Traveling Johns

We spent today cruising Lake Como. It was absolutely gloriously beautiful. There were a couple rough spots. We need not talk about them.

While yesterday had been somewhat hazy, today the air was perfectly clear. In the early light, not long past dawn, we could stand on our deck and admire Varenna.

I also stopped to take a picture of the fountain next to our apartment. This is clearly much older than the buildings surrounding it, but I have not been able to figure our anything about it from any guidebook I can find. It appears to filter water from a spring high on the cliff above us. Is this the Fiumelatte stream itself? It seems like that would be larger and better marked. But I have not found that on a map, either. 

We went down relatively early to the ferry dock in Varenna. We walked along the path along the cliff. Sherry looked stylish, as always.

We had briefly considered renting a boat and trying to sail around the lake ourselves, but there is frequent boat service each small community, so it hardly seemed worth the expense. As we left Varenna, we had another opportunity to admire this beautiful community.

Our first stop was arguably the most famous spot on the lake, Bellagio. Lake Como is shaped a bit like an upside down Y. Bellagio is located at the tip of a peninsula where the two southern arms of the lake come together. It is not one community, but a cluster of small hamlets and villages. When we landed, the rest of our group was eager to have some breakfast. John and I took a hokey little fake train that made a 25 minute circuit of the village. Along the way, we saw a few old chateaux. This one had been built for some prince in the eighteenth century, and the recording informed us that it was still in “private hands.” We were left wondering who could afford to keep this as summer house. 

After the train trip was finished, we walked around the area near the ferry stop. It is the largest of the Bellagio communities, and clearly the municipal and commercial center. There are a few extremely expensive hotels in this area and a couple, like the one shown below, that are clearly more affordable choices. 

We stopped in a bar and had some coffee. One of the weird things for Americans in Italy is that a “bar” is mostly a coffee shop. You can probably buy some alcohol in most of them, but their main purpose is selling espresso and pastries in the morning. It is possible to get table service at most, but Italians prefer to just stand at the bar and gulp it down. We did as the Italians do.

We also stopped in a church to look around. It was mostly a hodgepodge of unfortunate nineteenth century “restorations,” but somehow they had preserve this obviously ancient pulpit.

After Bellagio, we headed to the other side of the lake to Villa Carlotta. This is another enormous chateau that originally dates from sometime in the seventeenth century. But the house was renovated and decorated at the height of the Napoleonic era. The interior is filled with third-rate art from that period.

Some of this seemed to inspir John to do his own posing.

Mostly Villa Carlotta is famous for its gardens. But much of the planting looked pretty familiar to those of us from Southern California.

The garden is an interesting mixture of mostly English-style naturalistic gardens and some more formal French gardens.

Our group posed for a picture together right by the entrance.

John and I wandered about the Villa a bit more after the others left. Some of that time was spent locating where he had lost his wallet, but as Shakespeare noted, “All’s well that ends well.” We bought two lovely watercolors by Marina Fusari, a very talented local artist. We met up later with Sherry and Giles for a bite of lunch. 

After that, Sherry wanted us to go to see Villa d’Este. This is one of the most exclusive hotels in the world. She thought it was about 45 minutes further down the lake. It turned out that it was nearly two and a half hours further! But what a magnificent ride along the way.

When we finally arrived, we really had no time at all to check it out. Sherry had made friends with a couple who were staying there, and most of our group went in briefly and looked around. But we had to get to Como, the only real city on the lake, to catch the fast ferry back to Varenna. 

As we pulled in, Jill had a bit of a Titanic moment. 

And as we all filed off, we had memories of an utterly beautiful day in one of the most gorgeous place on earth.

 

 

While we were not sorry to be leaving our hot and rather cramped Milan apartment, getting out of the city was an ordeal. We had made arrangements weeks ago for a rental car. Because we wanted a large vehicle, and because we were returning it to a different country, the fees were absurd. But we all felt like we wanted to have a car while we were in the mountains, and we wanted the experience of driving through the Alps to Avignon. 

But getting that car was a bit of a nightmare. Jill and Sherry walked over with me toward the Hertz office near Milano Centrale station. Those of you who know my two friends will hardly be surprised that we had a number of stops along the way for some shopping, some of which seemed important to me, and some of which seemed like it could have waited for another day. When I finally made it to the car rental office, the line was miserably long. I ended up waiting about an hour until I finally had a chance to be served. They sent me a link via email later to rate the service. As negative numbers were not provided as an option, I decided to not respond. I suppose the experience could have been worse, but I am not sure how.

Certainly packing the car was equally bad. John and I decided to travel with just two carry-on bags. The rest of our group had brought suitcases that were only slightly smaller than steamer trunks. By the time we had piled all of them into the car we had lost the entire back row of seats in the van. I was driving and John was navigating. The rest were crammed into a single row. They were uncomfortable and not shy about announcing that every few minutes. 

Fortunately, it did not take us all that long to reach Lake Como. The moment we turned onto the narrow road that lines the lake the kvetching turned into “oohs” and “ahs.” We stopped for a wonderful meal at a small restaurant. The service was perfect, the food was exceptional, and the view could not be better. It seemed like it could not have been more wonderful. And then found our apartment … and it became even better. To see what it’s like, you can check out this short video on YouTube on the Della Fontana Penthouse. 

In the evening we strolled down to the exquisitely charming nearby town of Varenna. 

Tomorrow, we will be exploring Lake Como. 

We spent a leisurely last morning at at our Lido palazzo. Jill and Sherry will be going to China to present some staff development to teachers there, so they worked on the material they would be presenting. I worked on editing photographs. The wonderful thing about modern photography is how easy it is to take a dozens and dozens of pictures on any day. The miserable thing about modern photography is trying to sort through and edit those same pictures. 

I made a push for us to take our final boat ride in Venice on line number two. It is usually the most crowded of the vaporetti routes as it goes up the Grand Canal, but I knew that because it starts in Lido we could get good seats if we wanted on it. And because is also ends at the railroad station it was an even more perfect choice for us. We pushed to get aboard with at the dock with all the queuing graces of French tourists, and having shoved a near mountain of suitcases into one corner of the ship, grabbed seats on bow. The trip indeed was glorious, but I having packed my camera away in my baggage I have only my memories to show for it. Sigh.

Italy has some remarkably good trains. I used to think that all European trains were wonderful, but my adventures last year on both the Croatian and Swedish railways were so awful that they made me think Amtrak was great. The Italian Frecce trains are clean, fast, and invariably on time. I insisted that we buy business class tickets, as I have learned on trains that paying just a little bit more makes the experience vastly more tolerable. And indeed we had wonderful seats in a quiet car. Well, it was as quiet as it could be with our group in it….

We are en route to Lake Como, but we needed to spend the night in Milan before heading out. There is not that much to see in Milan, particularly after Venice, but it is a lively enough city and both clean and safe by Italian standards. We are staying at an apartment we found on Airbnb. It is not expensive, but still not quite worth the limited amount we paid. The air conditioning does not work well, and the shower does not work at all. 

