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| Stone Lanterns at Kasuga Taisha, Nara |
With a
little over a week to go even we have to look at what we would like to do and
what we can do in practical terms without spending an awful lot of time
travelling. Coupled with this is that
our wonderful JR Rail Passes run out in about three or four days. So we’ve decided that we’ll have a car for
the last few days in the Japanese Alps.
This
means we can fit in a trip back to the north coast to a place called Matsue for
a couple of gardens. The main line Shinkansen
is closer to the southern coast so we head away eastwards from Nagasaki to
Okayama, then change to an express heading north. This runs through some of the best scenery
we’ve seen from the train because it has to go through some very hilly sections
on the way to Matsue. As always our
first port of call was the Tourist Information Office who are always unfailingly
eager and helpful with a stack of free maps and information. An added bonus is that they’re nearly always
set in or very close to the railway station.
Here at Matsue we were shown a leaflet about the Yuushien Garden which
for this week had an illuminated light display.
Shall we, or shan’t we ? We had
been travelling for quite some time and it was past 4.00. So we checked into our accommodation which
was about 400 yards from the station and was our third Airbnb. Japanese ones aren’t up to the standard of
the few others we’ve used elsewhere or heard first-hand about. This one was a small one room apartment split
into two with a screen, floor level Japanese style mattresses, a tiny bathroom
and a kitchen sink with a one plate electric hob for boiling a kettle. We weren’t planning on cooking so it didn’t
matter but the main thing is that while it didn’t have 100 thread Egyptian
Cotton sheets it was clean. I think it had two plates of different size,
a knife, and several other odd pieces of kitchen ware. It was
advertised as ‘sleeping up to seven’. This would have to be seven who were on
extremely friendly terms or who took it in turns to be out. Still it was good enough for us and very
convenient. We were only here because
Heather couldn’t find any available hotels in the town.
So
really we did nothing much more than have a cuppa, dump our bags and then we legged
it back to the station for the 5.30 free shuttle which we had assumed would be
a five minute ride to the garden. So we
and an old Japanese couple were the only passengers on what turned out to be at
least a half hour journey. We pulled up in a darkish car park with a couple
of dozen cars, were waved across the road by two uniformed men with light
batons and into what can only be described as a Serendipitous event. It was lowish key to begin with, Acers and
cloud pruned conifers lit quite discreetly, a bit of artificial mist, then a display
of backlit coloured parasols and a brightly lit entrance way. Well, inside the rest of the garden it was
absolutely stunning. It was eat-your-
heart-out Mr Disney stunning. There must
have been hundreds of thousands of lights in what was obviously a computer
controlled display of shapes, colour and pattern. Mount Fuji, the moon and a bright red Torii
arch in lights appeared regularly.
Neither of us had ever seen anything like it before. After the extravagance of the main displays we
were back into a more low key set of lighting again of red bridges, pools, more
Acers and conifers. Then our free
shuttle bus back, just us and the old Japanese couple. Magnificent, and I have to say one of the
highlights of the trip (no pun intended).
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| Yuushien Garden |
We
even found a decent restaurant next to the station where once more we were in a
fractured conversation and photo opportunity with a Japanese family. This does happen frequently. On one train we were in a fairly difficult
conversation and somehow we found out that our Japanese conversee played the
trombone, loved British Brass Bands but his favourites were the Japanese
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| Adachi Museum of Art Garden |
The
garden I’d wanted to see was at the Adachi Museum of Art, gravel, water,
clipped trees, classic Japanese styling with no lawns and some ‘borrowed’
scenery. It was a stunner and had been
named Best Garden in Japan by the Journal of Japanese Gardening. Assuming the Journal wasn’t funded by the
owners of the garden, it was a pretty good endorsement. This garden was a train ride and another
free shuttle bus ride away from Matsue.
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| Adachi Museum of Art Garden |
We
liked Matsue as a city as well as the two tremendously impressive gardens. Set next to two big lakes that could easily
be the sea, one of the things to do is to watch the sunset over one particular
island. We were nearby at the right sort
of time and toddled along, along with about a hundred other cameras. The setting was lovely, with two water set
Buddhas and as the sun finally dipped a smattering of applause broke out.
Japan
has a falling birthrate, the population is declining and it’s suggested that
they will have to relax their immigration laws to keep the workforce big
enough. From our limited experience of
the country it appears there’s a much simpler answer and that’s to do away with
all the non-jobs or wild overmanning that is apparent everywhere we’ve been. I wrote about the security guards in an
earlier blog but it’s common to see people whose job appears to be waving
people across the road when there are green lights to let you know when to
cross or to wave people out of the way in a tourist area when a car is coming. Other specific examples are seven staff in the
tourist office at Sapporo on a Sunday morning when we were the only customers. For us tourists having the information offices
open 9.00 am to 6.00 pm seven days a week is great but at what cost ? On one train ride while waiting for a
connection I went into a very small station shop to buy a drink and when I
turned to the cash desk there were four staff, shoulder to shoulder all looking
expectantly at me. In the town we’re in
now, we walked to some old houses about 9.00 on a Sunday morning and in a
garage/gas station there were eleven (yes, eleven) staff in uniforms waiting on
the forecourt for a vehicle to refuel.
You
might well imagine that a lot of rice is grown here and you’d be correct, we’ve
seen it in many places but it does seem to be highly labour intensive. Many fields are very small, by my estimate some
down to under a quarter of an acre. This
is due to the annoying property of water for rice growers of flowing downhill
which means that paddy fields have to be very flat, hence often very
small. More rice can be grown in a
given area than the type of grain favoured in Europe and I’ve read that this is
one possible cause of the Industrial Revolution happening in the west rather
than the east. If you can feed a bigger
population from a smaller cultivated area you have an ample supply of manual
workers. Throughout much of the last
1500 years, technology in many areas was more advanced in the east than the west but
this never developed into their Industrial Revolution.
After
another spectacular journey south through the hills to the huge built up areas
around Kyoto/Osaka we have two night in Osaka and plan to visit Nara, a much
publicised and temple strewn place a little further east. First though, on the evening of our arrival
we head to an exhibition which we’d seen advertised in Kyoto nearly a fortnight
ago and thought we wouldn’t be able to get to.
It was a whole exhibition of Hokusai, who even if you don’t know the
name you’re
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| This tame ! |
Nara,
the next day was very different for us. Apart
from the edge of Typhoons in one evening each at Kyoto and Hiroshima, I think it
was the first time in our five weeks so far that it was raining when we wanted
to visit somewhere. Apart from the
temples and a very impressive hall containing a huge Buddha, Nara is noted for
tame deer. Very tame deer. They can be stroked, have absolutely no fear
of humans and naturally are encouraged by being fed. People buy biscuits for them and then seem to
panic when the deer see what they have and get a bit pushy. To give some indication of how old the
cultural background is here, the five storey Pagoda was constructed in 730 and
a reconstruction was completed 696 years later in 1426, a mere 591 years ago,
so it’s 105 years til the next one then.
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| The Great Buddha |
The Great Buddha Hall, almost brand new having been rebuilt only in 1709
is the largest wooden building in the world and even so is only two-thirds the
size of the original wooden building it replaced. The Buddha is just over 52 feet high and is made of 432 tonnes of bronze and132 kg of gold
On our
last JR Railpass day we travel to Nagoya to pick up a car for six days in the
Japanese Alps, making sure to book our seats for the return to Tokyo on the
left side of the train. The left is the
Mount Fuji side and we’re hoping for clear weather.
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