Bridge to Heaven

Last Sunday I took a road trip to Amanohashidate, or the Bridge to Heaven. It's one of the "Three Sites of Japan", but Japan has a lot of "Three somethings of Japan" (three famous castles, three national treasures, three famous mountains, the list goes on), so it should be taken with a grain of salt. There's a spot on a mountain where you're supposed to take a picture, but by the time I got there it was already closed.

One surprising thing about Japan is how difficult it can be to get around. There maps are kind of bad and usually confusing. Most roads don't have names; none of the roads near my house have one. I guess everyone just uses GPS. I looked on Google maps and it said I could take Route 9, a main road in my town, almost all of the way there. Turns out there were two Route 9s, one with a small, round blue triangle and the other with a small, round hexagon. Only after returning home from a 2 hour detour did I realize my mistake. In any case, the weather wasn't very good so I probably wouldn't have gotten a very good picture. Here's a beach:


Apparently people go swimming here during the summer, as there were little fake tree stump showers all over the place. There was also a couple of observation bays. I think I'll come back sometime to go swimming (and it won't be drenched in oil!)


Like most of the historic places I've been to in Japan there was a famous assassination here. I think the assassination site I see most often is now a Starbucks.


A man fishing off the bridge:


A lot of temples and shrines will have trees with white pieces of paper hanging off them that people put up as their wishes. This one had little white fans that were all pre-printed:



PS: I edited how you can make comments, so it should be a lot easier to do now. Any comments are appreciated!

PPS: John, if you decide to write on this with an alias I don't know, please tell me so I don't get freaked out like my last blog.

Giant Salamander

Last night I met up with some people in Kyoto for dinner and drinks. One of them was too cheap to go to any bar so we ended up going to the Kamo river to drink beers from a convenience store. It's a good thing we did, because we saw a couple giant salamanders in the river there. They grow up to 5 feet long, but the ones we saw were maybe 3-4 feet long. They were trying to go up river but were impeded by a breakwater. They're pretty rare to see, especially in Kyoto. All of the Japanese I talked to there had never seen one before in the wild (though I'm not sure if the middle of Kyoto qualifies as 'wild'). One guy tried telling me it was an alligator, but they don't have those in Japan. Apparently someone called the police because two officers showed up at one point.

That's the best thing police have to do on a Saturday night in Japan; watch salamanders try to get up a river dam.

Higashi Honhonganji

This is a temple about a minute away from where Ben and Claire are staying. It's under repairs right now so there is a lot of construction around the site. The gate outside and the fountain in the road make an impressive site:


The buildings inside are even bigger than the gate. The smaller of the two main halls is covered by an even larger building while being renovated. The one that is still open is the second largest wooden building in Japan:


Surrounding the temple grounds is a tall wall and moat. There are a number of carp in the moat (I think they're considered the emperor's pets) and the occasional turtle:


Inside this temple and many others is a spring where you can wash your hands and rinse your mouth before you enter the temple proper. This one has a dragon's mouth for the fountain:


There weren't many people there when I went, but a few families had kids running around:

Reform now; because children are the future

Since I've lived in Sonobe, I have noticed a lot of politicians have their signs up all year round. I'm not sure if it's from the supporters or a benefit of office, but you see the same faces all over the place. I did not notice this when I lived in Nagoya, but I may have missed it then. When I've gone to Kyoto and Osaka these posters also seem less prominent, but maybe they're just hidden with all the other advertising clutter.

The guy I see the most around my town* is Yasuhiro Nakagawa of the formerly ruling LDP (I assume he's still in office).


I never paid much attention to it until one day I walked up close to one and saw the smaller picture hidden in his sports coat. His ad basically says "Reform now, because children are the future" and he lives up to it; apparently he has six children spread out among his four wives. I also like that most of the children and one of the women look like they're crying.


"Children" and "future" seem to be the most common words I hear from people campaigning**, though that may be because I don't understand or try to follow what they're saying. I find this ironic because there are so few children in Japan that they population is expected to decline significantly in the next 50 years, from about 125 million today to perhaps 80 million. Somewhat anecdotally I can say that the average classroom size in my schools seems to get smaller as the kids get younger. It's also a widely reported statistic that up to 1/3 of Japanese couples (including 1/4 of recently married, young couples) do not have sex at all. So really, perhaps children aren't the future.