In the evening we went to the center for dinner and some shopping. This is not a group that is interested much in seeing churches, so I did not bother taking them through the Duomo, probably the most historically important building in the city. Instead I took them through the famous arcade. John arranged dinner for the six of us in a rooftop restaurant overlooking the cathedral. 

Tomorrow morning we get our car and head off to the mountains!

Today we tried to get to out of the apartment early to see Venice before the crowds arrived. It is not easy to get six people ready early in the morning, particularly when three of them are former actors, not a group of people known for doing their best work early in the morning. Piazza San Marco  is normally a tourist nightmare, a place which makes Times Square seem subdued in comparison. But John and I knew that in the very early morning the Piazza is quiet and you can appreciate the beauty of the buildings and open spaces. The only hustle at this time of the day is the movement of the deliverymen with pulling carts of supplies to the cafes about the square. 

Saint Mark’s Cathedral are often lost later in the day amid the thousands of people crowding about to see them. In the early morning you can appreciate their distinctive architecture. 

There is something just extraordinarily beautiful about the Venice on early summer mornings. The light that inspired generations of painters still shines on this city. 

A couple of the women in our group fell for the offer to feed the pigeons. 

John tried to warn them that this was a scam, but they finally had to pay several Euro for a handful of bird seed. High atop the winged lion, the great symbol of the Venice, a seagull surveyed the scene as if to say, “It happens every day.”

As some in our party had never been through the Doge’s Palace, we decided to go through this together as a group. Here Giles, Sherry, Jill, and Ray all admired the Golden Staircase leading up to the various state chambers. 

Serenìsima Repùblica Vèneta, the Serene Republic of Venice, lasted for nearly a thousand years. But it was not a republic in a modern sense, although there was no monarchy or hereditary prince to govern the city. Venice followed a mixed government model, combining a kind of elected monarchy in the doge, a hereditary aristocracy in the senate, and a democracy of the oldest Rialto families, no matter how little money they had, in the major council. Niccolò Machiavelli considered it a near perfect form of government, and that, I think, suggests that there were some problems with it. The real power in lay in the republic with the richest families and they more or less ran the country for their own benefit. 

The Doge’s Palace was the seat of all the different branches of government which were not in the end particularly separate. There were various councils that were tasked with different administrative and judicial functions, but all were members of the Great Council. That group met in the largest room in the Palace and one of the most magnificently decorated one.  

The Doge’s Palace is also directly adjacent to the Duomo, the cathedral, and Venice was certainly not a republic in the modern sense of a secular state, either. The Doge and the Council enforced Catholic belief, and was at least charged with upholding the moral standards of the church as well. 

The government did this with somewhat less vigor than most of the churchmen would have liked. Venetians were famed for their somewhat flexible sense of morality, particularly in matters of love. This was, after all, the city of Giacomo Casanova!

After our tour, we split up for a bit. Four of us went off to Murano, the island famous for centuries for the production of Venetian glass. All the guidebooks had warned us that the glory days of glassmaking here were long past, and that most of the glass on sale in the various shops here was imported from China or Indonesia. All of that was no doubt true, but this island, one of a cluster of three in the northern part of the lagoon, was lovely. We probably would have happily wandered about it more, but by this time it was about noon, and we began to appreciate why even here in the north of Italy the residents used to retreat to their homes to escape the midday sun. We first paid a somewhat perfunctory visit to the Museum of Glass and then retreated to a restaurant and had a lovely meal. Afterwards, we wandered about a bit more, poking our heads in shops and a ninth-century church.

We were all a little tired, so we went back to Lido to nap in what we had come to think of as our Venetian palazzo. 

In the evening, we all went back for one final visit to the historic center of Venice. Three of us went off to wander through the quiet back streets and canals of the city as the sun began its descent. David Lean, the great British film director, called this time of day “the golden hour” for a good reason. Everything seemed bathed in lovely gold light.

We all set, save Sherry, for dinner on the island of Guideca. John and I knew that there were a few cafes on the quay not far from San Giorgio where you could sit by the side of the water and see Santa Maria della Salute in the as the Venetian sky turned from blue to purple to black. We had a good meal but a magical evening there. 

Tomorrow, our journeys continue and we are off to Milan. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Gentle readers, our journeys begin again! We have actually been away from home for a while now. Monday morning, June 11, we took a flight from Los Angeles to New York City. We met up with my sister in Penn Station and from there we went to an apartment we had rented in Yorkville on the Upper East Side. I had to be on Long Island to lead a training for church, and it seemed fun to have a little vacation before I started my work. That first night we had dinner, explored the neighborhood, and went to bed.

The next day we went off to the Met to see that Heavenly Bodies show. This is the controversial exhibit that shows the influence of the “Catholic Imagination” on fashion designers. I was somewhat disappointed here. There were a lot of fun pieces by designers who had been raised Catholic, and if you were quite familiar with certain kinds of ecclesiastical garments, particularly those widely used before the Second Vatican Council, you could see how the fashion designers had adapted and often eroticized chasubles and copes. But the larger sense of a “Catholic Imagination,” a sacramental vision of nature infused with and perfect by grace, what underlies the otherwise absurd richness of Catholic ritual and folk practices, was largely missed by the curators.

That afternoon we caught up with Yin, a good friend of Ellen’s whom we had met a couple years ago in Charlottesville. Yin now lives and works in Chinatown. We met for lunch at a Mongolian hot pot restaurant, and afterward Yin took us on a tour of Chinatown. It was interesting to learn about the different groups of Chinese people who live in this area, and some of the tensions between older and new residents, and conflicts between immigrants from different areas of China. That evening Lin took us back to the Museum Mile by Central Park where various museums were open for free for one night. We were deterred by the long lines at the Guggenheim, though John stopped briefly to admire the architecture of the building. I mean, that is why he said he stopped to take this picture….

We took a brief look at the Cooper Hewitt museum. It was interesting enough, but I was still glad that I had not paid for my ticket! As evening turned to night, we stopped by the Reservoir for its iconic view of Manhattan.

John and I went back to our place in Yorkville, while Ellen and Yin talked for a bit longer.

Our final full day in New York was mostly about the theater. We had purchased tickets to Carousel, the Rogers and Hammerstein revival at the Empire Theater. I had never been a big fan of this show before, and I was a little perplexed by why John had decided with all the options available to get attend this particular musical. But after a couple numbers, I found myself completely drawn in by the story and the music in a way I had never been before. Maybe it was being a little older, or maybe it was just Renee Flemming’s beautiful voice, but I cried and cried though much of the play. Afterwards, Ellen treated us to a great meal, probably the only decent food I have ever had within shouting distance of Times Square.

The next morning we had to grab the Long Island Railroad out to Huntington. The training, part of my work with the Education for Ministry program, was at the Seminary of the Immaculate Conception, a former Roman Catholic facility for training priests that had now been turned into a retreat and conference center.

