Day 5: Chicago

Day 5: Chicago

At last we have a couple of days that we don't have to meet for the tour before 8:00.

In fact we don't have to meet until 8:30. So we had time for a leisurely breakfast and one last trip to the roof bath of the gods before we had to cram everything into our carry-on and hit the road.

We started out with a nice morning walk through the old part of the town to enjoy and participate in the morning market. At this time of the day, most of the little shops are open and a variety of goods are for sale. I wanted to get some locally produced handicraft and was thinking about a wooden rice bowl and some chop sticks. I went into a couple of shops before I found what I wanted. Not too expensive. Walked on for another 10 minutes and came to a different shop. There the same bowls were half the price I had paid. Dammit! This made me rather suspicious. I went and talked to our guide and (at the next shop) she asked the merchant. Turns out that just about all of the $10 bowls are “made abroad” (read China). So here I am buying tourist goods from China. Dammit, if I want chinese goods I will go to the gift shop at Multnomah Falls.

I did manage to get a locally made wooden sake cup.

I argue with myself that this can be a part of my shot glass “collection”.

This brings about the realization that all of my other shot glasses from various tourist locations were made in China. I could save myself a lot of time and effort by just visiting the shot glass factory in China and picking up a glass from every location in the world !! (perhaps next sabbatical).

Then,  on to a little tour buss that is going to transport us for the rest of the day. We are on our way to a place called Shirakawago. When ever our guide said it, it sounded like Chicago. This is a National Cultural area and features a large number of old traditional houses with thatched roofs. The architecture of these things is pretty cool. The ground floor is massive wood beams. The upper floors are the very slanted thatch roofs. The roofs are slanted because they get a lot of snow here in the winter. They are held together with sticks and rope and honest to god Boy Scout Square lashings. 

These first pictures are from the museum. Later from the live town.

 

Water mill (for pounding rice)(I think)

 

a Six Tatami mat room

Home Shrine. We see these in all of the old homes

Daniel has all ninja poses this trip

Sil Worm Paraphrenalia

It is BIG up there. (Well, in the big houses). See the Square Lashings?

A couple of other cool technology things:

1. In the upstairs area, the houses would keep and raise silk worms. The upstairs area was conducive to this because it was warmer during the winter. (because of the hearth fire)
2. The silk worms were used for 2 things. The first was silk. The second was that their excrement was processed to make an important and valuable ingredient for gunpowder. I am thinking that it must have been Potassium Nitrate.
3. The roofs used to last 50 years, but because the houses don't use wood fires for cooking and heating anymore, the roofs don't have the added protective anti-insect barrier provided by the smoke. So they only last 30 years. (And yes, I did ask how the smoke could be anti-insect if they were raising silk worms. That just caused all sorts of translation problems.)

This was a lovely little area with lots of water running through it. I mean, the town had water flowing everywhere through the ditches that are along the sides of the road. There must have been a couple of mountain creeks that were deverted through the town. The water was being used to flood the many rice fields, run little water mills, flow through private home gardens, even cool barrels of soft drinks. Make for a very green scene.

In town pictures start here.

I love this one. This is a rice paddy. The side walk is actually lower than the paddy, so I could take this without getting wet.

 

 

After lunch we are back on the buss and headed for kanazawa. This is a very mountainous area. Perhaps somewhat similar to the Tillamook coastal range (though bigger). The road we were on was an expressway and made its way literally through the mountains, via tunnels. Tunnel after tunnel. One tunnel was 10km long. I know of nothing remotely like this in the United States. Japan is just honeycombed with tunnels in this area. Between the tunnels is a bridge going over a gorge, where below there is often either a river or a dammed river. We were going through tunnels like that for about an hour. At one point we emerged from a tunnel onto a bridge that was just above and in front of a big dam. Behind the dam, two more tunnels came out of the hills. So this little gorge, that had no houses or even flat land for a house, had 3 roads suddenly spilling out of the mountains to cross over the river. It happened too fast for a picture, I wonder if I can find it on a map?

The dotted lines are ALL TUNNELS. Look at this !!

And now we are in Kanazawa in the tallest building in the rather large City. We are across the street from the train station and it has this remarkable entrance structure. It features what I think to be a modernistic Tori gate that is literally holding up the ultra modern metal and glass scalding structure.

 

A water Clock !!

It is a CLOCK

Made of water

Train Station

Our Hotel. Tallest building in the City 

Tain Station from our Hotel Room

While we were strolling around in the shopping mall next to the station, looking for some dinner, we found a couple of interesting things. I wandered into the Columbia store thinking it would be exactly like any other columbia store. But it was very different. The main thing was that the clothing articles were wildly and beautifully colored. Bright pastels. Very young and hip. I liked it. I haven't seen this kind of thing in the mother store back in portland. They also had a slip-on shoe for Fathers days that were wild colors and of the sort of design that is more typical for japanese comfort wear. Don't know if those would sell in the US or not.

Daniel visited a Music store. He likes JPOP (japanese pop music) and KPOP (Korean pop music) and was comparing it to Pop (American pop music). American pop music (which I would call, Rock) was around 1500 yen. Pretty much the same thing that you would pay in the US. Makes sense. But JPOP was 2400yen and KPOP was around 2800yen. How strange that Japanese music would cost more than US music right here in Japan. The music just isn't all that different.