Spent most of today in the small town of Yamazaki; a 10 minute train ride outside of Kyoto. A lovely little town with everything you would need - a bakery, hotel, cafe, noodle bar, medical facilities, schools, transport links, garden centre, supermarket, shoe shop, haberdashery, police station, nice houses, communist era-looking blocks of flats, wedding planner, religious sites... And a whisky distillery!
Anyone who knows me knows I enjoy a fine single malt scotch. But I also discovered a few years back that the Japanese make a fine whisky as well (obviously, it can't be called Scotch, but it is the same style). The first one that I ever sampled was the Yamazaki 18 year old. Part of the Suntory group, the Yamazaki distillery was the first to start producing Japanese whisky. Despite starting off a bit dodgy (screw cap, strong aroma of furniture varnish) I have to say it is one of the best whiskies I've had. I've since had their 10 and 12 year old expressions (and have a bottle of one of them at home) and also an SMWS (Scotch Malt Whisky Society) bottling.
The visitor experience consists of 2 parts. There is a small museum and "whisky library" which you can wander around at any time. The museum gives some of the background into the distillery and displays various artefacts from their history. The whisky library is a number of shelves with small sample bottles of various different casks and, I assume, bottlings. (Sadly, you can't drink from them!) There is also a small bar where you can purchase various whiskies, including a number of overseas ones, and the obligatory souvenir shop (albeit a very expensive one - a bottle of the 10 year old expression was best part of £70 instead of the ~£25 it costs in the UK).
The 2nd part is the tour of the distillery (run every hour, on the hour). This is quoted as lasting around an hour, but the actual tour only lasts around 30 minutes, but is followed by some sampling of a couple of the whiskies. For obvious reasons, the tour is delivered in Japanese, but they have handheld audio guides available in English (and I think French and Chinese) with numbers as you stop at various points so you can get the information. There were a couple of points when the tour started to move on before the commentary had finished, but otherwise it seemed to work well. The one thing I did notice from watching the tour was that didn't seem very interactive - it just seemed to be the tour guide talking. I'm not sure if this is just the way these things go in Japan, or perhaps the group I was with just didn't want to ask any questions. The audio guide also doesn't help during the tastings when the guide just talks away and you have no idea what she's on about (unless you speak Japanese, of course).
The whiskies sampled were the Hakushu (a peated whisky also produced by Suntory nearer Tokyo) with no age statement and the 10 (I think, and for some unfathomable reason spoiled by being offered as a high-ball (on the rocks with soda water)) and 12 year old Yamazakis (the 10 y/o may have been the Yamazaki with no age statement). I also had a try of the sherry cask whisky which I think is used in the 12 year old Yamazaki (they don't actually sell a "finished" whisky range like, say, Glenmorangie, but they have the standard expressions are made up of various casks to create the final product).
Best part of the distillery is everything is free, apart from the shop and whisky from the tasting bar!
After getting the train back to Kyoto and eventually working my way out of the station (mainline stations in Japan are like towns in their own right) I couldn't help but notice the 120m+ tall Kyoto Tower (it's right opposite the station, and tall!) At the base is a 9-storey building housing a hotel and department store (actually more like a 1970s department store, or even a 1970s market). But from the 11th floor (I didn't bother trying to work out the numbering) there is a second lift that takes you up to the viewing level 100m up. As it was getting late I managed to get some daylight shots of Kyoto, and also some of the sunset over the hills to the West, and night time shots. Kyoto seems to be situated in something of a bowl, surrounded on 3 sides by hills and something else on the 4th (possibly a body of water). The city seems to have quite nicely spread out to occupy all of the flat land in the middle, including some little "arms" that fill in some od the valleys. You don't see it so much from the tower, but there are maps giving a kind of isometric view of the city that show it quite clearly. The tower is probably one of the better ones I've been up for photography (lighting is fairly consistent all around so not too much reflection) and it wasn't too busy. It's also one of the cheaper ones I've found (about £7 per person, although still not as cheap as the (free) ones at the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building).
So tomorrow will be exploring a bit more of Kyoto, and hopefully a couple of temples. I've had a couple recommended to me by an American I was talking to on the Thomas the Tank Engine train (see Day 5). As an aside, she thought I was from Australia... This is something Americans always seem to accuse me of being for some strange reason!