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!