The seminary is in the midst of 150 acres on the lush north shore of Long Island. However beautiful, it is close to absolutely nothing, so John quickly decided to rent a car and see what he could. While I taught — and I had six absolutely wonderful mentors for this training — he went off to see what he could. Probably the highlight of his travels was a trip to Sagamore Hill, Theodore Roosevelt’s home on Oyster Bay.

My training lasted from Thursday to Saturday. It was hard to say goodbye to everybody I had only met about 18 hours earlier! John and I had initially planned to spend a final quiet night at the seminary, but it was just a little too boring and the room was just a little too small. We managed to find just about the last available room on the beach in Montauk. We stayed at the Atlantic Resort, or something close to that name. The place was almost certainly overpriced, but just about everything in that part of the costs a fortune. But at least we had an ocean view from our balcony.

On Sunday, our final day, we slowly made our way towards Kennedy Airport. We stopped a couple places along the way. We had lunch in East Hampton at the Bostwick Chowder House, something of a local institution. The food was not bad, but for the price it should have been better than “not bad.”

Our second stop was a bit more off the beaten path. John and I love gardens, and there are remarkable few public gardens on Long Island. The Bridge Garden in Bridgehampton is one of them. Now a part of the Peconic Land Trust, this five acre garden was the idiosyncratic project of two local men. Largely done in the naturalistic English style, the gardens filled with all those lovely trees and plants that we cannot grow in Southern California

Our final stop was at the Parrish Art Museum in Southhampton. This small museum is a serious collection of modern art, mostly works by painters, sculptors, and photographers who worked at some point in their lives in Suffolk County. After we purchased our ticket, we were asked if we would like to join the tour that was just about to begin.

It turned out that John and I were the only ones on the tour, and we had a wonderful guide, a retired philosophy professor from Columbia who had a particular passion for architecture. Much of the collection consisted of abstract expressionist works, never John’s favorite, but I was rather impressed by a collection of pieces by James Brooks. The building itself is interesting. Designed by Herzog & de Meuron, the Swiss “starchitects”, it is designed to look something like the potato storage barns that once dotted Long Island.

The centerpiece of our summer trip is going to be another bicycle trip, this time down the Rhone River from Avignon to the Camargue, the marshy delta where the Rhone empties into the Mediterranean. We are doing this trip with two other couples, Sherry and Giles and Jill and Ray. Both Sherry and Jill were colleagues of John’s in the arts education department of the Los Angeles school system. Neither Ray or Giles had ever been to northern Italy, so we just decided to start our trip in Venice. John and I have been to Venice several times, but even I am not jaded enough to say, “Venice? Again? Puh-leeze!

Indeed Venice is about the only place in the world where the taxi ride from the airport does not make you think that you have made one of the worst mistakes of your life. The Alilaguna water bus from Marco Polo Airport is an enchanting tour of the Venice Lagoon in its own right with stops at all the major islands that form the city of Venice. We are staying this time on Lido, the largest of the islands and one of the few with what the British called “carriage roads.” We found a huge apartment here for a reasonable price on Airbnb. Our apartment, with three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a dining room, a large living room, and a huge balcony, occupies most of the first floor of the building below. 

And all this for far less than we paid for our somewhat claustrophobic quarters in New York!

After we settled into our apartment, John and I took a walk around the center of the island, the area known to locals as Santa Maria Elisabetta. The largest building in this area is the Tempio Votivo. This is a curious structure. Built in 1925, it was originally conceived as an expression of gratitude that the Almighty had somehow preserved the City of Venice from bombardment by the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Perhaps reflecting some better theology, it was later changed into a memorial to those who died in the First World War. Despite its aggressive neo-classicism, it had nothing to do with Mussolini or Fascism. 

Alas, it was closed and I have no idea what it looks like inside.

Although Lido itself was settled well before Roman times, it was a mostly a fishing and farming area until the middle of the nineteenth century. At that time, sea bathing, that is swimming in the ocean, became quite fashionable with the upper classes of Europe. Although going to the beach seems like a natural form of recreation for us, for most of the Christian era few people in Europe thought of swimming as a pleasurable pasttime. During the eighteenth century, however, doctors in England began to have their patients visit the seaside to breath the healthful air and to partially immerse themselves in the salt water as a therapy. After railways made traveling to the seaside practical, the beaches of Europe were filled the people seeking to restore or improve their health. The west side of Lido island, with its fine sandy beaches opening up to the warm waters of the Adriatic, became some of the most popular places in Europe for the elderly and the infirm. Huge hotels were build there. The Grand Hotel des Bains — I suppose Italian was not considered a refined enough language to attract the best people in Europe — was one of them. It has been closed for decades now, and the interior must be in a perfectly wonderful state of decline.

The beach in front of the hotel is still very much in use and still has the small beach huts where respectable people could discretely change into their “bathing costumes.” 

At the same time, other wealthy people began to establish second homes in this area, so Lido is filled with some of the most charming of late nineteenth and early twentieth century architecture. Most of this, like our apartment building, is done in an “Italianate” manner.

But some people preferred other styles that owed nothing to the local architecture. 

Tomorrow we will be exploring the historic center of Venice with our friends.

We met our guide a few minutes after nine this morning. She was a soft-spoken women probably a few years younger than us. Her name was Amori, I believe, but she preferred to be called Mori. We never did discover much about her background, but she was one of the most well-educated guides I have ever had. Before we started on our tour, we stopped by Starbucks because John really needed a cup of coffee. While we were there, Mori gave us a little background about Kanazawa. While there have been people living here for many centuries, the city first began to take shape in the Muromachi period of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The power of the government in Kyoto was quite weak at this time, and a peasant rebellion in this area resulted in the formation of a Buddhist state historians call the “Peasants’ Kingdom.” The peasants had difficulty establishing a strong central government, and the Oda Nobunaga, a powerful daimyo, defeated the peasant forced. He gave the Kanazawa area to one of his generals, Sakuma Morimasa, But after the assassination of Oda, Sakuma was defeated by forces loyal to Maeda Toshiie. in 1600, Maeda sided with Tokugawa Ieyasu. In gratitude, Tokugawa significantly expanded the lands of Maeda and during the many years of the Tokugawa Shogunate, the Kaga Domain was the largest in the country and the Maeda became one of the richest and most important families in Japan.  

Because the Maeda were so rich and powerful, Kanazawa became a kind of little Kyoto. The enormous Kanazawa Castle, the symbol of Maeda power, dominated the center of the town. Around it were built not only elaborate defense but also extensive gardens and dozens of temples. This central area was surrounded by areas set aside for samurai, for merchants, and finally for geisha. The closer to the castle your home was indicated how important you were, how close you were socially to the center of regional power. One of the samurai districts is still largely intact, and our tour started there. Mori pointed out the original walls of a samurai home. These are made of a kind of adobe, and in the winter straw is placed over them to help keep them from weather damage. If you look closely, you can see irregular lines created by the straw. 

