Photos: Tosho-gu Shrine, Nikko, Japan

Inspired by some recent posts on Steemit (Japan Photo Blog by kafkanarchy84, My Ryokan Experience by shinge3 etc.), I've decided to start posting some of my Japan-related photos. Most of these are already on my Flickr account (https://www.flickr.com/photos/nicholas_sikorski/) but I reckon that as Flickr now belongs to Yahoo, I'd be much better off sharing them here.

Anyway, I took these photos whilst on a weekend trip with my wife to Nikko 日光, in the mountains of Tochigi 栃木 Prefecture. Nikko is famous as the resting-place of Tokugawa Ieyasu 徳川家康, founder of the Edo shogunate: his family built an ornate shrine - the Tosho-gu 東照宮 - in the first half of the 1600s in which to enshrine him as a shinto deity. The over-the-top style of architecture that was used is very distinctive, setting it very much apart from the far more subdued imperial buildings of roughly the same time. In much the same way as Versailles in France, many find it a little vulgar and overly ostentatious, but whatever you think of the buildings themselves, the surroundings are very pleasant: vast expanses of pine woodland covering mountains stretching away into the mist.

Hope you like the photos: let me know what you think!