There are a few memorial theme parks for the Warring States periods in Japan. I visited one of the parks – Ise-Azuchi Momoyama Cultural Village – which has since changed its name to Tomoiki-no-Kuni, Ise Ninja Kingdom, in the winter of 2008. In this park, all of the staff wore old-style Japanese kimono and welcomed us with a very high price: 7500 yen...
I found a brochure for the museum when I visited a sake brewery on my trip to Hida-Takayama in the spring of 2001. It was the Hikaru Memorial Hall, which was the former name of the museum, and the pamphlet showed me that they exhibited their research results of Geology and Archeology in the hall. I was so interested in this place and went to the museum soon after...
I was in Nagoya because I had to attend a one-day meeting in the Spring of 2021. Nagoya is a big city and there are so many sightseeing spots. I hadn’t enough time to visit several viewpoints, so I decided to go to a bizarre temple: Toganji Temple. There is the Nagoya Daibutsu in the temple, which was colored dark green on his whole body. It is a very rare...
Ivory was widely used to make carvings because of its hardness and whiteness. Now, the ivory trade is limited all over the world in consideration of animal preservation and protection. However, until two decades ago, there were so many ivory markets everywhere. In particular, old China had produced enormous ivory carvings and Japan imported...
Momotaro is one of the most famous Japanese folk tales. All Japanese know the story of a very tiny boy, who was born from a peach, and who beat the evil demons and took the treasures back. In this story, he got three servants to fight the demons: a dog, a monkey, and a pheasant. Of course, they were very active during the combat against the demons...
Do you like bees? I think most people doesn’t like them because they are dangerous insects. However, there is a person who really loves bees in Tohmi City, Nagano. His name is Mr. Kuniyoshi Shiozawa, and he is the founder of this marvelous beehive art museum. I visited it in the winter of 2002 after the Shinshu Golden Castle that I...
When you get off the train at Sakakibara-Onsen Station, you see a huge pyramid made of so many glass panels. If you have been to the Louvre Museum in Paris, it is very easy to recognize that the pyramid is very similar to the entrance of the Louvre Museum. Additionally, there are two big statues in front of the pyramid: one is the Venus de Milo...
It is on the hillside of Baika Mt. in Atami. This mysterious war museum is run by an anonymous person, and a few people from war-bereaved associations visit this museum sometimes. The “Roadside Japan” book showed me this eccentric library, and I visited it in the autumn of 2005. I couldn’t reach this place directly because there was no guide sign on...
When I watched some late-night talk show, I saw an owl that could transform himself to be plump or slender. It was so cute that I wanted to take pictures of his transformation. The next weekend, I was in the Kakegawa Kachoen Park to meet him. He is a northern white-faced owl and he spread his wings when he met another smaller owl to...
As you know, the big izakaya restaurant chain, Yourou-no-taki group, has so many Japanese-style pubs all around Japan. The founder of this huge company, Toukichirou Kinoshita (this is his second name and his real name is Tomikatsu Yamanta), constructed a magnificent fortress as his vacation home in Shiga, Nagano where he was born and raised. This is The Shinsyu...