JAPAN 4: The Harvey Phillips letter continues, with the travelers heading toward Fuji.

“January first we left Tokyo on a clear and bright but very cold morning for Lake Hakone. All the way to Adawarn where we left the train to strike up into the mountains we had a marvelous view of Fujiyama, rising majestically above all else, and one can see it for almost a hundred miles in every direction on clear days.”

The group spent the night in a hotel on the mountain, and then headed to Numazu the next day. They walked around some before boarding a train back to Kyoto. Yoshio Osawa, a fellow Princeton student, took them around the city in his car. “There is no doubt about it — Kyoto is by far the finest city in Japan. The streets are wide and broad, it is the old capital of Japan, the Mecca of Buddhism, containing hundreds of temples and shrines as well as thirty Christian churches. The moving of the capitol to Tokyo was a crime — about like moving it from Washington to New York.

“We went into several of the largest Buddhist temples, removing our shoes and entering in stocking feet, or pulling a sort of large cloth covering over the shoes. A real Buddhist temple is a beautiful object — simple but impressive.

“One thing we had to learn was the difference between a temple and a shrine. The temple is always to Buddha and has no Torii, or wooden gates, before it. A shrine is always in memory of some great statesman or warrior and always had Torii. If you have seen the temples and shrines in Kyoto you have seen the best Japan has to offer.”

Still more to come.