Day trip to Aichi prefecture

Since many of my students are from Aichi prefecture and since I don't know about many of the cities in Aichi, I decided to do a day trip there to find out more about some of the places there. The first place I went to was Kiyosu and to Kiyosu castle specifically: It is not a large castle but it can be seen from quite far away. It was built in the 15th century and saw a number of battles:

Luckily there was beautiful weather for the whole day and so it was easy to get some nice photos of the castle:
Inside, I was able to dress up as a samuri. It took three men about 5 minutes to put everything on me:
There were 9 separate parts to this uniform. I was then able to have my photo taken carrying a sword, a rifle and then a spear:
Afterwards I climbed up to the top of the castle to get a good view of the city. The photo below is of the beautiful rock garden at the entrance of the castle:
After visiting the castle, I got back on the train to go to the city of Handa. It has a very famous vinegar factory there called Mizkan that has been in Handa since 1804. Its vinegar is especially good for making sushi rice. Here are some of the factory buildings that run along both sides of this river:
After an hour tour of the vinegar factory, I walked a short ways to a sake museum. There, I had a tour of the museum. Since I had gone on another factory tour of a sake factory last year with my family, it was interesting this time to see some of the historical equipment that this museum had:
You will notice that both the vinegar buildings and the sake museum are made with black-painted wood. There were a number of these old style buildings throughout the city of Handa.

After going for a short walk around Handa, I got back on the train to go to the city of the Okazaki. This was the city that my Aunt Elizabeth had done a homestay. The first place I visited there was a miso factory. Miso is a paste made from fermented soy. Miso soup is of course made from this miso paste. From the black buildings in the picture below, you can tell this is also an older company (over 300 years old):
To make miso, soybeans are soaked, steamed, and then sprinkled with 'koji' fungus that helps the soy ferment. After three days, sea salt and water are added and the mixture is put into 7-foot-tall cedar vats. These vats can hold 12,000 pounds of miso. The vats are covered with a cotton cloth, a heavy wood pressing lid, and 6,000 pounds of stones. The pressure helps reduce the salt content of the miso and it is allowed to age for two years. It was very impressive to see these large vats of miso:
There must have been about 100 vats in the one building I walked around in. This naturally fermenting method brings out much more flavour in the miso than miso which is pressed with machines. I found a good website here explaining in greater detail how the miso is made at the Hatcho miso factory.
After buying some miso products, I went for a walk to Okazaki castle. While crossing the bridge to the castle, I could watch a swan battling with some turtles and 'koi' carp for bread thrown by some other visitors:
Compared to Kiyosu castle, Okazaki castle was quite hidden by large trees:
This castle is famous for being the birth place of Tokugawa Ieyasu. He was the first shogun of the Edo period (Tokugawa period) of Japan, which was from 1603 to 1868:
There was a nice park around the castle with very fancy telephone booths:
Here is a museum for Tokugawa Ieyasu:
I was just about to leave the park when I could here some music coming from behind me. I turned around to see a doll doing a dance (perhaps a Noh dance) to music:
I realized that I had past by it and had not noticed it since it wasn't playing music:
Only after the performance did I understand why I had not seen it. Everything neatly folded away into a regular-looking clock:
As I walked back to the station to get the train back home, the sun was setting and I felt good that I had made the most of my trip to Aichi.

Camping in Forest Park

On Saturday, Ayako and I headed up to Forest Park along with Eric and Tomoe. I think this is the latest in the year for our first camping trip there. We arrived around noon and enjoyed lunch together. Afterwards Tomoe and Ayako relaxed in the small river near us while Eric and I played some board games. I was able to beat him at Othello but he was pretty quick at beating me at chess right after that.
Next, we decided to go for a walk through the park:
We had fun at some exercise stations along the path:


We then came to the very high suspension bridge in the park:
Ayako didn't seem quite as scared to cross it this time:
Here are a couple of the creatures sighted during the weekend:

Eric and Tomoe headed home after having some dinner while Ayako and I stayed to camp for the night. It was a nice and cool so we both slept well. In the morning we had breakfast, relaxed in the chairs while reading books, and then packed up just before lunch:
Amazingly, this was our first camping trip of the year. Hopefully we'll go a few more times before the year is out.

Trip to Hakone

Ayako and I took a day trip to Hakone on Tuesday. It was both a good trip and a bad trip all rolled into one. We'll start with the good news.

