Melting into the Sun at Nijo-jo Castle

On one of the hottest, muggiest days of the summer so far, Skylar and I decided to put on our matching "grandma sun hats," stockpile the C.C. Lemon soda and iced green tea bottles, and bicycle from Doshisha University to the famous Nijo-jo Castle. The castle is one of the most popular tourist destinations for everyone who has ever traveled through Kyoto--right up there with Kinkakuji (the "Golden Pavillon") and Kiyomizu-dera Temple.

The trick to biking in the hot summer sun here--where there is simply no breeze whatsoever to cool you down--is to keep on moving. The faster you pedal, the cooler you feel. That is, until you stop, and then you melt from head to toe with heat exhaustion.

Nijo-jo Castle was built in 1603, when the shogun Ieyasu Tokugawa moved into its palatial quarters as his home sweet home. It is stunning as a piece of well fortified architecture--a double moat--with both an "inny" and and "outy" as Skylar points out. The castle is perhaps best known for its "uguisu bari"--or creaking floorboards that are engineered to sound like a bunch of singing nightingales should any assassin sneak into the castle on a secret mission to take down the warlord. Everyone who visits Nijo-jo loves walking on these squeaky wooden floorboards and seeing the "secret" compartments where the shogun's personal bodyguards would hide out ready to attack at a moment's notice.

When I told Skylar this story, he said it was the dumbest thing he ever heard of. He said he thought it was a total waste of a ninja to send one inside the castle on an assassination "hit." If it had been up to him, he would have sent a pack of ninjas across the moat by the main entrance to create a diversion. Then, he would have simply shot some flaming arrows directly into the highly combustible rice paper shoji screens in the castle's windows and burned the whole place to the ground.

I used to think that my 10 year old son might be the reincarnated soul of some wise old Buddist monk from Enrakuji Temple on Mt. Hiei. After eight weeks in Japan, I'm beginning to think he might instead be the reincarnated soul of one of Oda Nobunaga's craftiest tactical warriors--one of those guys who made mincemeat out of places like Enrakuji. When it comes to envisioning some of the dirtiest tactics for how warfare in old Kyoto might have been improved, Skylar rules.