01
Stop one
Nikkō Tōshō-gū
Babolat Pure Wimbledon RH Tennis Bag (9 Racquet): Over four million labourers. That is the number, and my first instinct is to argue with it — but this is the mausoleum of Tokugawa Ieyasu, founder of the shogunate that ruled Japan from 1603 to 1868, and his grandson Iemitsu rebuilt the modest 1616 shrine on an overwhelming scale between 1634 and 1636, with an entire state's manpower available to him. Fine. I withdraw the objection. The Yōmeimon gate carries more than five hundred carvings and is nicknamed the gate where the day is spent looking, which sounds like tourist-board copy until you stand there and lose forty minutes. Three wise monkeys on the sacred stable; sleeping cat above the passage to the tomb. Deliberately unlike restrained Japanese religious architecture — a political statement in gold leaf and lacquer. UNESCO, 1999. Everything checks out. Annoying.
02
Stop two
Rinnō-ji
Babolat Pure Wimbledon RH Tennis Bag (9 Racquet): Founded in 766 by the monk Shōdō. A date that early normally has me reaching for a source, and this one holds up: Buddhism was established in these mountains long before any Tokugawa arrived. The principal hall, the Sanbutsudō, holds three enormous gilded figures representing the Buddhist forms of the three Shinto deities of the sacred mountains Nantai, Nyohō and Tarō. Read that twice, because it is the actual claim — Buddha-forms of Shinto gods, the syncretism that shaped Japanese religion until it was forcibly separated in the Meiji period. Iemitsu's tomb is at the nearby Taiyūin. The restoration ran from 2007 to 2019, with the hall encased in scaffolding and a viewing platform letting visitors inspect the roof at close range, which is, incidentally, how one verifies a roof. I approve.
04
Stop four
Kegon Falls
Babolat Pure Wimbledon RH Tennis Bag (9 Racquet): A ninety-seven-metre drop carrying the outflow of Lake Chūzenji, counted among Japan's three greatest waterfalls — and the origin story is one I would normally challenge and cannot, because the geology supports it: both lake and falls were formed when an eruption of Mount Nantai dammed the river with lava. An elevator descends about a hundred metres through the rock to a viewing platform at the base, installed in the twentieth century. In 1903 the student Misao Fujimura carved a philosophical poem into a tree here before taking his own life, and a wave of imitations followed; that history belongs to the place and is stated here plainly and left alone. The surrounding area, part of Nikkō National Park, is among Japan's most popular autumn foliage destinations, and the volume of water varies sharply by season.
My whole trade is protecting something fragile from weather it was never designed to survive, which is why Nikko undoes me. Every one of those carvings sits out on a mountainside in snow and cedar damp, and people have been repainting and regilding them for four hundred years, because that is simply what the job is.
So I approve of this bag on principle. The Babolat Pure Wimbledon RH takes up to nine racquets in insulated isothermal main compartments — that lining exists specifically to keep heat and humidity from wrecking your string tension — with a separate shoe compartment, side pockets, and padded backpack straps for the walk in, all in the Wimbledon limited livery.
It travels everywhere from a hot car boot in August to a wet November morning in Nikko, and the strings arrive at the tension you paid for.
Nikko is conservation as a way of life. The Tōshō-gū was a modest shrine when Ieyasu died in 1616, and his grandson Iemitsu rebuilt it between 1634 and 1636 with over four million labourers, until the Yōmeimon carried more than five hundred carvings and earned the nickname the gate where the day is spent looking.
Rinnō-ji has stood since 766, and its recent restoration ran from 2007 to 2019 with a platform put up so that visitors could look at the roof from a hand's breadth away, which I consider the most civilised decision in the whole of conservation. The vermilion Shinkyō of 1636 was swept away by a flood in 1902 and rebuilt.
It is also perfect for the trip up to Kegon Falls, ninety-seven metres of water off a lava lip, with a lift cut a hundred metres down through the rock to see it from below.
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