Hagi (July 21st)

Summer vacation started on July 19th! Hooray! I think I was more excited than the students!

The following Sunday I started my long awaited summer travelling! I used the ju-hachi kippu only available during school vacations. These tickets are basically an all day pass on the local train lines (not shinkansen) for $23. So I spent Sunday on seven different trains, travelling for 12 hours, finally arriving at Hagi at 7 pm exhausted.

Hagi is an interesting town. It was a center of unrest leading up to the Meiji Restoration and many revolutionaries in the Restoration were born and educated in Hagi. (In few words, the Meiji Restoration occurred when Japan realized that by remaining isolated from the rest of the world, they had fallen way behind in terms of industrialization. So in 1868, the Emperor Meiji reclaimed his imperial power from the shogunates who were running the country and brought the country into the modern age.)

However, what Hagi is famous for is its very well preserved samurai quarter. Lonely Planet sums it up well: It's ironic that Hagi's claim to fame is its role in propelling Japan directly from the feudal to the modern era, while its attractions are principally its feudal past.

I was up bright and early on Monday morning (I blame the lack of curtains in the youth hostel), rented a bicycle and began toodling around town.

My first site of the day was the ruin of Hagi Castle which was torn down in a display of loyalty to the Meiji Restoration.

After that I cycled through the samurai part of town, stopping every few feet to take photos of the varied walls.

I visited the Hagi Museum which had a large exhibit about beetles (the insects) and not so much about the history of the area as I had hoped.

Next, I went to the Aiba watercourse which was just a little canal along a roadside but with some historical houses. The homes along the watercourse had an opening to the canal to draw in water. (Hard to explain, see photo)

For lunch, I stopped at Mos Burger (a Japanese hamburger chain) where I ate a "taco". Don't worry Taco Bell, there's no competition here! I'm not really sure what spices and seasonings they used and couldn't quite identify the liquid "cheese" squirted on top.

After lunch, it started pouring rain. But that didn't stop me from visiting Tokoji, a temple which has the tombs of the odd-numbered lords of Hagi. There are about 500 stone lanterns which were nicely moss-covered.

One of the things that caught my eye all over Hagi was the shachi. These are the mythical fish on the roofs which are supposed to spout water in case of fire. In Himeji and other parts of Japan, these are typically just on castles and temples. But here in Hagi, they were also on rooftops of homes.

Elementary School

Every Thursday I rotate between three elementary schools. These photos are from two different schools. The kids are in 1st and 2nd grade. The uniform some of the kids are wearing is their gym uniform. I'm under the impression that they have to wear it on the days they have gym; other days they can wear what they want.

Typical lessons at elementary school include:

Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes

Reading Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What do you see?

Hokey Pokey

Simon Says

Greetings (hello, my name is...., nice to meet you, how are you, etc) and shaking everyone's hand

There are four morning classes with a short recess between the second and third class. Then lunch at 12:30. I eat school lunch with the kids in whichever classroom I just taught. The students usually eat lunch at their desks, but each school has a small dining room that the classes take turns eating in. One set of lunch pictures below is in a classroom, the other in the dining room.

At lunch time, about 10 students in each class put on coats and hats and face masks and go to the school kitchen to get their classroom's lunch. They bring it back and serve it to their fellow students who have been moving the desks around for lunch and generally goofing off, as seen below:

School lunch is often a bread roll, soup, and some main dish and milk. It's hot when it's brought back from the dining room but by the time everyone is served and we wait until everyone is seated to say "Itadakimasu" (literally "I receive") before we can start eating, it's barely lukewarm.

Lunch on this day was lemon chicken (like sweet and sour chicken but just lemon flavored), a noodley soup, bread with margarine, and milk.

And on this day it was octopus rice (they very thoughtfully picked through the rice and gave me an octopus-free serving!), some bean sprouty vegetable dish, soup and milk, and an individually wrapped plum for dessert. The kids all peeled their plums before eating them!

After lunch is recess when the kids head to the playground. Every school has numerous unicycles which the kids love, and the usual playground swings, monkey bars, etc.

July 12 on 12

Last Sunday, Suvanya, Sophie and I went to a tea ceremony performed in part by the students in the tea ceremony club at my junior high school.


My junior high school has a Koto club (the girls in the club were too shy to be in the photo). Koto is usually called a Japanese harp, but it’s played by kneeling on the floor next to it. And Koto music is written in traditional Japanese numbers (which string to pluck or strum). It has a plaintive sound that I can listen to for about one song.


Tanabata was a minor Japanese holiday on July 7th. Tanabata is based on two constellations which are closest in the sky on July 7th every year. If it rains on July 7th, the holiday isn’t celebrated that year! Somehow, also associated with this holiday, people write their hopes on a colorful piece of paper and tie it to cut bamboo branches.


These photos of Japanese fashion were taken on my cell phone (luckily I downloaded them before promptly losing my cell phone on Tuesday!).


Punky Brewster is alive and well, living in Himeji!

Many people have good sized gardens where they grow vegetables for their families. The remaining veggies they can sell to grocery stores. Because of all this homegrown food, it’s common to see onions and persimmons and other produce hanging outside of houses like this.


This is the machine where you buy train tickets. It’s not too complicated. There is a big sketch above the machine showing the fare to each stop, hopefully with names in the latin alphabet. You feed in your money and hit the amount of the ticket and it spits out your ticket and change. If you have problems, there is a button to hit, and a conductor opens that dark blue plate to the right of the machine and pops his head out to help. The first time I witnessed that I jumped back startled.


I’ve been meaning to take a photo of the tree at the house across the street from our bus stop. You can see how they’ve pruned and trained it to go over the gate very beautifully.


