Nara period field trip

Sunday was a fieldtrip for my archaeology class, which is currently my favourite of all the courses that I’m taking. Unfortunately, this was an all-day field trip, during which it poured rain unceasingly. The trip was to see two different palace sites from before Kyoto became the capital of Japan, when Nara was the capital instead. We’re talking 710- 784 AD. Well, the thing about ancient capitals is that there doesn’t tend to be a lot left of them, and this was no exception. The Heijo Palace complex in Nara was huge, and they’ve actually discovered where most of it is, but what I actually found myself looking at, was a bunch of holes in the dirt. You see, the first site that we went to see was where they had built a visitor’s centre around the archaeological site itself, which consisted of the remains of where the support beams had been placed when the original palace structure was built. Some of the other ways of showing what had been discovered included covering the area with dirt and then marking at ground-level where the posts had been (with different colours of cement or bushes) or even fully re-constructing based on archaeological findings. This last option was very interesting, though expensive enough that it is not widely exercised, though we did walk through a lovely reconstruction of a Nara period garden. At Nara period garden parties (among the nobility, of course) people would sit along side a little brook and write poems in Chinese that they would then recite to their friends. To reward people for good poems, a little raft with a cup of sake labelled with the poet’s name would be floated down the brook. The funny thing is, though this brook had been added to the reconstructed garden (and is reinforced by written records from the time), the actual site that the reconstruction is of has no evidence of any sort of stream at all. After this was a little museum, which would have been more interesting had I not been hungry and cold. Next we hopped a train to Osaka, where we saw the site of a palace from the same era (Naniwa Palace, if you’re wondering) represented in the coloured-concrete method, and then hurried into the museum that stood pretty much on top of it. The museum was actually one of the most interesting ones that I’ve seen, including a scale replica of a small portion of one of the buildings at Naniwa and several mannequins dressed in Nara court dress. There were other artefacts on that floor, and the floors below moved forward through Osaka history up to the pre-war period. After this we all headed back to Kyoto, and I was back in time for dinner.
-Rubber boots may not be fashionable, but I was extremely happy to have them for an entire day of walking in the rain.
-They used to use wood as toilet paper in the Nara period. It doesn’t seem worth it.
-As interesting and well done as the museum in Osaka was, according to my host family it hasn’t received as many visitors as they had been hoping, and the new governor of Osaka has talked about closing it down. I really hope that they don’t, but then I neither vote nor pay taxes.