Nagoya’s Treasure Chest

Wednesday, April 24, 2024

This morning we said goodbye to Takamatsu, and I wasn’t sorry to leave. It wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t that interesting. It wasn’t easy to get around. It wasn’t always easy to understand or be understood by local residents. It wasn’t easy to find a sit-down restaurant for dinner. With the exception of the outstanding Ritsurin Garden, I feel that Takamatsu is skippable. You could easily visit Ritsurin on a daytrip from Okayama. The train ride to Takamatsu takes only an hour. If you want to see Naoshima, using Okayama as a base for a day trip probably works better.

I had to go to Takamatsu to figure this out. Now, you don’t have to. Sometimes those out-of-the-way places are quite delightful, and sometimes they are just places that are off the main tourist track for a reason.

We took the Marine Liner, an express train, back to Okayama, and from there we took the Shinkansen on to Nagoya. 

The Shinkansen is awesome. If you are standing next to the track with your back to the direction the train will come from, you will not know it has arrived until the leading car has entered your peripheral vision. It’s that quiet.

Upon arriving in Nagoya, we proceeded to the Hilton, and it was such a delight to be in a hotel that is so well run by a staff that was so incredibly gracious and attentive.

The weather was on and off drizzle with a very low cloud ceiling.

The view from our room at the Hilton. The tall, unusual building on the left is the Spiral Building - very beautiful. Its design, based on half-square triangles, is very appealing to a quilter.

We needed a little time to motivate ourselves to go out again on such a lackluster day, but we finally got ourselves out the door and we soon arrived at the Nagoya Castle and Hommaru Palace, where Ninja with umbrellas tried to prevent us from entering.

This was the first castle in Japan to be designated a National Treasure. The castle was partially destroyed in 1945 during air raids. Reconstruction has been an ongoing project since 1957. The main castle structure is now unsafe, and plans have been made to tear it down at some point and rebuild from scratch, based on existing architectural plans and photographs. Thus, it is not possible to enter the Castle, but it is magnificent from the outside.

The approach to the Castle was lined with (closed) booths selling snacks such as
sponge cake balls on skewers.

I love this!

This is the Front Second Gate, one of the few remaining original structures of the Castle.
It is an Important Cultural Property.

The Castle’s website is worth a look for the professional photos and video. 

The Castle was completed in 1615 by Tokugawa Ieyasu, the Shogun. Tokugawa Ieyasu is a name that keeps popping up in our travels. (If you watched the 2024 Hulu mini-series, Shogun -  or if you read the book by James Clavell - you may remember Lord Toranaga. It is pretty obvious that the fictional Toranaga is based on Tokugawa.)

Hommaru Palace was part of the original castle compound. It was destroyed in 1945, but most of the irreplaceable screens inside the palace had been put into storage at the beginning of the war and were preserved. The Palace has been rebuilt using the exact methods and materials that made the original palace resplendent. I was really wowed by it. The rooms seemed to go on forever, and each one had stunning screens and beautiful details such as transoms. The Palace consists of 13 connected structures, with a total floorspace of over 33,000 square feet.

The entrance to the Palace

Upon entering, we were required to remove our shoes and put on some dorky slippers. (I got a blister from shuffling around in them.)

Genkan, the Entrance Hall, consisted of two rooms. It was the first area that visitors hoping for an audience would pass through. A tiger and a leopard stared the visitors down from gold walls.

Omote Shoin is the Main Hall, consisting of five rooms, where official audiences were held. It was adorned with flowers, birds, and civet cats.

Taimenjo, the Reception Hall, was used by the Lords for private meetings and banquets. These four rooms are decorated with depictions of the customs of the era and famous sights.

The six rooms of Jorakuden Hall were intended for visitations by the Shogun. These luxurious spaces feature detailed artwork, decorative fixtures, carved transom windows, splendid coffered ceilings, glossy lacquered accents, and paintings depicting the actions of a righteous king.

 We have more photos, but you get the idea. 