That last picture, of course, is a picture of a picture as the winter mats were taken down some weeks ago. The streets, however, all always clear of snow thanks to an ingenious system that sprinkles them with warm spring water when it snows. The samurai neighborhood is now possibly the most exclusive place to live in Kanazawa. Homes are beautiful

and beautifully landscaped.

Mori snapped a picture of the two of us. We have noticed that the guides here like to take pictures of us. We try to explain that we know what we look like and could be happier about it, but they never take no for an answer. 

One of these homes, called the Nomura-ke or “Nomura’s house,” is open to the public. It is unfortunately a little too popular, and the place was so crowded with tour groups, mostly European, that we could barely move. The Normura family were not of the highest samurai rank, but they still had quite a comfortable life. The house fairly large, but it is only a part of the original compound. Kitchen, bedrooms, servant quarters, and other private areas of the house are now gone. 

As I watched and listened to the other groups I really appreciated Mori. She had an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the home and the period. She carefully explained the layout of rooms and Japanese homes and the function of the alcoves. Suddenly our room in Matsumoto made sense to me! The alcove is the central focus of the room. It is the only part of the room that is decorated in a western sense. There is always a scroll with a poem or saying written on it appropriate to the season and the occasion. There is also a floral arrangement of some kind. Coming into the room, guests are expected to sit quietly in front of the alcove, ponder the epigram or poem, and admire the flowers. After that, if this were a social occasion, the owner would sit on the floor with his back to the alcove and the guests would continue to face it. 

Japanese homes are generally arranged around gardens. There is a larger garden between the house and the walls surrounding the home and smaller gardens among the different sections of the home. The smaller gardens allowed light and air to enter the home. The larger garden at Nomura-ke are some of the most famous in Japan. They are not large, but exquisitely designed.

The place was so crowded that it was hard to get a good picture. We just tried to flow through the crowds like these koi through the pond and see as much as we could, cursing Dutch and Hungarian tour groups under our breath. 

Mori took time to explain the different parts of the family shrine. 

She also took us up into a small second-floor room that looked utterly nondescript. I would walked briefly through the low doorway and left after a few seconds without her guidance. This plain little room, she explained, was the setting for the tea ceremony. While I tend to think of the tea ceremony as being a divertissement for women, it was in the sixteenth and seventeenth century a very serious affair for powerful men. The rituals of the tea ceremony were developed by Buddhists, particularly of the Zen school, to provide a framework for negotiations among powerful feudal lords and their samurai. Everything about the tea ceremony was designed to calm and focus these often volatile men and to allow them to calmly begin processes of  compromise. Drinking tea made total sense now:  these were not men who should be downing large quantities of sake! 

One feature of the tea room was striking, the ceiling. 

Mori told us that this is made of semi-fossilized cypress wood. One way to spot the function and importance of a room in a traditional Japanese home is to look at its ceiling. The extremely valuable wood here would have made the significance of this room obvious to anyone in the Edo period. 

While most of the visitors in this house were foreigners, there were a few Japanese here. We have noticed that some young Japanese people, both female and male, seem to like to dress in traditional costume and have their pictures taken, often selfies, in historic sites. These two girls were doing that

but they were also quite happy to let foreigners snap pictures of them, too. 

We took a taxi from here to our next stop, the Kanazawa Gardens. These are considered one of the most perfect Japanese gardens in the world, and both John and I would have to agree with that assessment! They are also enormous and stunningly located on a hilltop, adjacent to the castle, overlooking the city and the entire valley. The gardens were laid out by the Maeda family for their enjoyment and that of their guests. Mori explained to us that Japanese gardens aim to achieve certain opposites at the same time. They are utterly artificial, but are designed to look natural. They should provide a sense of spaciousness while still providing places for privacy and seclusion. Water needs to be constantly flowing through the garden, but it should often appear to be still as well.

The center of the garden is dominated by a large lake. The lantern here illustrates one of the aspects of the Japanese aesthetic:  it is not perfectly symmetrical. One leg is intentionally shorter than the other because the irregularity was seen a making it more beautiful. 

The lantern is also in the shape the struts of a koto, the court instruments that women might play during social events in the garden. As we strolled through the garden, we saw one lovely scene after another.

A young Japanese couple were taking pictures of themselves in traditional dress. I find this an very interesting revival. 

Mori took us through the Seisonkaku, the large Japanese villa built in 1863 by Maeda Nariyasu, the thirteenth daimyō, as a retirement home for his mother. Photographs, unfortunately, are now allowed here, and though we would probably have taken some anyhow, at least without flash, if we were by ourselves, we felt that we did not want to get Mori in trouble here. It is a remarkable house, largely traditional in style, yet showing some of the signs of the openness to the west that characterized the Meiji era. It still has the original Persian carpets and electric lights that were installed when the crown prince, later to be the Emperor Taisho, came to Kanazawa for a visit. 

After a little over four hours, it was time for Mori to leave us. She finished the tour by bringing us to the Noh Museum. John loves theater, so we had asked to come here. There was a fantastic display of kimonos.

That last one is my favorite, and although it looks stunningly modern, it was made and used before Admiral Perry landed his fleet here. There were also a large collection of masks.

Volunteers at the museum allow visitors to try on becoming a Noh actor. A young woman put on everything. 

John asked if he could do the same, but the woman told him that he could only do the mask. 

It was still pretty effective.

After that, we went to the Myoryuji Temple, commonly called the “Ninja” temple.

The temple has some connection with the priest Nichiren, founder of one of the principal sects of Japanese Buddhism. It does NOT have any connection with ninjas. In the Edo period, ninjas were essential, but as spies and assassins the work they did was dishonorable and so they were not given the same kind of respect as samurai. The temple was given the ninja moniker because it has all kinds of hidden passageways and traps. I was never completely clear why this was. I understood that sometimes the daimyo might be in the temple and that this could be a place for an assassination attempt. But some other things I read made it sound like this was also a place where samurai might be stationed. 

Part of the reason I was never clear is that the tour was conducted in Japanese. We were given an English guide as we went through it, but this was obviously not really a completely satisfactory substitute for the information provided in Japanese. Photos were forbidden and nobody seemed to be trying to take any even surreptitiously. The guide was a rather severe young woman. I kept thinking that if she were Catholic instead of Buddhist she would probably have a name like Sister Peter Canisius. While she gave the tour in Japanese she occasionally barked order to us in English referring to us as “foreigners.” “Foreigners in the back!” “Foreigners first down the stairs!”

By this time it was late afternoon and we were ready to go back to our hotel. Catching a cab is not easy in Kanazawa away from the central business district and it was not that far from hotel anyhow. And we did enjoy a bit of the view on the way. The natural setting of this city is pretty impressive.

Back in our hotel room, we enjoyed the same view. 

In the evening we went out one more time. The contemporary art museum was open until eight o’clock, and it was a pretty intriguing building. The building is round, and the outside wall is completely made of glass. The collection inside, however, was not as interesting as the building. The only interesting thing, in fact, was a two story swimming pool. Here is John “under water” and 

doing his Sunset Boulevard homage.

