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.
