We slept in alllll the way til 4am today. Wow. Amazing. At this rate, I’ll be back on track in three more days! Surely this will give me powers to beat the crowds at Fushimi Inari Taisha.

SURELY IT WILL.

Even at just barely after 7am, there were somehow a lot of people arriving at Fushimi Inari Taisha. Are these also jetlagged Americans who are up way earlier than they should be? No. No they are not. They are people who got up because Instagram told them to do it to avoid the crowds, ironically forming a crowd themselves.

Anyway, morning people are weirdos. The only reason I am up early is because my body is very confused. I will almost never wake up early to sightsee anything, even if influencers tell me to.

Fushimi Inari is the head of the Inari shrines – there are hundreds nationwide. It sprawls over a mountain and guests can walk under thousands of gates as they go up the mountain to the shrine at the top. It has a nice history in English on its website or you can read my lazy one below.

The tl;dr version is that in 711, the Inari deity took up residence at the peak of the mountain, the shrine was eventually designated as one of Japan’s highest ranking shrines, it became a national treasure in the early 1900s, and now tourists flock to it and its legion of foxes.

Related to Fushimi Inari (I swear), Rhett wanted to see a bamboo forest, but he dislikes very crowded places (already he dislikes this shrine). I put my google powers to work and found that Fushimi Inari has a secret bamboo grove. We are definitely skipping Arashiyama in favor of the one that’s at this shrine. Arashiyama is pretty, but it was crowded in 2018 and it will surely be ultra crowded now because even though the cherry blossoms are taking their time, the tourists are here.

We streamed into the shrine’s main gates with the other visitors, driven forward by the promise of groves that were secret. Lo and behold, we found our grove – past the main shrine buildings and somewhat hidden bathrooms into an area that definitely looks private but isn’t. There are no signs at all (hence the secret??) but some torii beckon you forward.

You can walk through a bamboo-lined path and into a ravine with a creek and a mossy and forgotten-looking sub-shrine. Because I’m a boring adult, all I can think of is how expensive these heavy stone gates must have been and how they’re all just back here collecting spirits and moss.

It was super peaceful and there were only two other people (foreigners) wandering around – we saw them once. It’s hard to believe that there’s a horde of tourists just on the other side of the hill! You could hear birdsong and there were signs that some animal was digging around the path.

But we are also here to climb this mountain, pass beneath thousands and thousands of torii, and see the shrines. This is why I have been doing the stair master for weeks at the gym – I will not be defeated by the mountain!

And I wasn’t! It was harder than I thought since I’m currently the beast of burden, carrying the backpack up the mountain. The hordes definitely thinned out after the first city viewpoint. We were free to wind up and down the mountain steps in pursuit of the fox shrines and a workout. At one point, a fireman JOGGING UP THE MOUNTAIN passed us. I felt weak and pitiful.

And bonus: on the reverse side of the mountain, I found a lady who sells postcards with art that has her cat on them. Said cat was wandering around. I got to touch it one time.

We got our fill of people, foxes, stairs, and gates, and decided we were going to head out to often-missed Uji. Uji is Japan’s matcha heart and everything here is matcha-themed.

And now let me tell you about food tourism in Japan. One of the key tenets in Japanese domestic tourism is reserved for leaning hard into both seasonality of food and celebrating a food’s tie to a place or an event. Cities will have their special way of making noodles or sushi, seasons have their flavors, and tourist attractions usually have foods shaped like the thing or related to the thing.

Like if you have ever seen Mob Psycho 100? People turn the giant broccoli in season 3 into a tourist destination, and you can go and eat green food or food shaped like the giant broccoli when you go to see it.

And if you don’t know much about Japan, you are like “what the f?” over this or are at the very least, slightly charmed or puzzled. And if you are Japanese, you are laughing because this is the epitome of Japanese domestic touristing, and this is the entire joke.

So now that you know that, you have extra appreciation for the fact that Uji’s Thing is matcha. We went to a highly-rated cafe just a few steps off the main drag – Matcha Roastery. Every menu item used matcha in some way. My salad had a slightly spicy matcha dressing, as did Rhett’s. My latte was phenomenal. We had the cafe next to the inner garden to ourselves for most of the time.

Matcha is not served sweetly here – I find matcha things generally ultra-cloying in the US. Matcha-flavored things in Japan taste primarily like matcha and just have a hint of sweet with them, if at all. It’s heavenly.

After a very leisurely lunch, we visited Byodo-in. The last time I was here was 2008 and they’ve since added a really nice museum that shows off some of the carved bodhisattvas from the restoration of the shrine. Byodo-in was built in 1016 and is on the back of the ten yen coin. You can wander its lovely curated grounds and behold the beautiful reflecting pond out front where one can presumably reflect on if you want to go into the main hall or not.

The main hall is also called the phoenix hall and it has golden phoenixes perched atop it. Rhett was not feeling the shoe removal today so we skipped it, but the museum had pictures of the buddha inside, so it was still in our hearts.

We did a quick circle across the Uji river to Uji Temple, which featured little bunnies that Rhett thought looked like the Monty Python bunny. He wasn’t wrong.

We capped off our Uji day with some delightful matcha ice cream outside of the Keihan Uji station.

I love when I find public transit spaces that are some retro futurist brutalism mashup. Keihan Uji station is worth the 10 minute walk from the JR station. It looks like it’s straight out of Star Wars. It was designed by Hiroyuki Wakabayashi who also happened to design my favorite building of all time in Shibuya. It’s fate I found this station on instagram I guess.

At home, I finally thought to turn on the TV and pick up news, and there’s a big segment on how cold this spring has been – it’s been driving up spring veggie prices since crops aren’t ready yet.

And it’s delaying the cherry trees. Oh.

We finished our day off with some stellar French food (yes, I really am in Japan, and no, I can’t explain the French food either) from a hole in the wall restaurant just a few minutes from our hotel.