Kanazawa

 I arrived in Kanazawa, still slightly drunk from the Sake tasting earlier that day, only to find out that it was pouring. So I hid beneath my umbrella and went to check into my hostel. After chatting with the hostel owner for a while, I decided to brave the rain and go out again - only to find out that the weather had become gorgeous in the meantime: no more rain, and a really great warm wind that lasted for my entire stay in Kanazawa.

The first sight I checked out was Kanazawa castle. The castle is a recent reconstruction, but the interesting thing about it is that it is not made from concrete, but using traditional techniques. They also have a few cross sections on display showing how the castle walls are actually constructed.

Kanazawa castle

Ever wondered how the interior of a castle wall looks like?

My next stop was the contemporary art museum. They had an exhibit called 360° which was all about changing perspectives. Some of the pieces were awesome to look at, and some really made me think - all you can hope for in any museum, right?

This cool exhibit - located in front of the museum's entrance - lets you play with color mixing

Kanazawa's train station has a fountain displaying the current time. The other side of the panel said "Welcome", if I remember correctly

 The next day, I went to see the so-called ninja temple with a bunch of really nice and funny Americans I had met in the hostel the night before. The temple is officially called Myoryu-ji, but earned its nickname from all the hidden stairs, doors and trapdoors inside. It even has a dedicated room for committing Seppuku (ritual suicide). It is basically a tiny cell with a revolving door. You can open it from the outside, go in, and close it - but there is no handle on the inside. So no way of changing your mind about the Seppuku once you're inside...

In front of the ninja temple

There's definitely some truth in this statement, don't you think?

Beautiful traditional houses in Kanazawa's samurai district

Awesome painted sliding doors inside one of the samurai houses

... and this is why coins need a hole in the middle! Who needs a purse if there are coins like these?

Another highlight in Kanazawa was Kenroku-en garden. It is cited as one of the best gardens in Japan, and you can see why when you look at the pictures below. What I didn't expect, however, was its size - it is huge! I would have gone there earlier if I'd known... because when I finally got to the tea house, it was already closed ;-)

Huge old and gnarly tree in Kenroku-en

The museum of Kanazawa traditional crafts is on one side of Kenroku-en, so I paid it a short visit when I passed. My first thought on this exhibit was - wait a second, they build bombs here?!? But they're fireworks, not bombs, of course. Interesting to see, nevertheless ;-)

Just before I got on the train to head back to Osaka, I went to check out Omicho fish market. It is not as huge as Tsukiji in Tokyo, of course, but the selection of fresh fish is varied enough to make any market in Germany pale with envy.

Takayama

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.

Hida-no-sato folk village

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.

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 ;)

Shingled roof seen from below

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.

Traditional street in Takayama's city center

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.

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 :)

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.

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 :)

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.

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...

Sake tasting at 8:30am

Train Travel in Japan, pt. 2

I really liked traveling in Japanese long-distance trains. In addition to the stuff I wrote about earlier, two more points occurred to me during my last trip in Japan.

First, the leg space you get is enormous compared to planes, or even German trains. Not that the average Japanese person needs a lot of leg space... but I thought it was very nice and relaxing. 

And second, I like the way the seat reservations work. In each train, there is a designated number of cars for non-reserved seats. All other cars are for reserved seats only. So if you have a reserved seat, there won't be other passengers roaming about in your compartment looking for a free seat. And if you don't, you know which cars you can find a seat in - and don't have to search the entire train if these cars are full. By the way, I've always found a seat in the non-reserved cars.

Back in Germany, I was immediately reminded that German trains are not as punctual as the Japanese ones. During my second train ride, I was waiting in the train at one station, when there was an announcement on the speakers: the train's departure would be delayed indefinitely due to missing train personnel. Well, "indefinitely" turned out to be just a couple of minutes, but I thought that "missing train personnel" was a hilarious excuse for accumulating delay. Stuff like that just doesn't happen in Japan...

Hakone Adventures

After my visit to Tokyo, I took a train to Hakone in the hope of catching a glimpse of Fuji-san. The area is developed to cater perfectly to day trippers from Tokyo. There's a circuit route including travel by boat, ropeway, cable car, train and bus that covers all the sights in the area. I wasn't quite sure the circuit would work out in one day, so I booked a room somewhere in the middle of it.

When I arrived , the sky was overcast and winds were picking up, but I started anyway. My first stop was the old highway that connected Edo (which is now called Tokyo) to Kyoto. Looking at the rough stones you can see below, I'm not really sure if the road actually deserves the name "highway"...

Part of the old Edo-Kyoto highway

Next was the checkpoint museum. One display in the museum said that the checkpoint was built mainly to keep women from escaping from Edo, and that those who tried were sold off as slaves. This made me wonder -- was Edo really such an evil place that they effectively had to imprison the women there?

