Manga and a temple in the sky

On Saturday morning, Ciaran and I took a walk up Karamasu dori  to find the Kyoto International Manga Museum. The museum is housed in an old school building. Tatsuike Primary School was opened in 1869. It was a thriving school until the 1980s when people in Kyoto started to move out of the city into the suburbs. By the mid 1990s the school was down to 110 students and the decision was made to merge Tatsuike with a few other inner city schools.

I absolutely loved the story of the building and the way they have preserved the school by putting the manga museum into the old building. The walls of the classrooms are lined with thousands and thousands of volumes of manga dating back to the post WW2 period. All of the books are available to read. Young people come into the museum, grab a book and sit around reading for hours. Some of the rooms have been preserved as a memorial to the primary school. I loved seeing pictures of the students over a hundred years and the pictures of every principal the school has every had. The principal's office has perfectly preserved. It gives you a really strong sense of the school and the energy of hundreds of young Japanese children.

Ciaran, of course, was more interested in the manga. He was in heaven finding books he has only read about on the Internet. The funniest bit was when he found the huge phoenix statue suspended from the ceiling. He dropped to his knees to honour it. He had to explain to me that the phoenix is the main character and symbol of the 'father of manga', Tezuka Osamu.

In the afternoon, Ian, Ronan, Clare and I crossed the Kamo River and headed into the Higashiyama district of Kyoto. Almost accidentally, we found ourselves heading up the steep, paved street towards Kiyomizudera. This is one of the best known temples in Japan. At the top of the hill, it is 13 metres above the ground. Clare called it the temple in the sky. The walk to the temple is part of the appeal because the streets are lined with beautiful quaint shops and the whole area feels like old Japan.

After the kilometres and kilometres we had walked, we decided we didn't want to cook. This was where my day fell apart. While Ian and Ronan got really nice take away pizzas, Clare, Ciaran and I ate chips! That was the only gluten free take away food we could find. Being a coeliac in Japan sucks. A few glasses of wine helped to ease the pain :-)