On our way home we took time to observe the full moon

 a few of the early blooming cherry blossoms. 

We strolled around looking for bite to eat. The place I wanted to go turned out to be closed for a private party, but we walked through some very cool, extremely Japanese neighborhoods. 

Tomorrow we taken the bullet train to Tokyo, and from there we return to Los Angeles. It’s been a great trip overall. 

 

 

 

 

 

This morning we said our farewell, without any particular sadness, to the Takayama Ouan Hotel. I suppose I should not be so harsh on this place as the staff has been unfailingly pleasant and helpful. It is just not the place I would have picked to stay, and I was irritated that we ended up here. We are trying Japan’s famous luggage forwarding services. We packed a small overnight bag to take with us to Kanazawa today, and we should be reunited with our two larger suitcases in Tokyo on Saturday. 

We put the bags that were coming with us today in a locket at the train station and took a local train to Hida Furakawa, a village about 10 kilometers from Takayama. As expected, the train left the station at 9:40 precisely. We reached our destination 15 minutes later. Our travel agent had arranged for us to take a bike ride through the countryside here with a guide. We wandered through the town and, with the help of Google, found the bike tour office. We liked our guide right away. He had lived and studied in Toronto, and not only did he have a solid mastery of English, he also understood North American sensibilities. We had some company today, two older Spaniards, a married couple. We also liked them, even though we somehow never quite learned their names. He was a retired electrical engineer, and he spoke excellent English. His wife spoke little English, though she was absolutely delighted that I could converse with her in Spanish. 

One we all had our bikes and had adjusted them, we were off through the quiet streets of the village. The old neighborhoods of Hida Furukawa are beautifully preserved. 

As we rode along, everyone greeted us with a cheerful “ohiogozaimas” or “good morning.” The secondary students had to practice their English by calling out “Hello! How are you?” to use as we passed. I found it hard to imagine Americans in most places being so friendly. 

As we rode along, we learned a great deal about the different types of rice that are planted here. The Japanese prefer short-grain rices instead of the long-grain varieties that are more common in California. They grow ordinary rice for daily use, sticky rice for making sushi, and a special almost round rice that will be distilled into sake. Our guide confirmed that few farmers make much money from growing rice and that evading otherwise harsh taxes was the principal reason for planting year after year. He pointed out that they also grow soybeans here and also different types of vegetables. We came across a family planting some vegetables today.

 

We also had a chance to see where they raise the famous Hida beef. Japanese beef is the opposite of free-range beef. The cattle are raised in barns and fed a rich diet before they are slaughtered. 

It gave me pause.

We stopped at a farmhouse. Our guide explained that the house was extremely large by Japanese standards, but that was because several generations of the same family lived there. 

The farmer’s wife was quite happy to show us around and even let us go inside to see the room for receiving guests. It is not easy to describe Japanese rooms sometimes as their functions are different from those of American or European rooms. 

We stopped at a spring on a small hillside. John refilled his water bottle.

and our guide used the same spring water to make us some tea.

We passed over the train tracks 

and soon we were back in the village.

We said goodbye to our guide and our Spanish friends, and headed back to catch the train. Our return train was an “express” which probably saved us a minute or two, hardly worth the extra ¥300. 

Back in Takayama, we had a quick cup of coffee. We grabbed our belongings and went from the train station to the bus station next door. We were headed to Kanagawa, but along the way we were scheduled to stop at Shirakawa-go for a couple hours. You can see why I did not want to be carrying all our belongings with us! Unfortunately, this bus did not have reserved seats and it was insanely crowded. I had a regular seat, but poor John had to endure 65 minutes on a folding seat in the aisle. It was torture. 

Shirakawa-go is high in the mountains. The climate is harsh: the area experiences some of the heaviest snowfall in the country. It was so remote from other settlements that it developed a fairly unique culture and style of architecture. Now connected by highway to both Takayama, Kanazawa, and other cities, it has become a magnet for tourists who want to see the unique gassho-style homes. It is designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

There are about 300 of these houses in all. Some are still used as private homes. Other have been converted into shops and restaurants. Others form a folk village museum here. John was not feeling that great after his miserable bus ride, so we just had some coffee and a soft serve and walked around a bit. We did not really have time for the folk museum, and I figured that I had learned most of this stuff in Hida, anyhow. 

Around four thirty we boarded the second bus. We had reserved seats, actually, very good ones, on this bus and it was not all that crowded, either. We took a final look at Shirakawa-go

and continued on to Kanazawa. 

We arrived in Kanazawa around six o’clock. We took a cab to our hotel in the center of the small city. We are staying at the Hotel Tokyu. It is a Hilton kind of place designed for business travelers and western tourists. The room is the standard size for this kind of hotel, but after our accommodations in Takayama it seems like Versailles. 

In the evening, we asked the helpful man at the front desk for a dinner recommendation. He asked what we wanted and I said that I really wanted tonkotsu ramen. He said that was an easy one, and suggested a place about a minute’s walk away. We found it without much problem. It was a small place with only a couple tables and a larger counter. We took a place at the counter, and a few minutes later were slurping the most delicious ramen I have ever had. It was far from the fanciest meal I have had in Japan, but it might be the most satisfying. 

I tried to like our hotel a little better today. John took me up the to spa on the roof this morning. It hardly compared to the onsen in Matsumoto, but it was clean, relatively uncrowded, and there was a nice view from the outside tub. We had breakfast at the hotel’s restaurant. It was a buffet of some western and mostly Japanese food. Nothing was awful, but nothing was great, either.

We had a guided tour of the city this morning. Our guide was a charming young woman named Akiko. She spoke quite good English. It turned out that she had lived and studied in Halifax for a year. Her walking tour focused on the special foods of this region. It was a pleasant way to spend a morning. For much of the tour, we walked along the river. 

There were dozens of stalls set up on the embankment. We stopped at many of them. We tasted different types of miso, looked at unusual vegetables, and sampled local specialties. One of the places I liked best was a coffee cart that sold espresso in cups made from cookie dough. They also did very cute designs on the top of the cappuccino foam.

We walked through the narrow streets of the old merchants’ quarter. While not quite as extensive as similar neighborhoods in Kyoto, there is a truly impressive amount of old houses and shops in Takayama. For some reason, though, I did not seem to take pictures here. I guess I was too busy eating….

We  stopped at a very large shrine on a hillside.

There was some kind of event going on, and there were a large number of older people there wearing kimono. The men all had the emblem of the shrine on their gray and black kimono. I man was talking to them over a loud speaker and they seemed to be intently listening. Akiko did not give us much of a sense of what was going on, but I wondered if it was in some way political. Shinto practice in recent years has often been linked to quite conservative elements in Japanese society. 

Instead, she took our picture.

Our last stop were at a place that sold grilled rice on a stick

and a little shop that sold pretty little tea sweets. 

