Mount Takao - November 11, 2019

With Dash sedated on his anti-anxiety meds to keep him from hurting himself, David and I met some of his co-workers to hike Mount Takao today. The mountain is home to a monkey park, Buddha's ashes, and the Yakuoin Temple among other things. There are multiple ways up including hiking trails, a cable car, and a chair lift. We chose to go up hiking trail number 1. To say it was steep to start with is putting in mildly. My legs were burning! Once we reached the level where the cable car drops people off it leveled out a little. There were lots of interesting statues to look at along the way. Here are a few of my favorites:

Our first big stop was the Monkey Park. We hung out watching the Japanese macaques for a long time. The baby monkeys were so entertainingly spastic! They were flinging themselves all over the place. The swing was obviously a favorite toy.

Next stop, the stupa to pay our respects to Buddha. The stupa houses Gautama Buddha's bones.

On to the main attraction, the temple. To enter the temple area you walk through the impressive Shitenno-mon Gate.

In the courtyard (Daishi-do) there are 88 different Buddha statues. The Yakuoin temple is dedicated to the Shinto-Buddhist mountain gods, Izuna Daigongen and his retainers (the tengu).

Karasu Tengu

Hanadaka Tengu

As we made our way to the temple we had the opportunity to peak into an area designated for the priests only.

We arrived at the main hall of the Yakuoin Temple and were greeted with the smell of incense. Yakuoin was established in 744CE and the god Izuna Daigogen is enshrined here.

As we worked our way through the temple grounds we stopped to view the Izuna-gongendo-Hall.

After leaving the temple grounds we reached the summit of Mount Takao. This was our view:

Had it been a less cloudy day we could've seen this:

So I had to 'make do' with fall leaf and mossy tree shots like this:

It had started to drizzle by the time we headed back down the mountain so we decided to take the incline train down.

It would be nice to explore the other hiking trails around Mount Takao in the future...