capitals of Japan between Nara and Kyoto and as such has a lot of remnants of that period especially temples and shrines. After a lot of stop and go traffic we finally arrive and find a parking place close to the main attractions and walk to one of the main shrines of Kamakura, Tsurugaoka Hachiman-gu.
It was built by Minamoto Yoritomo who established Kamakura as the political center of the country for over 100 years and is dedicated to Hachiman the Shinto god of war. It is nicely landscaped with a torii at the entrance leading to the the pictoresque Genpei-ike ponds.
The main shrine is on top of the hill so we have to walk up while stopping a few times to catch our breath. It is a very popular shrine with lots of tourists wandering around it as you cannot enter it.
We also walk around it and take a look at the detail on the building and also its surroundings including the usual paper streamers and lanterns.
There are quite a few lanterns in fact, they need a small truck to move them around. And also lots of protectors still using arrows as far as we can tell. And then we move on towards another temple nearby, Kencho-ji, that we hope we can still enter as it is getting late in the day.
