Japan 2 - Takayama

Welcome to the second blog on our trip to Japan. We tried to sample many different "sides" of Japan. When we told Toru-san (John's business friend in Tokyo) that we were going to Takayama, he was amazed. He said that no one but Japanese people go there! And he was correct! We only saw one other Westerner while we were in the Takayama area.

But that's getting a little ahead of ourselves. Takayama is in the Japan Alps, not too far from Nagano where the Winter Olympics were held in 1998. We were able to take the bullet trains (the Shinkansen) on the way there. We could not take the fastest bullet train (see the picture below), due to the nature of the Japan Rail pass that we bought.

Takayama is a beautiful little city. Everyday there was a Morning Market where we stopped to buy our lunch for the day. They had the freshest strawberries that I have ever tasted. The aroma of the strawberries was almost as wonderful as the taste.

As we said earlier, we wanted to try to see as many different faces of Japan as we could. Annie found us a ryokan, which is a traditional Japanese inn that dates from the Edo period (1603-1868). No one there spoke English, which is not surprising judging by Toru-san's comment that no one but Japanese people go to Takayama. From the picture below you can see that we had a beautiful room, covered in tatami mats.

It was interesting getting to our room. In the entry way of the ryokan, you step inside onto a concrete floor that is "sunken" compared to the rest of the bottom floor of the inn. You take your street shoes off and put them in a cupboard. You put on some other slippers and walk up to your room. Once you get to the door of your room, you take off these slippers and put on some different slippers that are just inside the door of your room. You can wear these slippers everywhere in your room EXCEPT the bathroom. There's another pair of slippers outside the bathroom door that you put on to walk into the bathroom. The bathroom is divided into the bathing area and the toilet area. You guessed it - there's another pair of slippers to put on to go in the toilet area of the bathroom and NO WHERE ELSE! So guess who wanders out of the toilet area of the bathroom right into the room wearing the toilet slippers while our hostess was visiting? If you guessed "John" then you win!

Below is a picture of one of our meals with our hostess. We were served both breakfast and dinner in our room every night. Usually they gave us one relatively Western-style meal and one traditional Japanese meal for the two of us and we were able to sample each to see what we liked.

As you can see below, the meals were exquisite! Truly, the Japanese attend to the saying "First you eat with your eyes". Each meal was a work of art. Each meal consisted of little bits of many different things, ranging from various seaweeds, mountain vegetables, noodles, pickles, many types of tofu, some meats (try Hida beef if you ever get a chance!).

More Japanese food artistry.

We wandered around quite a bit in the area. We found an artist's studio with some great sculptures that we liked. We're not quite sure what the artist was trying to say with this piece, but he was pretty emphatic about it!

There was a sake brewery in town. You can tell these by the round ball hung over the entryway to the brewery. We drank quite a bit of sake all over Japan. We really enjoyed it.

We took a side trip to the Hida Folk Village near Takayama. It's a little bit like Sturbridge Village in Massachusetts. It's a place where they have tried to show how the Japanese people lived a couple of hundred years ago.

There was this great building where they dried the cocoons of the silkworms, to get ready to gather the silk.

The building was lashed together - no nails. It's not like they didn't have access to metals. The Japanese have long understood metals better than most Western countries. They just didn't use any metal nails when they built this building.

On another day trip, we went to Furakawa which was pretty close to Takayama. They had these wonderful little "streams" that went throughout the city which were full of koi. There were little dispenser around that you put a 50-yen piece in and got some food for the fish.

An "art shot" trying to capture the koi.

We hope you have enjoyed the photos of the Takayama area. We had a great time, even with the language difficulties. Thank God for our little Japanese phrasebook! Next we will go to the Nara and Kyoto area.

Take care!

Japan 1 - Tokyo

In keeping with the theme that this is a blog about global photos, we thought we should put up pictures from more places than just New Zealand and Oregon. So here are the pictures from a trip we took to Japan in 2004.

We may have mentioned in the New Zealand blogs that when we got married, we promised each other that for our 50th birthdays, we could go anywhere in the world we wanted to go (assuming we could afford it - that was a BIG assumption). Obviously for John's birthday, we went to New Zealand. For Annie, it was a little tougher choice. She always wanted to go to Scandinavia - Norway, Sweden, Denmark. But she also wanted to go to some place that would be completely different from Western countries. She ended up chosing Japan. Which worked out very well for John, as at the time, he was making many trips per year to China and Japan for business.

Annie flew in to meet John in Shanghai. We'll have another blog on Shanghai - for this series of blogs, we will stay focused on Japan. After a few days in Shanghai, John finished his business work and we flew to Tokyo for a two week vacation. The first person we met in Tokyo was a business friend of John's - Toru-san Koizumi. John and Toru-san met at a business conference a few years ago, and have kept in touch. Toru-san took us to a great part of Tokyo called Akihabara which we renamed "Man Town"!