After four lovely hours together, we said goodbye to Akiko. John and I had some time here and decided to look at some of the local shops. After shopping for fifteen or twenty minutes, I realized that I did not have my camera. I was upset as I this would be the third camera I have somehow lost on a trip. But this being Japan, probably the most honest country in the world, it was exactly where I had left it on a post on the busiest street in Takayama. 

We have been amazed in Japan to find everything left out without fear of theft. Good bicycles are left overnight in front of houses or stores. Antique shops leave stuff outside on tables. You never hear the sound, so ubiquitous in Los Angeles, of cars locking and unlocking. 

There are many sophisticated museums in Takayama, but John wanted to go to one that was not, the Takayama Showa Kan. Showa refers to the regnal years of the Emperor Hirohito, 1926 – 1989. Kan simply means hall or big room. This private museum is devoted to the popular culture of Japan during that era. 

John insisted on having me pose in the school room. I actually was a little upset about the angles in the triangle. You did not need a protractor to understand why this measurement was wrong.

Meanwhile, John was the epitome of post-war angst in a small luncheonette. 

We headed back to the train station. On the way, we stopped at the largest Buddhist temple in Takayama. Most of it was closed up, but the architecture was lovely.

One of the most famous things at this temple is a massive tree that is supposed to be about 1200 years old. It is still early spring here, so it was not at its best.

We had bus tickets at 1:10 to go to Hirayu Onsen, the hot spring located high in the mountains. We had stopped here briefly on our way to Takayama. The bus ride, which lasted about an hour, was not unpleasant at all. I brought along my pocket wifi and did some work on this blog as we rode up. The hot springs area is mostly a ski resort, and it has looks a lot like many second or third tier North American ski resorts. It’s not Whistler. John wanted to get something to eat, and we fumbled around with an automated system for ordering your food. The staff tried to helpful, though nobody seemed to speak a word of English. The cafeteria was almost deserted. After we finished eating, we went up to the onsen on the third floor.

As Bette Davis famously said, “What a dump!” There were only two pools, one indoors and one out-of-doors. Both were starting to fall apart. There was genuine hot springs water here with a high calcium content and a trace of sulphur, but the nice water could not make up for the sorry state of the facilities. We were supposed to spend about two hours here, but after a few minutes we figured out the schedule for taking a bus back to Takayama sooner. I am pretty annoyed by this. One of the reasons for working with a travel agent is to avoid mistakes that waste an entire afternoon on a short trip, and this was definitely a wasted afternoon. 

This evening we went to a restaurant Akiko had recommended called Kyoyo. It was a charcoal-barbecue-on-your-table joint located in what appeared to be an old nineteenth century house. The food was not bad at all, but the place was filled with Europeans, mostly Dutch. There were only a handful of Japanese customers. 

We have a busy, busy day tomorrow. 

 

We were awake fairly early again today. I took a last little soak in our private outdoor hot springs tub. We packed our stuff, and around seven thirty went down to breakfast. We liked the fare a little better today: we had salmon instead of mackerel, and there was a particularly delicious soup of hot soy milk and tofu. Really, it was quite good.

At nine we caught a cab down to the Matsumoto bus terminal. Ken had suggested getting to the station early so we could get the best seats on the bus. As it turned out, we need not have worried much here as there were a handful of us on the bus. The route from Matsumoto to Takayama is supposed to have spectacular scenery, but both John and I were a bit disappointed here. Leaving Matsumoto, the road steadily climbs towards the mountains as it goes cities that grow progressively smaller. Entering the mountains, the bus traveled along a road through a steep valley carved, no doubt, by a glacier during the last ice age. This could have been as dramatic as we were promised, but the valley had been filled with a series of small hydroelectric dams, most of them looking like they had been put in about 80 years ago. The road, a narrow two lanes at best, looked like it had been put in mostly to allow construction and maintenance equipment to reach successively more remote projects. It certainly had never been designed for the amount of travel it had today. As we looked at the aging walls of ugly concrete stretching across the ravine, I wondered how many of them still did produced much energy or did much to prevent flooding. Dams like this are being torn down across the American West today. There was more and more snow on the hillside the higher we went, and when we reached the summit there was at least a couple feet still on the ground.

We stopped briefly at a hot springs complex almost at the top of the pass. I think that John and I are supposed to come here tomorrow. As you can see from the picture below, Japanese buses are not much like their gruesome American counterparts, and much of that has to do with the wonderfully polite drivers. They are all smartly dressed in clean uniforms and wear white gloves. 

When our ride resumed, the road grew wider and straighter as it went down the southern side of the pass. The snow quickly seemed to disappear, and after a couple of miles it was completely gone. We were both also disappointed as we began to enter Takayama. This is a city that tour books praise for its traditional charm. We did not see much of that as we came into the city. We saw car dealerships and home improvement stores, chain restaurants and grocery stores, all fronted with large parking lots, all looking drearily reminiscent of the same sort of streets linking so many American cities. One of the odd benefits of travel, sadly, is that you lose the illusion that things must be better elsewhere and that your own country and community are uniquely without charm.

The bus station is Takayama is located, as seems typical for Japan, adjacent to the city train station. I had looked up our hotel on the internet, and I could spot it two or three blocks further along this long, straight commercial stretch. John once observed that much of Anchorage looked like it could survive both winter and a nuclear blast, and the cement and steel structure we saw here in Takayama looked about the same. Our hotel, the Takayama Ouan, is thirteen stories high. From a distance is looks scarcely different from any of the cheap chain hotels that line the perimeter of the Dallas-Fort Worth airport. When you enter, though, you discover that they have made an effort to make it more Japanese, a kind of bargain ryokan for the backpackers and pensioners. We registered without any difficulty, but they informed us that our room would not be ready until three o’clock. It was about twelve thirty, then, so we allowed them to give us a receipt for our luggage and headed back toward the train station.

Both our travel agent and our guidebooks had recommended the Hida Folk Village. At bus station they sold us a combination of bus tickets and entrance to the museum. It was not particularly far from us and no doubt if we had been desperate enough to save a dollar each we could have walked it. The folk village is a small Japanese version of Skansen in Stockholm or Sturbridge Village in Massachusetts. The brochure we were given as we entered spoke of all the artisans in period clothes who worked in the different houses and buildings of the village, but there were none to be seen: we saw only a few maintenance workers in green vests wandering about looking as if they were making a list of projects to be completed later. There were few visitors either, and most of the time when we entered a building we were the only ones there.\

All of this makes it sounds as if the Hida Folk Village was another disappointment, but it was in fact one of the most interesting places I have seen since I have been in Japan. There is ample multilingual interpretive material throughout the open-air museum, and just about everything in Japanese is also translated in to English and Chinese. The latter surprised me as the few foreign visitors we saw were either generally British or American. Like Sturbridge Village, many of whose buildings were rescued when the city of Boston flooded valleys to create the Quabbin Reservoir, a good many of these home had been saved from the ill-conceived hydroelectric projects of earlier decades. The folk village has both a narrow and a broad focus. Unlike Skansen, which collects buildings from across Sweden, the Hida Village restricts its focus to the mountain areas around Takayama; unlike Sturbridge Village, which attempts to recreate a specific era in regional history, the buildings here date from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.
The buildings do an admirable job of depicting the difficult lives of the peasants who lived in this area from the Tokugawa through the Taisho periods. The mountain areas had little good arable land, and it must have been a struggle to raise the food needed to survive in this difficult climate. There is an abundance of timber in the mountains, and cutting and sawing trees was an important part of the regional economy. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, silk manufacturing became a major industry in Japan and this silk production became an important cottage industry.