Rebuilt Hakone checkpoint

 After the checkpoint, I had planned to get on a boat to cross Lake Ashi. However, when I arrived there, everything was closed up and a sign said that the boats had stopped for the day due to heavy winds. So... I backtracked and made the circuit in the other direction to get to my hotel.

The cable car leading to my hotel

In the hotel, I found a few vending machines I hadn't seen before:

This one sells hot meals 24/7...

...and this one has tooth brushes, razors, towels and soap.

There was really nothing to do around my hotel (not even a convenience store to be found...), so I just relaxed in the hotel's onsen for a bit and went to bed early. That way, I was able to catch the first cable car to the top and continue with the ropeway journey in the best early-morning weather. The first stop of the ropeway was Owakudani volcanic valley.

View from the ropeway down Owakudani volcanic valley.

Small ropeway to transport eggs up the hill - you can see one of the egg cages is just being sent up

Owakudani's signature item: eggs boiled in one of the volcanic pools and blackened by the sulphur contained in the water (and that's why they need a ropeway to send eggs up the mountain). They sell them in packages of five for 500 Yen, and of course I had to get one! The eggs taste like regular boiled chicken eggs, but the blue-black shell looks really cool :-)

After Owakudani, the ropeway continued down to Lake Ashi. The journey offers a great view of Fuji-san - provided the mountain doesn't hide his face in a cloud cover. The cloud cover was just breaking up as I went down, and I figured I was pretty lucky in having seen a bit of Mount Fuji.

At the shore of Lake Ashi, there is really nothing to do but cross over to the other shore in boats that are dressed up as pirate ships:

On the boat and on the other shore, it turned out I was even more lucky: the cloud cover over Fuji-san cleared completely, and I was able to get some great pictures with myself and Fuji-san :-)

It was still pretty early when I left Lake Ashi, so I decided to make a stop at Hakone Open Air Museum before hopping on the train to Takayama. The museum turned out to be absolutely gorgeous - it alone would have been worth the trip to Hakone! It is an art museum, consisting mostly of sculptures set in a beautiful park. Combined with perfect weather and cherry trees in full bloom the visit really was a stunning experience. Check out the pictures below:

This was probably my favorite sculpture in the museum (well, part of it, anyway). Inside the sculpture you could climb to the top using a narrow spiral stair. The colored glass laid inside the walls was beautifully illuminated by the sun outside. Gorgeous!

Near the sculpture above, there was a free hot foot bath, fed with water from a hot spring. Sitting there...

... and gazing out over this amazing sculpture garden... life just doesn't get more perfect than that!

And, finally, here are some more impressions from the garden:

I could have spent hours there admiring the combination of art and nature... But as I had a train to catch I had to leave after just about two hours. Luckily, I still have the memory of this perfect place - and the pictures to serve as a reminder! :-)

Sights in Tokyo

In the previous two posts, I wrote a lot about what I experienced in Tokyo. So in this post I'll show you some of the visual highlights instead of writing a whole lot more. Enjoy!

Senso-ji temple was near my hostel, in Asakusa. The temple was in my back when I took this picture. It shows the (huge) shopping street leading up to the temple, nearly empty because it was late and rainy.

In contrast, this is the street leading up to the Meiji shrine where Emperor Meiji and his wife are enshrined. This one was nearly empty because it was early in the day. You can see how the street is just being cleaned of dead leaves.

Inside the Meiji shrine, a traditional Japanese wedding ceremony was going on. Actually, this wasn't the only one: I caught glimpses of three ceremonies in the short time I spent here.

Also in the Meiji shrine, there was an Ikebana exhibition - I don't remember which school though.

I took this snapshot in Yoyogi park - and not for the scenic beauty, in this case, but rather for the two runners in the center. Have a close look! They appear to be holding hands, but in fact they are both holding on to a rubber band. The guy on the left has "guide" written on his shirt, while the girl's shirt says "blind runner". I've never seen this before, but thought is was really amazing!

Ginza = skyscrapers + designer stores. And a huge pedestrian zone on select sundays :)

The imperial palace gardens are basically a huge green oasis of peace and quiet in the middle of Tokyo's skyscrapers.

In Yasukuni-jinja, about two and a half million people are enshrined, mostly people who were killed in some war. There are war criminals among them, creating a bit of a controversy especially when politicians come to visit the shrine.

I found this vending machine near a pond on the grounds of Yasukuni-jinja. Can you guess what you can buy there? Of course - it's carp food for the huge carps in the pond.

Mori Art Museum is located on the 53rd floor of a building in Roppongi. The museum is open till late, so I took the opportunity to take in Tokyo by night before I went in. The red lights on top of many buildings were constantly flashing on and off - I guess that's because of the airport that is located in this direction.

