It was a very long time ago that I visited the farm of ostriches in Ishioka, Ibaraki. I watched a TV program about this farm recently and I realized that it has continued breeding ostriches for a very long time. Also, I found out that there is a huge ostrich egg on which we can step and it can never be broken by the weight of a human. So I wanted to visit there for a...
This is my other travel story from the winter of 2007. There was a private zoo in Akiruno, Tokyo. Its name was Mutsugoro’s Animal Kingdom. The founder of this kingdom, Mr. Masanori Hata, whose pen name is Mutsugoro which means “mudskipper,” is a famous zoologist, essayist and TV personality. The zoo was moved to...
This information center exists near Shinagawa JR Station. I visited there in the winter of 2012 because I didn’t know what meat processing was at all. When we enjoy meat dishes, we want to know what kind of meat we have and how to cook them, but we never want to think about how the meat is processed from domestic animals. This museum shows us the real process...
It was said that this Niko-Niko En was the strangest place in Japan at the time. I visited this place in the spring of 2002. As always all hidden weird places are hard to access; this private wooden statue museum was deep inside of the countryside. I parked my MX-5 in the riverside parking lot. There were so many...
I found tiny old glass bottles in a showcase when I visited the Palace Factory in Imabari. There was an explanation plate on the showcase, and it said that this private museum was founded by Dr. Taichi Shouji. It is located in a residential area of Nakano, Tokyo. My wife and I visited there in the winter of 2009. I made a reservation phone call to him and...
Do you know about the threadworm inspection which had been enforced at all elementary schools in Japan? Yes, I’d had this examination long ago. However, students nowadays don’t know the name of this test because Japanese hygiene management runs almost perfectly recently. In fact, I’ve never encountered the threadworm infection at...
It exists under Route 16, which is the most famous and most congested beltway in the metropolitan area. I went there in the summer of 2011. It is a huge underground canal that can keep rainwater from overflowing the rivers around Kasukabe when heavy rain is falling. Kasukabe citizens were having a lot...
There are so many stone collectors in the world. However, few people know the matchless stone collector, Mr. Syouji Hayama. He picked up so many human-faced stones all around Chichibu. He found a volleyball-sized human-faced stone beside a river and named it “the son of God”. After picking up this stone, Mr. Hayama had plenty of lucky events in...
Ushiku-Daibutsu – The World’s Tallest Giant Buddha It holds the world record- the bronze buddha in Ushiku, Ibaraki. It took seven years to build Ushiku Giant Buddha, the world’s tallest statue from 1992; but now in 2020, there are several statues taller than Ushiku in the world. However, it is still the tallest in Japan. I visited it three times or...