Most of the houses are quite small, though a few, probably intended for a large extended family, are larger. They are generally made entirely of wood, though some have thatched roofs. 

Whether large or small, the central feature of each house was one or more irori or large indoor hearth. 

There was no real chimney in these homes. The ceiling above the hearth was slatted to allow the smoke to escape into the rather and out the roof. This did not work perfectly, and the beams of the ceiling roof and some of the interior was covered in soot. The interpretive material pointed out, though, that this actually protected the wood from both moisture and insects.

I think this is no doubt true, but I wonder what the health affects of spending hours in those smoky homes must have been for the individuals. And they did spend most of their time there during the long winters. Fires were kept constantly burning and generally there was a pot of miso soup always above the fire. Families sat around the fire to keep warm.

The area around the fire, of course, was earth and stone. There were floors further away from the hearth in many houses, and these were covered with tatami mats. The only furniture was usually there to provide storage for clothes or valuables. 

Sliding windows and doors with rice paper allowed in some light and, I am sure, most of the cold.

Every home, except those designed for seasonal use like the woodcutters’ cabin, had a shrine. 

John is starting to meditate fairly frequently, so these family altars were an inspiration to him. 

I was really struck by how profoundly religion was a part of the lives of people in Japanese villages. 

Villages not only had shrines and temples, but statues and images were almost everywhere.

The distinction between Shinto and Buddhist practices did not appear to be important, and elements of both could be found in homes and communities. I liked these Rokujizou statues. In Japanese Buddhism, Jizo is a bodhisattva who saves souls from hell and helps them to paradise. Each statue of the Jizo here illustrates one of the six paths of transmigration. 

There were also many pictures of Ema. These horse pictures were common gifts made to shrines, and people put them in their houses for good health for their animals. 

Another thing I found fascinating was one house where some more recent photographs of people in places in Takayama were displayed. This was a dinner in Takayama. I doubt that the woman is a geisha — that really scarcely existed outside of Kyoto by this period — but I am sure that is what those businessmen wanted her to be. 

And this was a cherry blossom party sometime in the 1950s. I doubt there were any men dressed up as women in that group. 

We had a wonderful weather and from the folk village there is a glorious vista of the Northern Alps.

There is also a less glorious view of a bizarre new temple. We learned later that this is the headquarters of a new religion called “Mahikari” or “True Light.”  It was founded in 1963 by Yoshikazu Okada, a former officer of the Imperial Guard, who had a vision of the “Great Creator” when he had seriously ill. Most of its followers come from outside Japan. 

After a couple hours, we had seen just about everything and were ready to go back. I retrieved our jackets from a coin locker, and we had a soft serve as we waited for the bus. There was a small English bus tour group here, and they looked like they looked as if they all had faithfully watched every episode of Big Brother or Coronation Street. Back at the hotel, we received the key to our room. After our last two hotels, this one is utterly dreary. The room is so small that I wondered if cells in minimum security prisons were larger. There were tatami mats on the floor and a double futon instead of a bed, but no amount of paint or Pier One decor could give the room any charm. We serially unpacked, and as both of us were tired, we took a nap.

In the evening, we were ready for some dinner. After a couple days of the ryokan fare, John was ready for something less Japanese. I knew that this area of Japan is famous for its beef, and many in Japan consider Hida beef the equal of the more famous Kobe beef. Most of the restaurants in Takayama feature Hida beef prepared either in Japanese or in western styles. I picked a French restaurant here. While French cuisine is rather out of fashion in the United States these days, the Japanese seem to be the world’s last francophiles and it is not unusual to see stores and restaurants in Japan with French or, more likely, faux French names. Ours was name “Mi Midi,” a moniker I doubt any bistro in Lyon would sport. We had 200 grams of the A4 grade beef cooked medium rare. It was quite exceptional, and the hors d’oeuvres and desserts were also good. The small restaurant with red-checked bistro curtains was quite full, and we were seated next to another English tour group. This one was much different from the earlier English bus group. I sent John a text after the sat down suggesting that this was an outing for members of the Warwickshire branch of the Conservative Party. They were much concerned with making sure that the gin and tonics were made properly.

Tomorrow we have a walking tour of Takayama and a trip up to the mountain spa.

It was a little strange waking up on the floor. A Japanese ryokan, even a modern one like ours, is nothing like a western hotel room. We are staying at a place called the KAI Matsumoto. KAI, pronounced “kie”, is an upscale Japanese hotel chain that specializes in spa resorts with a traditional Japanese feel to them. The Matsumoto facility is located in a mostly residential neighborhood on the edge of the city. The hotel does everything to create the illusion, however, that it is completely separate from the surrounding city. Windows look out into carefully designed walled gardens or they are covered with rice paper or fabric screens that hide the outside world. Everything is very quiet. We have an enormous suite here. A hallway covered in tatami mats opens up onto two large rooms separated from the hallway and from each other with sliding doors. The rice paper on the doors have a subtle design of branches and leaves. Walls are covered with wood or brown fabric. Everything is calm and muted.

Not everything is completely traditional, of course. Ryokan have modern electrical, heating, air-conditioning, and plumbing systems. The plumbing, in fact, is one of the most fun things about Japan. The toilets in this country are far more high tech than those found in America or Europe. The seats are electrically heated so that it always feels warm and comfortable when you sit down. And after you have, er, finished, you press a button and a steady stream of water immediately cleanses you. 

Not only that, but pressing another button will deliver a steam of dry air as well.

Guests at the ryokan are generally expected to dress in traditional Japanese style in the public spaces. When we arrived we were given simple gray *yukata* with a blue band to tie it. We also had a small jacket that apparently went went it. There were also a lime green pants and tunic provided, but this seemed to be an alternative to the *yukata*. We were also given those wooden flip flops, and these came with a set of socks that allowed for a space between the two. I think you cannot comfortably walk in these shoes if you did not grow up in this country. John and I never quite did figure out the ins and outs of dressing here, but I think the staff and the other guests are just pleased that foreigners make some effort. As far as we can see, we are the only westerners here. Everybody on the staff speaks a little English, but only a little. And, as we speak no Japanese, we have to be grateful for what communication we can have.