The National Museum in Ueno. Besides hosting some great exhibits, the building and its interior are not too shabby, either.

Among other exibits, the advertising museum has one panel with products from every decade since the 1940s. It's very interesting to see how the products themselves, and also their design and packaging, changed over the years.

This store sells Shoju. No sake, no other beverages... just hundreds of different varietes of Shoju. I was quite impressed!

Reliance on Guide Books Gone Bad

In my travels in Japan, the information in my guidebook has always been pretty accurate. Until I arrived in Tokyo, that is. Maybe it wasn't the guidebook that caused my problems, but a combination of earthquake after-effects, my own inability and chance. But in any case, I found many things quite different from what was written in the guidebook.

One thing to look for in Tokyo are, of course, all the geeky subcultures. Cosplay, for example. And maid cafes. My guidebook listed a couple of places and made it sound like you could be sure to encounter these subcultures there. Well, not the case. I found neither the cosplay crowd in Harajuku, nor the maid cafe advertisers in Akihabara, nor the girl geeks in Ikebukuro. Or maybe I'm blind?

Later in the day, I was unable to find several of the bars listed in the nightlife section for Shinjuku. Granted, that may very well be due to my inability to cope with the Japanese system of naming streets and numbering buildings. In Germany, streets have names and houses are numbered along the streets. But in Japan, names are given to blocks rather than streets, and houses are numbered within a block. But I never really grasped how the blocks are defined (is there some kind of natural border to a block or is it more or less arbitrary?), or how the numbering works exactly. Combined with the inability to read, this makes for a great source of confusion ;-)

Another thing where the guide book was wrong were museum opening hours. One museum was a big construction site. Reopening in 2013. Another was partially closed and had odd opening hours for the rest. Earthquake after-effects. Two others were closed without any apparent reason - or maybe the reasons were posted on one of the Japanese-only signs.

Luckily there is enough to see in Tokyo and I could easily find replacements for the closed museums. But it is a little frustrating to spend all this time in public transportation only to find out that the target attraction is closed or non-existent.

So, what can I learn from this experience? Two things, actually.

• First, learn the local language. This is too bloody difficult for me in Japan and China, especially when it comes to reading. But it seems doable in the rest of the world.


• Second, rely more on word-of-mouth and confirm written information with locals or other travelers.

Two pieces of advice to my future self that I may well need later this year... :-)

Eerie Tokyo

My original plan had been to combine Tokyo, Nikko, Hakone and Takayama in a 10-day trip right before returning to Germany. However, this plan didn't seem like such a good idea anymore after the earthquake and tsunami in March, and the resulting nuclear situation in Fukushima. I thought about it for a long time, but in the end, I decided to go anyway - I just couldn't imagine having lived in Japan for 6 months without ever paying a visit to Tokyo. The only modification I made was to leave out Nikko (just 150 km from Fukushima, which seemed a little close), and instead throw in a visit to Kanazawa.

My first impression of Tokyo was that everything appeared to be normal. Just like there had never been an earthquake or nuclear crisis in a power plant that is just 250km away. After a while, however, I started to notice many little things, small pieces of evidence that there was indeed an ongoing crisis. Together, all these little things created a slightly eerie atmosphere - maybe more in my mind than it was really evident by looking at the bustling Tokyo crowds - but still, eerie.

One of the most evident signs of crisis were the metro escalators. My guess is that at least two thirds of them were out of service. They were blocked with signs that I couldn't read but that probably said that energy conservation is more important than comfort right now.

Another sign was the lack of tourists. I was the only guest in a four-bed dorm room in my hostel, and there was scarcely anybody to be met in the common areas. There were invitations to fold paper cranes posted around the hostel, and signs asking to conserve energy by switching off the air conditioning. Many museums were nearly empty where I would have expected crowds. Several others were closed or only partially open, mostly without explanations in a language that I was able to read.

A final thing that contributed greatly to the eerieness I felt was the certainty that the drinking water contains radiation. I regularly checked a crowd-sourced map of public and private Geiger counter readings, and to be sure the measurements were way below the thresholds. Still, the knowledge was somewhat offputting. I was accustomed to drinking tap water and refilling my water bottle for free, but in Tokyo I ended up buying supplies of bottled water instead.

Tokyo might have been empty of tourists, but it definitely was not empty of people. The subway trains were still full at rush hour. I managed to get a seat in one during morning rush hour (just because the hostel was located close to the terminus in Asakusa), and was very nearly flattened in another during evening rush hour, so I guess my Tokyo subway experience was almost complete. Not quite, however: I didn't see employees pushing people into the train. Guess I didn't take the right subway line for that ;-)