Post by washi on Apr 17, 2015 13:29:48 GMT
A Remembrance of the 1300th Anniversary
In the year 710 the Empress Genmei ordered that her capital city be move some 20 kilometers north from the site of Japan's first capital city. The new city was called Heijō Kyō. The capital (with a brief interlude mid-century) remained there until 784, when it was again relocated. Much of the city, now called Nara, remained at this location, and has been continuously inhabited since that time. The time it was the capital is called the Nara Period. This period is one of the brightest in all of Japanese history, with spectacular architecture, technological , literary, and artistic achievement, and international prominence. The people of Nara celebrated the 1300th anniversary of that event, and invited the rest of the nation and the world to join them.
This post was originally made in the Travel Information forum. It was made in 2010 and was intended to provide information of interest to English speaking visitors. The event was celebrated all over the city and the prefecture, but the focus of the celebration was the site of the Greater Palace (called in Japanese Heijō Kyū or Heijō no Miya), now a National Historical Park. This area was the seat of government at the time, the location of all the offices and agencies of a fairly complex and sophisticated system. It was also the home of the emperor, the heir apparent and their households.
For the anniversary year only, many temporary facilities were erected there to accommodate visitors, and many special services for them were established. These are placemarked with purple stars. The permanent attractions (two of which were new that year) are placemarked with red stars, and are "on loan" from my post Overlays of Japan's Eighth Century Capitals. Gold star placemarks are on a few of the Nara attractions that offer something special in connection to the celebration (click on the gold star lower right on the map for links). Admission to most attractions was free of change. Of those which charged modest entry fees (like the new Heijō Kyō History Museum), entry was (and still is) free to bearers of foreign passports.
Nara (both the city and prefecture) is my favorite place in Japan. I'm a country boy, and Tokyo is just too crowded, too busy, too glitzy, and too lacking in places of historical resonance for my taste. Kyoto is chuck-a-block with both beauty and history, and I never regret spending time there. But Nara. Ah, Nara. It really is the birthplace of the Japanese nation. I can ride a bicycle through the not very crowded streets and pretty much always know where I am. I can walk along the route of roads older than anyone can guess, and stop from time to time to smell the newly turned soil, or buy produce by dropping a few coins into a box and helping myself to a handful of whatever is in season, or try to read a poem written on a sign about that place that was first brushed at the dawn of Japanese literature.
I removed a link to this post from the GEC Layer after the last anniversary event in 2010. The post was accessible only through my Links file, a mention in Sightseer, or an Internet search. In spite of this, between the time of its "removal" and the time the GEC self-destructed in early 2012, the file enjoyed somewhere between 300 and 400 downloads. When it became necessary for me to revise all of my posted kmz files, I seriously considered just deleting this one. The fact that about one quarter of the downloads occurred after the post had become irrelevant gave me pause to reconsider. I can't understand why interest should continue, but since it has, I have taken a few days to revise this material.
None of the new and temporary facilities appeared on the Google Earth default imagery, which is dated 2/21/2005. That imagery is still the default, but the "historical imagery" of 4/7/2014 shows the historical park pretty much as it is today. Double-clicking on the network link file which downloads the presentation will set the historical imagery to 6/4/2010, which is 2 days before my second visit to take pictures and research information for this post, and 7 days after my third. If you disable the overlay map, you will see the placemarks near their correct locations. Revising this file would have taken considerable time, which I do not have if I to get most of changes made before the old GEC data base is locked. The placemark called "Introduction" contains the introduction to the 2012 revision.
I must emphasize that the services and attractions that are listed in the "2010 Special Services & Events" folder no longer exist.
Download File
