Carp Kites in Gunma

Gunma prefecture,which takes in some of the most beautiful parts of the Japanese Alps, is a 4 hour drive from Tokyo.


Forested  mountains abound along with crystal clear rivers and ancient villages.

The village of Kanna was preparing for the Boys Day kite festival when we were there.

The poster below shows a former B grade celebrity who will MC. When I showed this poster to Japanese friends the reaction was " God,  is she still alive?" and such like. Judging by the hair the photo was taken in the 80s.

Cruelty aside though, the carp kite festival they have is a fantastic event hundreds of kites are strung on cables across the thundering, clear river. It's a wonderful sight.

Heading North

We travelled to the Northern tip of the main Island in early spring weather which mixed cherry blossoms and snow.

The North, like the island of Hokaido, was settled rather late in the piece and as a result has fewer older buildings and houses. Also it remains very wild and beautiful in places.

The winters are very severe with meters and meters of snow falling and freezing winds.

What is very old though are the Jomon sites in Aomori prefecture. This was the civilisation that thrived in Japan from about 14,000 BC to 500 BC.







At the site in Aomori they have rebuilt some structures over the original sites and there is truly marvellous museum housing hundreds of pieces of pottery and thousands of arrowheads and tools. It is a very well laid out and complete museum, sometimes museums can be a little haphazard in Japan.

Another fantastic thing up North is a style of music called Jongarajamisen. This is a super fast and energetic form of Shamisen music, quite unlike anything else in Japan.

It sounds a bit like Jazz and Bluegrass music. We went to a great little bar where upstairs is a Shamisen school and downstairs is a bar/restaurant where the best students perform. They were truly astonishing young virtuosos.

Interestingly they ususally play with their eyes closed. Tradiotonally the players were blind and being a musician was one of the few ways they could make a living.

Below is a video I will try and upload. Can't promise it will work on your browser though.

One of the wildest and most beauriful places was Lake Towada. We saw one other car in two hours of driving around the lake.

Rikuzentakata and Ofunato

The great earthquake and tsunami may have been several years ago, but for the people affected they experience the consequences every waking moment. We made a trip to the worst affected area with two main purposes.

Firstly to deliver some money that had been raised by the Adelaide community to a school in the worst affected area.


We wanted to hand it over prersonally to the headmaster so that it didn't get tied up in various bureaucratic accounts or spent on things other than the children.

There are about 80 children at the school we visited. They are in a temporary school as theirs was completely destroyed. Many are orphans and being raised by their grandparents etc. 85% live in temporary housing.

Secondly we wanted to visit a friend who has returned to the area to look after her mother and see for ourselves what was happening about helping these people.

Whereas some of the towns are about 1/2 intact Rikuzentaka has basically ceased to exist. It resembles a parking lot on the moon, with giant machines moving earth about.

For every big city or town destroyed there are dozens of little villages and settlements that are no more. The coastline is incredibly crenelated with many rivers and streams. Every stream and indented valley had a settlement of some sorts.

 

This is a giant conveyer which is moving a mountain. They are demolishing a nearby mountain and transfering the soil by conveyer in order to raise the whole area by many meters. Rikuzentaka will then be rebuilt on the raised platform.

All along the coast this sort of thing is happening and giant concrete sea walls are being built. This is fairly controversial as many people believe that the vast amount of money involved would be better spent helping those affected to rebuild somewhere else on higher ground.
 It's a good point as you can't put a wall around the whole coastline and even if you did you have to to leave entry gates to ports and exit gates for rivers. These are always weak points and useless if they cannot be closed in time.

Indeed in Ofunato there was a very big concrete wall and gate and the tsunami went straight over the top of it.

So about 170,000 people are still living in temporary housing that looks like this:

 

Each 'house' is about the size of a shipping container. 

There are quite a lot of volunteers from all over Japan who have come to help people  rebuild their homes and lives. However there is an enormous amount yet to be done and many of the settlements will never be rebuilt.

Cherry Blossom Viewing

It is hard for people who haven't experienced it to fully understand how important the cherry blossom season is to the average Japanese person. Sure, looking at flowers is nice but why all the fuss?

Well as mentioned in the previous post, the winters here are very hard and very grey. With all the concrete Japanese cities are particularly colourless in winter. In the countryside its leafless trees and brown grass, snow in the mountains.

After all this, the cherry blossoms of spring are a truly wonderful and welcome sight. Not all the trees are the same shape or colour and although they are in confined areas like parks in the cities, in the countryside they are everywhere.



The Japanese take the viewing seriously but in a carnival spirit. On the weekends and after work you can see hordes of people picnicking, drinking and having a generally good time amongst the trees.

In some areas many little food stalls are set up and people will spend the whole day merrily eating and drinking and viewing.

On our trip North this time we were lucky enough to see perhaps the most famous tree in Japan.

The "Takizakura" (waterfall cherry blossom tree) in Miharu is one thousand years old and truly a marvel. We had to get there about 7.30 in the morning before the crowds arrived. The tree itself has a trunk about 4 meters in diamete.


Wonderful to think that people have been caring for and admiring this tree for a thousand years.

Back in Japan for Spring

Spring and back in Japan. The winter has been long and particularly cold with a lot of snow. I'm glad I missed it. Following such weather the riot of spring is truly a riot. We simply do not have such a contrast in Australia. Most plants here are annuals or dissiduous so in winter there is not a green thing to be seen. It is also the driest season so everything is brown or grey and it doesn't help that Tokyo seems to be the concrete capital of the world.

Around our house things are starting to look lovely. Diagonally across the road is an 800 year old shrine with a cherry tree.

The neighbours are planting their summer vegetable gardens and their tulips are in full bloom





Soon there will come a warm weekend, usually in Mid may when it seems the whole neighbourhood is in their fields planting rice. 

It is one of the nice things about where we live in the outer suburbs. Although there are factories and some fairly ghastly main roads full of fast food joints and Pachinko parlors, there are ancient temples, lots of vegetable gardens, farmers markets and flowers.

And the neighbour's kid chasing butterflies.