Cherry Blossom Season at Mt. Shosha!

I decided that, since I've figured my camera out a bit, that I should properly try to take photos of all of the Buddha statues lining one of the main trails on Mt. Shosha. All but two of them ended up having their portraits come out nicely, so I'll just have an excuse to do this again sometime!

There weren't as many cherry trees at the top of the mountain as other parts of Himeji, but the ones that were in bloom stood out the more because of this. I have yet to be tired of looking at these beautiful blossoms! It's a shame they last only a couple of weeks, but I suppose that forces us to admire them more closely during their brief blooming time.

While visiting the main three-temple complex from The Last Samurai film, I came upon a (secret) film set for a Japanese period movie. There were so many actors and actresses in traditional clothing! They looked amazing! I wasn't able to fully understand all of the information about the movie, but here were the facts I did get:

It's a movie, not a serial drama.
It's not by NHK (the equivalent of the BBC of Japan), but by some broadcasting group that sounds like "shikoku." (I, unfortunately, cannot remember it fully).
It has a really long title that I cannot remember; it went in one ear, and out the other.
It features some of the same actors from The Last Samurai. (Japanese ones, I imagine. I didn't see Tom Cruise anywhere!)
They don't like tourists with cameras. I got shooed away pretty quickly, even after I asked if it was okay if I took a few photos of their set...

The only shot I was able to get of their set. The actors were standing (or kneeling) on both main temples' terraces.

During the lunch break, they opened things up temporarily for all of us tourists to be able to get a closer look at the temples--even if they did leave all of their equipment scattered about.

I hope to find out more about this movie at some point or another. It was definitely pretty cool to trip on a secret filming set (they tend to keep things secret, due to the sometimes-intense idol worship that can happen here). Some of the actors I saw were probably very famous here, but since I'm an ignorant gaijin I didn't recognize them.

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Daley-sensei's Adventures in Himeji, Japan.

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