We had our breakfast this morning, as we had our dinner last night, in a small private room. I understand now why Japanese restaurants are not open for breakfast. The main dish for breakfast today was grilled, whole mackerel. I tried to eat it, though I nearly choked on some of the bones. I was glad that nobody except John was there to try to see me try to fillet this thing with chopsticks. The rest of the meal consisted of a lot of small bits of pickles and a semi-raw egg with fish roe on it. I was glad for the bowl of rice.

We met our guide promptly at nine in the lobby of the whole. His name was Keniji Nakano, but he preferred to be called just Ken. We learned later than Ken was in his early forties, though he looked younger than that. His English was quite good. He had lived in Los Angeles for several years in the early nineties, and he had studied at Los Angeles City College. We liked him right away. We had a large minivan and a driver for the three of us. One of the things we noticed about all the taxis in Japan is that they all have antimacassars on all the seats. 

On our way into town, we stopped at a small convenience store. I was jolted to see a familiar sign from my childhood.

One of the interesting things when you travel abroad is that you find things you remember from years ago. There are brands that no longer exist in the United States that continue to thrive abroad. I had not thought of Lawson’s Dairy for many decades, but here it was in Matsumoto, a local convenience store. 

Our first real stop for the day was a scenic outlook on a hill not far from the center of town. Ken told us that during the several hundred years ago there had been a smaller fort here. Back then it was important to scan the valley for attacking troops belonging to other feudal lords. Now the hills is a city park and there is a small elevated viewing platform where once the military tower had stood. The day was perfectly clear and the view of the Japanese Alps was breathtaking. 

Before we left, Ken insisted on snapping a picture of us.

We left the park and went to the center of town to see the major attraction of this part of the country, Matsumoto Castle. This is not only one of the few castles left in Japan, but it was even in its time possibly the most beautiful. Four hundred years ago, there were hundreds of castles in Japan. After all, Japan was essentially a feudal society until the middle of the nineteenth century. Feudalism in Japan was not precisely the same as it was in Europe. The daimyo did not own the land or the people on the land in the same way that one of King John’s barons would have. The deeply personal aspects of fealty and vassalage characteristic of the European system were absent in Japan. Instead, the daimyo was simply entitled to a certain amount of the rice or other staples that the peasants in his area produced, and he in turn was expected to protect them from hostile outside forces.

But back to the castle. The years before the establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate at the beginning of the seventeenth century, were a time of complete political chaos in Japan. The daimyo were fighting among themselves for control of the country. The Matsumoto Han or area was one of the most fertile areas in the nation, so control of this area was important and the it was important to build strong fortifications. As it turned out, however, these were not needed because not long after it was finished, Tokugawa Ieyasu established effective control over the country and the civil wars ended. So we have not only an intact castle but one that is essentially in perfect condition.

Japanese castles were made of primary of wood. They relied on elaborate systems of moats to help protect them from enemies. The current moat around the castle, essentially now just a big koi pond, is only a fraction of the size of the original most system. But it certainly helps enhance the beauty of this building. 

The moat was designed to be just a little wider than 16th century Japanese cannons could fire, so making it an effective fortification. The bridge that connects it to the outside is a later peacetime addition. 

It was also far, far deeper than it is today. Now the moat is home to some carp who almost seem to threaten the tourist unwilling to feed them.

We entered through a fairly formidable gate. 

In the sixteenth century, there would have been another large building him, the residence of the daimyo and some of his senior samurai. The castle itself was not a residence but functioned more as an armory. The daimyo’s house was destroyed in a fire in the seventeenth century, and was never rebuilt. This period wood block, though, gives an indication of what the close of the castle probably looked like.

As mentioned before, the castle was constructed entirely of wood. And Japanese carpenters and joiners were adept at using no nails at all to build these enormous structures. There is a bit of iron bracing seen in places, but this was added many years and probably more than a few earthquakes later. 

It was hard to get a good picture inside the castle. Not only was it dark, but it we were always moving because there was a steady stream of visitors behind us. I did get a couple interesting shots, though. Here is one of the many images of carp that are found on the roof of the castle. 

Ken explained that because the carp seem to be so full of water, they were seen as protecting people from fire. 

Right at the top I caught a glimpse of the shrine to the moon goddess. She was also considered to be effective against fires. 

After we had toured the castle, there were opportunities for taking more pictures. We posed with a guy in a samurai costume.

And Ken took a less silly picture to help us remember our trip here.

Ken took us on a tour of the old part of Matsumoto. This is not a big area. There are a couple of streets in the center of town where the old houses have survived both frequent fires and the desire for new and modern things. 

This street, and another on the other side of the river, were originally merchants shops with residences on the second floor and sometimes a store house in the rear. Today, they are all simply shops and restaurants. Probably the most interesting of all of them for us were the antique stores. We found a couple things that we loved, but were not quite willing to pay a couple thousand dollars plus shipping. 

We stopped by a Shino shrine 

and Ken taught me how to properly pray to a Shinto deity. You throw a coin into the box—the ones with holes in the center are considered particularly lucky—and then bow twice and clap twice. Make a request and bow one time more. If there is a bell, you can ring it at that point. You can also write down your requests, too.

We had a lovely lunch in a beautiful old inn. We sat at a table overlooking the garden. We walked around the garden afterwards.

You can see one of the backyard storehouses of a merchant here. The black and white crosshatch pattern is classic to this area. Ken took us by a spring where John filled up his water bottle.

We saw a Buddhist shrine.

We also saw a shop selling the Japanese wooden flip flops. These look great, but I would never wear them unless forced to. They are easily the most awkward and uncomfortable things I have ever put on my feet.

One of the highlights of a visit to Matsumoto is normally a trip to its art museum which specializes in woodblock prints. Unfortunately for us, it is closed on Mondays. But we did stop by the museum because there is a big exhibition of works by Yayoi Kusama, a local artist who has become a worldwide sensation. She is known for her colorful works like these massive sculptures outside the museum.

She is equally known for her colorful hair. Nearing ninety, she still colors her hair fire-
engine red. 

Our final stop on the trip was a visit to a wasabi farm. I was almost ready to tell Ken we were not interested in this as it seemed like the usual kind of things you get stuck doing with a guide, but it was actually really interesting. It turns out that wasabi is not at all easy to grow. It requires constant fresh water at a steady temperature. This area is one of the few places in the world where the conditions are perfect for it. 

The farm has a Shinto Shrine.

The giant candles are supposed to indicate how powerful the god who resides here is. You know what they say about gods with big feet…. But on a serious note, the farm is also filled with statues from nearby farms and villages. The local gods of this area are a happily married couple. 

John was more fascinated to learn that Dream, the 1990 Kurasawa picture, had been partly filmed here. This waterwheel was built as a prop for the film.

And John wanted to sit where the great man himself had sat to direct.

I will remember wasabi farm every time I have sushi! It was lovely. 

We had a short visit to a sake distillery after this. We had said that we really did not want to see the manufacturing process, but Ken was eager to show us the Meiji-era house. I had an headache by this time, and I think I did not show much interest here. We returned to the hotel, and had one picture of all of us. 

In the evening, we had the usual amazing dinner and started the process of packing up.