School helmets

Since January is a cold month, I haven't been up to as much on weekends as I usually do. So for your enjoyment, I thought I'd show some interesting things I see in Japan that I wouldn't see back home. One of these are school helmets, as seen on some school children below:All elementary school children in my prefecture are seen wearing these helmets when they go to and from school each day. I've heard that this is only done in my prefecture and is done since a big earthquake is expected to hit here at some point. My region gets large earthquakes (magnitude 8 or greater) every 100 to 150 years, but it has already been 157 years since the last one, so one is due to hit here at some point. And so, to protect their little heads, all school children wear these helmets to school. I'm quite impressed that they don't seem to mind wearing them and I hardly ever see a child not wearing one.

At the beginning of me staying in Japan, I found lots of interesting things to "show and tell" on my blog. Unfortunately these days, they have become regular things for me to see. Still, I'll try to find some more interesting things to show in the future.

Weekend update

I'm now back into the daily routine of work again after the New Year break. Luckily, I'm still also receiving Xmas presents from overseas. Ayako and I received baseball mitts from mom and dad so we went to the local school yard to play catch. Last night, we went to a birthday party for Amy. It was a nice place which had good food, even if the room did seem a bit like a jail cell:And here's the happy birthday girl:

Train trip - part 1 - Takayama

Ayako and I went on an 8-day train trip north and west of where we live. I wanted to visit one World Heritage Site as well as get to see some snow this winter. We stayed in 4 different cities/towns and also had long train rides in between. The first town we visited was Takayama (in Gifu prefecture). We had actually visited here briefly last May after a camping trip. It was nice to have more time to look around the historic town and get to see lots of snow on our first day:We went for a nice night strolls the two nights we were there:

And visited a few of the temples in the area:

At New Year's time, this area makes mochi-trees, which is made by taking pounded rice (mochi) and making small balls and colouring some red and sticking them on branches to make "trees":

Since Ayako has never seen lots of snow before, we made sure to make a snowman when we found a good amount of snow:

We also saw some "yukitsuri", which are trees that have a pole put beside them and strings attached to the branches of the tree to support them after a heavy snowfall:

Train trip - part 2 - Shirakawago

The second part of our trip took us to the village of Shirakawago (in Gifu prefecture). It is a World Heritage Site and is famous for its A-frame houses that keep all the snow they get from crashing through the roofs:In the village, there was also a open air museum of some houses that weren't lived anymore but you could walk through them and read about how they were built and so on.

The next photo is a view of the village from a hill. Ayako and I were lucky enough to stay in one of the houses that was run as an inn for the night of New Year's Eve. They fed us a big dinner and special (and large) New Year's breakfast.

We noticed that in the village, all of the villages wore rubber boots since I guess the temperature hovers around freezing and so it can sometimes be slushy on the roads. You could tell who was a visitor since they weren't wearing rubber boots. We got to borrow some boots from the inn, although I don't think I was fooling anybody into thinking I was from the village:

Ayako told me during the trip that even though she had seen snow before, this was her first time seeing lots of snow, so one thing we did was make snow-angels:

At night, it was very quiet in the town, since all the bus loads of visitors had left. We went for a walk around 11 o'clock and I got some nice night pictures of the town:

Near midnight, we went to the local shrine, we many of the people in the town were. There was no countdown for Xmas but we watched a special ceremony happening inside the shrine:
And got to keep warm by a big fire outside the shrine:

It was a quiet New Years Eve, but a memorable one.

Train trip - part 3 - Kanazawa & Matsumoto

On New Years Day, we took a bus ride to a city called Kanazawa (in Ishikawa prefecture). We first visited the historic geisha district, which had nice old buildings and nice small restaurants and shops: In one of the sweet shops in the geisha district, I bought a boar shaped sweet that has sweet red bean paste inside (since 2007 is Year of the Boar):

Near the geisha district, we walked around an area that had about 50 temples in a very small area of town. At one point, I could see 6 temple entrances standing at one point:

Since there were so many temples in a small area, some of them had found different ways to attract people to them. The one below, had opened a preschool on the grounds to get some young followers (you can see the playground through the gate):

In this temple area, I saw many cats (as seen in this collage below):
Our favourite, friendly cat was the next one, who followed us for a good 5 minutes before deciding to give up:

There was also a nice collection of birds in Kanazawa from these gulls to herons and hawks:

We next visited Kenroku garden, which is one of the three most famous parks in Japan. It maybe wasn't one of the best times of year but it was still busy with visitors.Again, you can see the trees being supported by a tall pole and strings attacted to the branches which helps the trees during heavy snow falls. It was a common site throughout the city:
The last city on our tour was Matsumoto (in Nagano prefecture). The main thing to visit in Matsumoto is their castle, which we went to look at night:
And during the day. We also did a tour inside during the day:

We also visited the Japan Ukiyo-e Museum. Ukiyo-e is wood-block printing that was famous in Japan from 1760s to 1890s. Since I have a few posters of ukiyo-e art in my apartment, I was interested to see it. Here's an example: Overall, it was an enjoyable, relaxing trip...although glad to be back home to relax some more before works starts.