I arrived in
Takayama at about 10pm, coming from a beautiful spring day in Hakone. So when I stepped off the train, I wasn't really prepared for the freezing temperatures awaiting me in Takayama.
Takayama is one of the gateway towns for visits to the Japan Alps, so I could have been prepared that it would still be pretty cold in April. Well, I wasn't, so I put on all the layers of clothing I brought and tried not to think about the cold ;-)
My first stop the next morning was Hida-no-sato folk village. This is basically an open air museum where typical houses from the region are preserved. Due to heavy snows in this area, the architecture is quite different from houses in other regions of Japan, featuring very steep shingled roofs.
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| Hida-no-sato folk village |
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| Interior of one of the houses - notice that there's a real fire burning! Apparently, this is done to keep the temperature and humidity in the houses at optimal levels for preservation. |
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| A shingle-maker was at work inside one of the houses. He first heated the wood over a fire and then split the blocks into shingles. The finer points of his work were explained in Japanese, so I didn't get any of it of course ;) |
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| Shingled roof seen from below |
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| Models of shingled roofs in different variants and states of repair |
After the folk village, I went to check out the city center. The city center is special because several of the streets have been preserved in the original Japanese style. When you enter one of these streets, it feels like you have just been plucked from the modern world with all its skyscrapers and convenience stores and sent back a few centuries into old Japan.
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| Traditional street in Takayama's city center |
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| Even the store fronts have been carefully preserved. This one is all about sake: the store is in the front of the building, and the brewery in the back. |
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| You can also enter some of the houses. This shows the inside of Yoshijima Heritage House. The entrance fee included a hot cup of traditional Japanese tea - made of some kind of mushroom (maybe Shiitake?). A taste I definitely wouldn't have expected from a cup of tea, but not bad at all! |
Takayama is famous for the
huge festival that is held twice a year, in spring and autumn. The floats used during the festival are exhibited in a museum for the rest of the year. The museum has a wonderful DIY audio guide in English: an ancient portable cassette recorder! I hadn't seen one of those for ages, but I guess it's a good low-cost option for such a small museum :)
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| Exhibition of festival floats |
Right next door to the festival floats exhibition is another museum, the Sakurayama Nikkokan. This museum has a 1:10 model of the huge shrine in Nikko. I was particularly happy to see this model because I had originally planned to visit Nikko, but cancelled it due to the nuclear situation.
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| Model of Nikko in Sakurayama Nikkokan - magnificent, isn't it? |
The next museum on my tour was Shishi Kaikan. They exhibit a couple hundred lion masks, but the main attraction for me was the Karakuri puppet show! They demonstrated several types of mechanical
Karakuri puppets, including one serving tea and an acrobat. The puppets are of course dressed up in a very traditional way, but I thought their interior with all the mechanisms was really really geeky :)
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| Karakuri puppets in Shishi Kaikan museum |
Just down the street from Shishi Kaikan, and my last museum for the day, was Showa Hall. This is a museum exhibiting stuff from the
Showa period, i.e. the period of emperor Showa's reign. This was actually quite a long time, from 1926 to 1989. The museum seems to concentrate mainly on the 1960s, and it is stuffed full of products and advertisements from that time.
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| Showa Hall - very colorful and interesting! |
On the next day I wanted to travel on to Kanazawa - but before that, I thought I'd check out the morning markets in Takayama. And guess what I found? A shop offering free sake tasting! It's not every day you get drunk before 9am...
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| Sake tasting at 8:30am |