Hakone is halway between Hamamatsu and Tokyo. It's up in the mountains and is famous for its onsens (hot springs). It was very beautiful to drive along the winding roads in the misty mountains:
There are three small towns in the area that have many onsen hotels. In one of them, we walked around and looked at the many souvenirs shops. The area is famous for its wood carving. We bought some souvenirs including some super soft mochi that's a bit sweet (called Yumochi). I had tried it before when a student brought some back from one of her trips, so I was happy to try it again. We enjoyed soba for lunch in a small restaurant looking out over a river:

After this, we decided that instead of going to a traditional onsen bath, we would try an amusement-style onsen with many interesting baths. It was full of families and quite the interesting experience. Some of the baths we tried going into were: green tea, sake, coffe, and red wine. They also had a Dead Sea bath with lots of salt so you could float quite easily. They also had many water slides as well.

The most interesting bath was a foot bath that contained Doctor fish. These are small fish that come up and eat the dead skin on your feet while leaving the alive skin. It doesn't hurt at all and tickles a little (or a lot in Ayako's case):
After the crazy baths, we went north to a town called Gotemba. They have a large outlet mall (Premium Outlets) there. I've been to one of these malls outside of New York before. There are 8 of them in Japan and the set up and architecture closely resembled the one in New York. I didn't buy anything but Ayako enjoying buying a few things.

Well the good part was all about our trip there. The bad part was about getting there and back again. On Tuesday morning (the day we left) there was a large typhoon the was supposed to come. They sometimes come close to us and sometimes just miss us completely. We decided to risk a bit of rain and go there. Unfortunatley, at 5:00 am that day there was the largest earthquake I've felt yet (6.5 magnitude). Luckily everything calmed down by 7:00 am, so we decided to head off on our trip.

Unfortunatley, we didn't know that the earthquake a taken a large chunk out of the toll highway going to Tokyo. We weren't going to use that road but a non-toll road. Due to the damage though, the toll highway was closed (and still is) in our area and so all of the traffic came down to the road we were using. This turned a 4-hour drive into a 6-hour drive. It was nice to be relaxing in the baths after such a long drive.

We finished quite late in Hakone and decided to rest in the car for awhile. We thought that by leaving later (about midnight) we could drive back home during the night and the roads wouldn't be too busy. Again, we guessed wrong. This time it took 8 hours to drive back home. The we a number of times when I was sitting on the highway with the car turned off for 20-minutes, only to start moving and get up to 60 km/h for a few minutes and then be sitting still again for 20 minutes. None of the traffic's movement seemed to make any sense. Finally, I risked getting lost and turned off the highway and started driving along small country roads to get home. Luckily I didn't get lost, but I was mighty tired after being in the worst traffic jam of my life.

Trip to Ise shrine

Ayako has started her week-long Obon holiday and so our first trip of the holiday was to Ise shrine in Mie prefecture. It was about a 3-hour train ride from Hamamatsu. The weather was cloudy, but at least it made it comfortable for walking around all day.

There are actually two sets of shrines in different locations in the town of Ise. We went to the first one (the outer shrines) first. There is one main shrine there and other smaller versions of the large one as well. Unfortunately, only the imperial family is allowed to enter the shrine and since it's surrounded by a large wooden fence, you can only see the top of it. Luckily it is free to visit these shrines. Here's a picture of me outside the main shrine:
Below is Ayako standing outside one of the smaller versions of the shrine. The tradition here is for each shrine to be rebuilt every twenty year. The area to the right of the shrine is where it will be built next time. After the new one is built, the old one will be taken down and the wood will be sent around Japan to build other shrines. Since this is one of the most famous shrines in Japan, other shrines will be glad to receive wood from the shrines here. This process happens every twenty years and so the location of the shrine swaps between the two plots:
We then went to visit the other main set of shrines (the inner shrines). The main shrine here is the biggest one and only the imperial family can enter it. Supposedly, there is also a famous mirror that was built in the third century and can only be viewed by a member of the imperial family. Unfortunately, no member of the imperial family has even requested to see it. It is kept under a cloth bag, and another cloth bag is placed over it when the previous one starts getting thin. Since nobody has seen the mirror for over 1700 years, there are many bags over the mirror and quite a good history of weaving from different eras.

Anyway, here are some photos when we walked around looking at the inner shrines:



Outside of the inner shrines, there is a street with many traditional houses and stores that sell lots of souvenirs and yummy treats:
These are are some shots from inside a traditional marketpalce area with lots of things for sale:

Ayako was very happy to find a famous store that serves "akafukugori" which is kakigoori (green tea syrup on shaved ice) with red bean paste and mochi rice balls inside. It was a very popular store and a yummy dessert to have, even though it wasn't that hot outside.
She then went to buy a famous sweet called akafuku, which is a mochi rice ball covered in red bean paste:

We enjoyed eating it on the train ride home. We've decided this holiday to just do day trips rather than one longer trip. Our next trip is to Hakone, a famous hot springs area.