We tried a local specialty for dinner: miso katsu. It is simply a breaded, fried cutlet (katsu - the same as everywhere else), with a thick, intense miso-based sauce instead of the usual fruity, vinegary tonkatsu sauce.

Today’s fabric is the tatami border (tatami-heri). This is the border on the tatami mat - a straw mat used as flooring in a traditional Japanese room. The heri seen in the Palace,would most likely have been made of hemp, which yields the best quality. All the tatami we saw inside the Palace had the same heri. It appears to be a stylized pattern, possibly suggesting the family crest of one of the lords. Below, the edges of two tatami in the Palace are butted together, so you are seeing two heri, or borders, so well-aligned that they almost appear to be a single strip of fabric.

Looking for Art in All the Wrong Places

Tuesday, April 23, 2024

Today was not a very promising day, as far as the weather. That’s unfortunate, because today was the day I had planned to go to Naoshima - The Art Island. We couldn’t go yesterday because of that thing about museums being closed on Mondays. Today was really the only option.

The weather matters because:

1. We have to take a ferry there. The logistics are complicated. The ONLY return ferries to Takamatsu are at 15:20, 17:00 and 19:45.
2. We will have to walk outdoors quite a bit. There are no taxis on the island, I am told. The only ways to get around are
• walking - I’m not sure of the distance - I don’t know if there is a sidewalk, I think there is a shortcut but I only found one reference to it online
• renting a bicycle and riding on a (narrow?) road shared with cars and buses - this is not something we are likely to do
• or taking the “town bus” (1 to 3 buses per hour) to a particular bus stop, then taking a shuttle bus (schedule unknown) to one of the main museums, then walking to the other two main museums. In other words, a lot of time outdoors waiting at bus stops and walking. It’s unclear whether the demand for the bus is likely to exceed capacity.
3. There are a number of outdoor installations to see on Naoshima, as well as the architecture of the museums.
4. You need to book tickets for the Chichu Museum and the Kinza Art House at least one day in advance, and the weather report was not hopeful a day in advance.

Uh huh. It was all pretty complicated, and Tuesday morning’s weather report looked like rain. We decided our vacation should be more fun and less stress, so the best thing to do was just stay in Takamatsu.

I had been wanting to visit Naoshima for years, but I was surprisingly relieved not to have to go on a rainy day. I also learned that it is probably easier to go to Naoshima from Okayama. The ferries are more frequent and they dock at the other side of the island, much closer to the museums.

Takamatsu Art Museum

Instead of going to three or four museums on Naoshima, plus the outdoor installations, we decided to go to the Takamatsu Art Museum, just a few blocks from our hotel.

The ground floor held items from the permanent collection, and it turned out to be free to see this. We were not permitted to photograph most of the exhibits.

I quite liked this large metal vessel

This one was so interesting, especially with the blue crocheted rectangle on it. I was tempted to pick it up and look at it more closely, but I doubt that would have been allowed. It really looked like it had been left there by a toddler, but I’m fairly sure it was part of the artwork.

The presentation of the pieces on display was excellent. Empty space was used very well to highlight a small number of pieces and avoid clutter (and crowding by visitors to the museum).

One almost empty room featured a film, projected on a wall. It was a fascinating study of light and shadow and the progress of a painting by an unseen artist. The action was sped up so you could watch a few days in 5 or 10 minutes. It was hard to walk away from it even though nothing much happened. 

The second floor held a special exhibit, which we paid to see, The special exhibit was called GIANT ROBOTS The Core of Japanese Mecha Anime. This isn’t really my thing, but I thought I might like it if I learned more about it, and I definitely wanted to see the Giant Robots.

It turned out that the exhibit was more about the concept of Giant Robots, than about actual robots. In fact, there were no robots there at all. Instead, the exhibit was a rather boring series of posters explaining the history of Giant rRobots. The illustrations were not particularly enlightening to me.

However, I was quite surprised to notice that Ken was a) familiar with many of the giant robots, and b) mildly into it. I also began to notice what an uber-male environment this exhibit was. Almost all the visitors were male. Almost all of the Giant Robots were male, and the robots seemed to have a lot of big muscles and testosterone. One hundred percent of the artists and creative people featured in the stories of the various Giant Robots were male.

