Mt. Otowa Kiyomizu-dera Temple | Review by Holly

The main reason I visited Okayama Castle this time was to attend a local sake event held inside the castle at night. You can take the streetcar to Shiroshita Station and then walk about 10 minutes to Okayama Castle. However, if you come at night, the route from Shiroshita Station to the castle isn’t particularly well lit. I found this stretch of the walk a little scary, and the lighting only noticeably increased after I actually entered the Okayama Castle and Ujo Park area. If you’re visiting at night, I recommend having your phone’s flashlight ready so you can at least feel safer while walking.
The castle tower you see at Okayama Castle today is a reconstruction. The original tower was destroyed in the 1945 air raid on Okayama and wasn’t rebuilt until 1966. Once inside, I felt it was more like a history museum themed around Okayama Castle. In addition to historical exhibits, there are also plenty of interactive activities and experiences, such as trying on samurai and princess costumes and riding in an Edo-period palanquin.
If you collect stamps from Japan’s 100 Famous Castles, you can get the Okayama Castle stamp here as well. The stamp is currently located near the reception area on the first basement floor. However, since it’s inside the paid area, you still need to purchase admission to use it. If you have the Okayama Enjoy Pass, you can use it here to redeem a package that includes admission to the Okayama Castle tower and a seasonal fruit parfait at Ujo Cafe.
However, rather than the castle tower itself, I found the truly interesting parts of Okayama Castle to be the remaining stone walls and castle ruins around it. The honmaru still has stone walls from different periods. You can see traces of the castle construction from the time of Ukita Hideie, sections left from later expansions by the Ikeda clan, and even excavated stone walls and markings left by stonemasons. Looking closely at the stone walls actually gives you a stronger sense of how Okayama Castle changed under different lords and through different eras. Compared with the reconstructed castle tower, I personally felt that these unassuming stone walls and ruins were more distinctive of Okayama Castle.

After entering Oharai-machi, turn right and you'll see it. The Akafuku Main Store is actually very easy to find. This is Akafuku's flagship location, and the timing of my visit was pretty good, so the line wasn't too outrageous. However, if it's very crowded and you're not set on eating at the main store, I don't think you need to spend all your time waiting here. There are other Akafuku shops nearby to choose from.
As for the Akafuku Mochi itself, I think its strongest point is actually the red bean paste. If the bean paste is strained too finely, it's easy to lose the aroma of the beans along with it. But if you try to preserve that aroma, it's difficult to make the paste this smooth. Akafuku balances the two very well. The texture is extremely delicate, but it doesn't just taste sweet—you can still taste the aroma of the azuki beans themselves. This seemingly simple wagashi actually requires a great deal of skill in handling red beans, and I think Akafuku is truly impressive in that regard.
What surprised me most was that it wasn't as sweet as I'd imagined. It's still sweet, but when paired with the hot tea provided, the sweetness is softened and everything comes back into balance. I really admire how Akafuku gets the level of sweetness just right.
When I visited, they also happened to have the seasonal summer Akafuku Mizu-Yokan. Akafuku Mizu-Yokan is made with azuki beans from Hokkaido and prepared as a whole slab poured into a single box, and it has very good reviews. I really wanted to buy it, but it's a frozen product that has to be kept cold. The problem was that I visited in August and still had a full itinerary after making the purchase, eventually heading all the way to Osaka. A frozen product was simply not practical to buy. If it had come in a smaller box, I could have found a place to sit after walking around Okage Yokocho and finished it right there. But it was a large 320g box, and no matter how much I can handle sweets, there was no way I could finish it all at once. In the end, I had to tearfully give up on it.

Kyoto has both an eastern and western Honganji Temple, but originally there was only one Honganji Temple. After Kennyo Shonin passed away, his eldest son Kyonyo succeeded him as head of Honganji, but Toyotomi Hideyoshi later ordered him to retire, and the position passed to his third son, Junnyo. This became the foundation for the lineage that would later develop into Nishi Honganji. Later still, Tokugawa Ieyasu granted Kyonyo land around Karasuma Rokujo and Shichijo in Kyoto, where Kyonyo reestablished Honganji, resulting in the present-day Higashi and Nishi Honganji temples.
Higashi Honganji is closer to Kyoto Station than Nishi Honganji. It is about a 7-minute walk from JR Kyoto Station, so if you happen to be nearby, I highly recommend stopping by. The first time I entered Higashi Honganji, I was genuinely taken aback because the grounds were far larger than I had expected. The Founder’s Hall in particular is one of the largest wooden structures in the world, and its interior contains 927 tatami mats. Compared with the other temples I had visited over the past few days, the ones I had previously thought were huge suddenly seemed like nothing.
And Higashi Honganji is not just “big.” If you look closely at the buildings, you will find many interesting details. Although the main buildings you see today have been reconstructed, the architecture still has plenty of details worth taking the time to examine. On this visit, for example, I saw quite a few wooden carvings featuring animals. The rabbit in the photo is one of them, and deer, dragons, lions, and other animals can be found elsewhere on the grounds. When visiting a large temple like this, it is easy to miss these small details if you only keep staring at the main hall. Instead, slowly looking up and down will reveal quite a few interesting things.
Also, it happened to be raining when I visited, and there seemed to be some kind of temple event going on. I saw the temple staff taking out a huge number of umbrellas to organize and dry them. From a distance, the sight of so many open umbrellas was actually quite impressive. This is not something an ordinary tourist would particularly expect to see, but it ended up becoming one of my strongest memories of Higashi Honganji.
I also never expected such a solemn temple to have its own mascot. On this visit, I saw a standee of “Ran’on-kun” on the grounds. It is a lion wearing Buddhist robes and holding prayer beads, which felt like quite a contrast at first glance. I later looked it up and found that it is an official character created for events related to the 750th memorial anniversary of Shinran Shonin in 2011. It made me feel that Japanese Buddhism is really quite modern.
And honestly, I personally think Higashi Honganji is quite luxurious. It feels very different from the style of Buddhist temples I commonly see in Taiwan, especially because the halls are decorated with many gold elements, making the overall appearance quite ornate. I even felt that it had the same kind of glittering golden visual effect as Nijo Castle,