* I also see a lot of Kazuo Shii, the leader of the Japanese Communist Party or JCP. The JCP gets a fair amount of support, something like 7% in an election last year. Two of their main issues are wanting the US military out of Japan and the destruction of all nuclear weapons. I know a number of people who said they have voted for the Communists for those very reasons, but also because they are upset

** This does not include people driving cars or otherwise speaking in public areas. The people in cars typically just repeat the candidate's name and "please" while driving around neighborhoods, rolling down a window so that passengers in all four seats can wave gloved hands at anyone who happens to be in the vicinity. I am 100% serious about this.

Other people are often outside of a crowded shopping area standing on top of a minibus speaking into a PA system or blow-horn. These typically are super-nationalists who are criticizing US troops in the country, China/Korea, or sayingt something else that comes off as generally negative.

Hidden Fox Shrine

Just off one of the main roads in my town are some torii, or wooden gateways used in Shrines. They look like this:



Though I've seen these gates many times, I never bothered to go up there until recently. The gates are on top of an old concrete sloped wall like many that considered off-limits. In fact, this one is from October 1941 (I think). This stone was near the site. It says "Showa 16, October". Showa is the posthumous name for Hirohito and his reign was from 1925-1989, so Showa 16 would be 1941:


At the top I was surprised to see a surprising new and well maintained shrine. There doesn't seem to be any access to this area except for an old walkway that is being encroached upon by plants. Nevertheless, a pretty clean shrine was sitting up at the top:


The reason I call it Hidden Fox Shrine is because I don't know what it is properly called and there were two statues of foxes in the largest building:


This little mountain was a fairly steep climb up, so it offered a good view of at least parts of Sonobe:



I think these photos make Sonobe look a lot bigger than it actually is.

More Osaka

Some pictures I took from around Osaka the last time I was there. This is around Namba, one of the big shopping and night districts. It was particularly crowded when I was there:



A river between some of the covered walkways:



Eventually I walked to an island where the main municipal buildings are kept (as in city hall and maybe the courthouse) At one end of the island is a park:



There were several roads that went above the island. Most of them had some kind of mural or painting on the walkway leading up to the roads. Here's one:



I'm not quite sure what this building is, maybe an assembly or conference center. It's near city hall between a public library and ceramics museum. I think it's fairly new:

Sonobe Student Festival (I think)

The principal at one of my schools told me about a festival last Saturday in Sonobe at a temple down the street from where I live. I think he said it had to do with schools or students, though I'm not really sure. In any case, I stopped by and a lot of kids from my schools were there. At the central part of the temple I saw some kind of dance with on guy stacked on top of another and flute music playing:



There was also a parade with a bunch of kids in 1st grade or below. Most of them were wearing make-up and many were crying at various points:

Osaka Natural History Museum

Right now I'm in the middle of "Golden Week", a roughly week long chain of holidays that everyone has off work. Trains are a lot more crowded and so is pretty much anywhere you'd want to go. Nevertheless, on Thursday I went to the natural history museum in Osaka. They have a temporary exhibit with dinosaurs that has been advertised a lot.

Although the temporary exhibit itself was pretty good (though short), the museum was a bit of a let down. To be fair, the main part of the museum was free and the exhibit wasn't particularly expensive by Japanese standards. But I continue to be surprised at the relatively low quality of Japan's museums. Osaka is the second largest city in Japan, but this museum (with the possible exception of the special exhibit) paled in the comparison to even the University of Iowa natural history museum. Mostly it was insects, which was okay, but more comparable to the small museum locked away in the upstairs of my dad's office in Coe than to a world class city's museum.

I remember going to the natural history museum in Prague and seeing whale bones hanging up on the ceiling. Prague is thousands of miles from the ocean, but they still managed somehow to get a whale skeleton there. Japanese eat whales, but there weren't any animals larger than a raccoon at this museum (actually it was a 'tanooki', but similar to a raccoon).

One thing I did like was the way they used lights on the skeletons. One (the first one here) was done really well, while the others could have been better. I think they were limited in their abilities to use the light because of the confined space for the special exihibit. Anyway, here are some pictures:





The only large stuffed mammal I saw was in an elementary school. A lot of the kids in my town where bells on their bags to scare away bears, though I think they're pretty rare now. One was at some point killed, stuffed, and given to one of my schools. I don't know why, but they keep it in a stairwell that goes up to the roof, hidden behind some billboards. It surprised me the first time I saw it. I think it would be better displayed at the main entrance to the school.