Takayama Matsuri

The spring festivals in Takayama is really beautiful. It's a bit like the one in Gion in July, but it is in a much smaller cit. So it has a small town, community feel to it. Big wooden floats, basically three story houses on wheels with walls made out of really old tapestries or scroll paintings, are paraded through the town. This one was really beautiful so we took a picture next to it... like you do.
Also, they have puppets here. The puppet performances are the hi-lite of the three day festival. They are suprisingly well animated (controlled?) and do some unexpected stuff. Even though they announced the story of each puppet show in Eglish before it started I was still a little surprised when this doll appeared with a dog looking mask.
Takayama has delicious beef. If you go there you should try it. We ate dango at the slowest food stand/hole in the wall place known to man. It was cold even though they put it over charcoal and tasted terrible. How can you mess up mochi on sticks covered in sauce? geese!

Gifu

We took a trip to Gifu, the prefecture to the east of Fukui to see some culture. Our main reason for going was to see the Takayama spring festival. We got derailed from going last year because of a car accident, so we were quite anxious to make it there in one piece. well, I was probably the only one who was worried.

Gifu is pretty famous for some villages in the Shirakawa-go. I think it means Shira river valley. but no research went into that assumption. These three villages are world heritage sites and are amazing because of their huge houses with thatched roofs. Apparently it's really expensive to thatch a roof, and you have to protect them against fire, huge amounts of snow, and various other things. Maintaining these houses is costly and requires the whole village to help each other out. So the tourist yen and government loans basically keep this village alive by helping to pay for re-thatching every 30 years. Otherwise it would just be metal buildings built to last 50 years at the most like the rest of boring, ugly Japan.


After going to the village, we visited a park devoted to preserving lots of different buildings. They were from lots of different parts of the region and used for many purposes. It was a bit more sterile than Shirakawago because there weren't bus loads of people, telephone wires, souvenir shops, cars and buses to be avoided, and annoying bullhorn messages all of the time. I liked both places, don't get me wrong. the real villages do feel lived in and constantly changing with the times - but seeing something a bit more peaceful was also nice.

I love trees

This weekend we joined up with the Takefu Rotary club and the international association (EIA) to plant some trees. Apparently these beech trees we planted live to be about 300 to 500 years old. Well most are getting on up to a ripe old age of 400 years. So to end a year themed with nature conservation and education the Rotary club decided to spruce up the forest with... not spruce trees. (Although there were still plenty of those living.)

The funny part about the day was actually the fact that we didn't plant any trees. Too bad, huh. The weather was predicted to be terrible thus causing a hike up a mountain to be dangerous. Also the ground would be muddy and we would do a lot of damage to the side of the mountain and underbrush and stuff like that if 60 people were walking around. or so I think I understood from the Japanese explanation. When I don't understand I usually just tend to fill in the gaps with what I feel like they should be saying. The Rotary club planted all of the trees except two the day before. So our work consisted of hiking the mountain, eating lunch, drinking tea, and putting strings around the saplings to help them grow straight. not that taxing, but we got to talk with friends and support our community.

This is the EIA team along with students from Takefu Higashi High School who speak great English!

Huge Kites

Ready to Go
Originally uploaded by robizumi.

Hamamatsu has a huge kite festival. By that I mean the kites are huge... well the festival is huge, too. It seems like each neighborhood in Hamamatsu had a kite. There were more than 100 neighborhoods represented at this festival.

A friend told us about this festvial when we were camping and we decided to drive there and check it out. Hamamatsu, which is in Shizuoka prefecture, was about a 4 hour drive from our campsite. Which meant we had to get up at 6 in the morning to drive there. It wasn't too hard to wake up early since we were camping though.

The kites were amazingly huge. It seemed like they needed about 10 people to get them off the ground. It wasn't that windy but the kites managed to stay aloft. I was suprised. There were tons of people there, but most of them seemed to be affliated with a kite team. All of the team memebers had matching happi (coats) with the symbol that was on their kite. A lot of kites just had kanji on them but many had pictures of foxes, or samurai helmets.

When the moved the kites out to the field to fly them, they had a small parade. Usually this seemed to consist of old men holding the kite and small children playing trumpets and drums. It was pretty fun to see. Often you were just encouraged to duck under the kites instead of move out of they way.

Camping during Golden Week

Lake Biwa at Sunrise
Originally uploaded by robizumi.

Golden Week is a series of public holidays here in Japan. The Japanese don't really understand how to take it easy so right smack dab in the middle of the week are two work days. So it could be this huge great vacation but instead they are two smaller vacations with an insultingly short work week in the middle.

All that being said, we went to Shiga prefecture for camping. We snuggled right next to Biwako the largest lake in Japan. It was pretty big. We walked around, enjoyed nature, and tried not to do a whole lot. There were hawks picking up spawing fish out of the stream right next to us. There were people with dogs every where. It was a nice time. We managed to make some steak fajitas and get some hot sparkler action in.