Koya-San

Michael To conclude our trip, we took the Shinkansen and several local trains to Koya-san to visit the monastery. This is a very popular spiritual destination for Japanese people and is hardly known among foreign tourists. You travel about 200 kilometers south of Kyoto, spending roughly a day on slow trains to the middle of nowhere, and then take a cable car for the last five minutes to steeply ascend the sacred mountain.

For a fee, which is paid not at the monastery but at an office at the train station, you get a room, dinner (even with sake or beer), and breakfast. However, you will be woken up at 6 a.m. for the Buddhist ceremony of the monks, and it is expected that you attend.

In the room, we had a so-called Kotatsu, a traditional Japanese invention: a low table with an electric heater attached underneath its tabletop and a thick down blanket that extends from the tabletop to the floor. You can generate heat under the table with the heater, and the blanket keeps the warmth in. You sit on a cushion on the floor, stretch your feet underneath, and can read, work, or even sleep. It's so cozy and practical that I've seriously considered getting something like this for our apartment in San Francisco.

We promptly appeared at the ceremony at 6 o'clock in the morning, sat in the lotus position almost the entire time, and listened to the monks' chanting -- an experience of sitting half-asleep in a cold temple and following the monks' mantras, even though we didn't understand any of it. After 40 minutes, we had truly earned our breakfast. By the way, the monks were vegetarians, so at noon we eagerly devoured a tonkatsu, the surprisingly similar form of the Japanese Wiener Schnitzel, at a nearby restaurant.