This is an attempt to show the scale of a Giant Robot by drawing it on the floor of one of the galleries.

I married a (very small) Giant Robot

Long story short: I have no further interest in Giant Robots. Unless I could see a real one. There used to be a full-size Gundam statue in Yokohama, but it’s my understanding that it was removed quite recently. It was outdoors on a dock, I think. I might have tried to see it when we go to Yokohama later this month, but I guess I “missed the boat.”

Mini is much cuter than Giant. I spotted this lovely on the way back to the hotel. I think I’m in love.

Today’s fabric is Cool Colorful Robots for Girls, by littlesmilemakers for Spoonflower.

To the Lighthouse

Monday, April 22, 2024

If you only have one day in Japan, do not make it a Monday. 

In Japan (and many other places), 90% of the museums and at least 50% of the restaurants are closed on Mondays. Even parks and gardens can be closed. It is a day that requires some creative planning.

We decided we would take a taxi to our destination this morning, so we asked a young man behind the desk at our hotel to call us a taxi. This turned out to be big production. Ten minutes later, after FOUR different clerks had participated, and something had been looked up on a computer, and after several questions had been asked and answered, the taxi had finally been called. Great teamwork, kids, but you don’t need a task force for everything. Yes, this is how a lot of things work in Japan. Nothing is simple if it can be made more complicated. If a job can be done by one person, how much better it will be to have three or four people doing that job.

The taxi dropped us off at a very long pier leading to a lighthouse. Based on the number of steps it took to walk to the lighthouse, I estimate the pier to have been about one kilometer long.

A mysterious mist hung over the Seto Inland Sea. It made me think of the ethereal music of Enya. 

We walked out to the lighthouse and enjoyed the warm, humid sea air. We watched ferries come and go.

We saw the island of Megijima, where our old friend Momotaro went to fight the Ogre.

Megijima

By the time we reached the end of the pier we realized that the “lighthouse” was really a “light,” not a lighthouse. It was made of red glass blocks and apparently it looks very pretty at night when it is lit up.

From the pier we walked to the ruins of Takamatsu Castle, passing the ferry docks on the way. 

Why is it so much fun to watch vehicles disembark from a ferry?

What are these?

The Takamatsu Symbol Tower  offers shopping, dining, and an observatory on the 20th floor.

Takamatsu Castle is an Important Cultural Property. It was one of Japan’s three biggest water castles, or castles with sea access. Construction was begun in 1587. The castle grounds were originally about 10 times as large as they are now, but over the years the lands were appropriated for other uses. The main castle building (tower) was demolished in 1884 due to its deterioration. The inner fortified area remains along with the base of the tower.

Azaleas!

This is how thick the inner wall around the castle was. Some of the stones were huge. Somehow, they were pieced together to yield a snug fit and a very solid wall.

One of the castle turrets

This is how big one of the moats was.

A group of tourists being taken on a boat ride in the moat

The hats and jackets were part of the boat ride experience

While we are talking about the moat, here is a fun fact. Lord Matsudaira Yoritaka, 1810-1886, is famous for his practice of swimming as a martial art. He would swim in the moat using a swimming stroke named “the Lower-left Katanoshi Stroke of the Suinin-Ryu.” The stroke has been designated an Intangible Cultural Property.

One of the gates to the present-day castle grounds

The popular foods here seem to be fried chicken (Japanese-style), grilled beef, and a local style of udon. Seafood was rarely  evident.

A tiny food truck

And then there is Slowpoke. Slowpoke is a Pokémon character, known in Japan as Yadon. He is relaxing on top of a mailbox in front of a post office. I have seen three or four other characters atop mailboxes on this trip. Why shouldn’t mailboxes be fun?

Happy Earth Day! 

Happy Passover to those who celebrate!

Today’s fabric is from the By the Sea Collection at Fabric Design Treasures.