Tokyo is an enormous city made up of hundreds of villages that have been swallowed up as Tokyo has sprawled out. Historically each of these villages specialized in a certain type of manufacture, or craftsmanship. There's a little village that just makes the plastic models that restaurants use in their windows to display what foods they serve. There's a village that specializes in knives and cutlery. Akihabara is known for electronics. If there is anything you want regarding electronics, it is here. Do you want a vacuum tube for a 1947 Philco television? It's here, and we saw it. If you want to build your own laptop from the ground up, all of the parts are here. You can start by building your own circuit board, and they have everything you need to do this! It was astounding!

While in Tokyo, we stayed at the Hilton in Shinjuku. We were not far from the Japan Rail (JR) station at Shinjuku, so we took JR everywhere we went in Japan. You can purchase a JR rail pass on the internet, just like you can buy a Brit Rail pass or a Eurail pass. It's the way to go.

One of the places we wanted to visit was Shibuya, just for the photo of the Hachiko-Shibuya intersection. On average, I think about 2000 people cross this intersection everytime the lights change.

It's called the Hachiko-Shibuya intersection because it is in Shibuya and it's near the statue of Hachiko (below). Hachiko was an Akita dog that belonged to a Professor Ueno at the University of Tokyo. Each morning the professor left the dog at his house and then met him at the nearby Shibuya train station. One evening in May 1925, Professor Ueno did not return on the train as he had a stroke at the University and died. Hachiko was given away but continued to escape, coming back to his old home. He figured out that the Professor wasn't at the home, so he went to the Shibuya train station - every day for 10 years! He became a national symbol of loyalty in Japan.

We had a few rainy days in Tokyo, but it was beautiful walking around at night. One of the really civilized things that all merchants and stores had was a rack of plastic umbrella bags. When you were walking into a store, there was a rack that had these long plastic bags that you slipped your umbrella in. Then it didn't drip all over the floor, making a mess and making it slippery for other people. Extremely practical!

Yodobashi is a GREAT store - it has everything. We were looking to replace some of our Japanese movies that we have in VHS with some DVDs. Movies like "Tampopo", "The Taxing Woman", "The Funeral", "Minbo - The Gentle Art of Japanese Persuasion", and our favorite "Shall We Dansu?" The first 4 movies are by Juzo Itami, considered one of Japan's greatest film directors. They each star Tsutomu Yamazaki (the Japanese John Wayne) and Nobuko Miyamoto. They are wonderful movies and we highly recommend any of them (try "Tampopo" first!). The last film in the list is the original Japanese movie that the American movie was based (loosely) on. You cannot beat the Japanese original. Culturally, it cannot be translated into America, because you don't have the taboo against men dancing and all of the other societal pressures that the Japanese salaryman is faced with. At any rate, we have been wearing our VHS copies out and would like to have replaced them with DVDs. However, the costs were astronomical! Between $75 and $150 US for these DVDs at Yodobashi's. Much too expensive for us!

In our Lonely Planet guide to Japan, we saw that there is a statue of Godzilla. Awesome - we HAVE to see this! So we followed the little map in the Lonely Planet, but just could not find the statue. We hunted for hours! How hard can it be? After all, Godzilla was huge! We would look around corners, no Godzilla. Finally, we started looking down at street level. There it was!

By the way, that's not our cool little scooter. It would have been great driving it. Although after our first wreck because we couldn't read any of the street signs or directions, maybe it would not have been too cool.

At any rate, we found a way to make Godzilla look the appropriate size.

Near the Godzilla statue is the Imperial Palace. It's beautiful, complete with a moat around it.

The Imperial Gardens are gorgeous also.

Beautiful irises at the Imperial gardens.

Japan is a wonderful place. The Japanese people are friendly, kind, helpful, courteous, and extremely practical. We visited the Sony store in the Ginza district, and saw technology there that we are only now seeing 5 years later in the US. However, there is another area where their technology leaves ours in the dust - toilets!

Behold the might Toto!

This is your loaded Cadillac (or should I say "Lexus"?) of toilets that was in our hotel room. Just look at the control panel below. You couldn't give your average American this kind of technology in the bathroom - he would blow himself up. If he ever did figure out how to work it, he would probably just start living in the bathroom - what else could he need? Notice that we are using the pronoun "he" in this!

So those are a few pictures from the Tokyo part of our trip. In later posts, we will discuss Nara, Takayama, Kyoto, Japanese food (excellent!), and whatever else we remember from the trip.

Thanks for reading!