There is a series of these posters against smoking. They’re all quite humorous and a bit random. You may have seen the last one before; I took it back in January. Click on the photo to zoom in if you have trouble reading the writing.




Another weird Japanese food idea – red bean Kit Kats. The Japanese branch of Nestle/Kit Kat ought to get an award(?) for their creativity. So far I’ve seen all sorts of fruit flavored Kit Kats (banana, mango, strawberry), as well as green tea, white chocolate, and possibly cherry or cherry blossom flavored. And now red bean. It was just a matter of time.

Hokkaido, Japan's Last Frontier - Part 4

After spending the day at Noboribetsu Onsen, I went to Sapporo to stay the night there. On my first day in Hokkaido, I had picked up a brochure showing some guided tours. There was one to Furano and Biei which have fields of flowers this time of year. And better yet, the full-day tour promised an English audio guide. I decided to go ahead and sign up for that tour for my last full day in Hokkaido.
I showed up in the morning, ready to go, imagining myself on a bus full of Japanese tourists who would listen intently to the tour guide, while I just put in my earphones and turned up the audio guide. I hoped I’d be next to someone friendly who would tell me what time to get back on the bus and other critical information. And I hoped for a window seat. So I was very surprised to get onto a completely empty tour bus! Well, I figured, we’ll probably stop at a hotel and pick up a tour group. I kept thinking this until our first rest stop, when it became very clear that I was the ONLY person on the tour! I had a huge tour bus all to myself, and two guides, neither of whom spoke English, and of course a bus driver.

At the rest stop, they wrote on a small white board the time we’d be departing. They gave me 20 minutes to go the bathroom. Obviously I was back within 5 minutes. I was a bit afraid we’d wait until the appointed time to leave (that would be very Japanese – to rigidly stick to the schedule), but we left as soon as the driver returned.
The audio guide was excellent. It was done by a Englishman who had been living in Sapporo for 17 years. He had some interesting anecdotes, like one about a department store which went a little overboard in decorating for Christmas and put Santa on a cross.
He described how agriculture in Hokkaido was developed. And how in the 1950 they began growing lavender to sell to Europe for perfume. Many many acres (230 hectacres at the peak) of lavender were planted and doing well for some time, until synthetic fragrances became popular in the 1970s. Then all the lavender farms began to go out of business. There was one remaining farm, Farm Tomita, and a picture of the farm happened to put into a 1976 JR calendar.

Then everyone saw the beautiful scenery and decided to visit. That’s all it took. Now Farm Tomita is a major tourist destination – a bit like lavender Disneyland. They have everything lavender, even lavender flavored ice cream, which I didn’t try. (I’m still getting over the perfume flavored gum I had in Okinawa.)

It was even complete with a little lab-like setting where this woman in a lab coat wrapped soaps in plastic wrap.
After an hour at Tomita Farm, I hopped back on my private tour bus and we continued on to Flower Land. First I was served a plough grill lunch.

It was very interesting – a hoe blade over a little sterno burner. As a foreigner, I wasn’t trusted to cook my own meal, so they piled it on the plough and covered in tin foil and told me to wait. It was really good – lots of cabbage, with some bean sprouts, eggplant, carrots, corn, mushrooms, and a piece of salmon, a big shrimp, and a couple of clams. After the huge meal, I was served a piece of melon for dessert, and then was free to wander around Flower Land for an hour. There was a little wagon ride around the flowers where I took these photos. Mostly that was all there was to do, unless I hadn’t seen enough lavender products at Farm Tomita.
I got back on the bus a few minutes early and we headed back to Sapporo with just a couple quick stops along the way. One stop was to see some famous trees. Some trees in Hokkaido were made famous by TV commercials. For instance, we drove slowly past the Ken and Mary tree, famous from a cigarette commercial. We drove by another tree famous from a car commercial. There were parking lots at these trees and people posing under the trees. I tried to imagine a tree in a American commercial enjoying such popularity, but I couldn’t. It’s kind of sweet how the Japanese people get so excited about trees in commercials. But kind of odd, too.
We stopped for another rest break near Biei town. I had flashbacks driving through Biei. It literally could be ANY small town in the Midwest (USA). Any town! There were even setbacks and buried power lines. Unbelievable!

The area around Biei is famous in Japan for its scenery and a famous photographer or painter has done some famous pictures of the area. It was nice, but really it could have been anyplace in the Western US, particularly the foothills of Rocky Mountains in Colorado. We stopped for a photo opportunity and my guides encouraged me to take my camera along. I wandered to the rest room and back to the bus, not bothering to take any photos. They urged me again to take some photos. I told them “Amerika wa onaji desu”. America is the same and they thought that was the most entertaining thing they’d heard all week. I heard them repeating it to each other on the way back to Sapporo.
All said, it was a good day, and the audio guide was really informative. But it took me an hour or two to get over the guilt of having a tour bus all to myself. I don’t know why they didn’t tell me I was the only one and they’d have to cancel. Or just having a policy of a minimum number of people. I can’t imagine why they sent me alone in that huge tour bus. I hope they don’t do that regularly.
The next day, I took a quick walk through the botanical garden in Sapporo. Lonely Planet said it was a must see, but I’m not sure what exactly was a “must see”. The highlight for me was this “Canadian Rock Garden”. Who knew that there was a Canadian style of rock gardens?

My flight back to Kobe was at midday, so that wrapped up my little trip to Hokkaido. It was a great trip, all in all.
My next big trip will be to Korea in a couple weeks. I don’t know how much of the country I’ll be able to see in a week, but stay tuned!