Birds and Fashion

Well, my life is going on here, and I'm starting to think I'll never fnish what I could say about Japan!   "Not enough space" is the bane of the travel writer, and I'll soon have to condense the trip enough to write a mere 1000 word newspaper article. So in this post and the next, I'll just try to give a glimpse of some of the other Japanese things I saw.  Almost everywhere I visited deserves a post of its own but,  hey!  

I'll start with some birds. These life sized paper cranes fly high in the stairwell of the Abiko City Museum of Birds in Chiba, a pleasant suburb on the outer edge of Tokyo. The museum is modern and it feels as if it was designed by people whose priority was to share their passion for birds, the way they look, the way they live, and the way they are made.

It is based on a fabulous Edwardian collection of stuffed birds which was collected by a member of the Japanese royal family,  Yoshimara Yamashina. Although born into a rigid system, he managed to break free to study birds and do important research about them - one of his book is a standard field guide to Japanese birds.  There are whole cases of stuffed birds, but I'm always a sucker for dioramas. This one showed the ecology of wetlands near the museum.  

There are many models explaining bird physiology - the way wings work, how bird bones are structured, and how birds fly.  My favourite is probably this, which shows every single feather to be found on an average bird.  For some reason that really fascinated me. 

The museum is mostly labelled in Japanese, but luckily I was visiting with Katsuko and Chisako, and they patiently translated - not that I remember everything they said.  We all admired the Audubon prints on display. Here's a detail of one entitled "Summer Red Bird"

 I'm not normally massively interested in birds, yet I found it hard to tear myself away from this varied, enthusiastic and carefully planned museum.  It's worth taking the train ride to visit it if you ever go to Tokyo ... at least, if you've got a Japanese friend who will translate!

By contrast, here is Akihabara, which I visited the evening after the bird museum. It's a place with lots of "maid" clubs and patchinko (gambling) parlours. These girls have to give leaflets out and try to get people to come into the clubs. To be honest, most Japanese women I spoke to are not too crazy on this aspect of Tokyo life, but it is quite conspicuous to the foreign eye.

 They're dressed in "cute" type outfits, like sexy maids, Alice in Wonderland, Red Riding Hood, etc. - you see a lot of young women dressed like this in certain parts of Tokyo.

But there were also all kind of eyecatching clothes in the shops, too - a mixture of charming and slightly creepy

Wouldn't like to meet this lady in my dreams...

And you can have whatever kind of eyes you want

All quite Grayson Perry really

When I revisited this department store next day, it was just about to open. You see the staff are all lined up as the manager waits for the clock to reach exactly the right second to open the store.  When we walked in, they all bowed in unison.



So - off to choose some whirly coloured contact lenses like the Mad Hatter!

Inspired by A Cartoon.

Today is the last day of the holidays, even though Twelfth Night isn't till tomorrow.  We've had a  good time seeing family and friends, and I've been preparing a talk I'll be giving n a few days time. (I'm not a great public speaker so it's a bit nerve rackimg.) And T. has been bravely struggling with our service provider, Gradwell, who took my other website offline before Christmas and have been barely responsive ever since.

I've also watched a couple of Christmas presents - Japanese anime cartoon DVDs.  I loved "The Girl Who Leaped Through Time" and Ghibli Studios' "Pom Poko," about Japanese raccoon-dog spirit-gods fighting the growth of the modern world.    Like most of the anime movies I've seen, they were really watchable, and  Pom Poko gave me the inspiration for this blog post.  Because I was watching a scene when an old farmhouse with a huge thatched roof is being demolished (above), and I thought, 

Hey! I've seen old houses like that! 

We saw very similar buildings in Shirakawa-go and Gokayama, where our friend Yoshi took us when we stayed with him and his family in Toyama.  They're villages on the Shogawa River, dating back to the 11th century. They are apparently the only place in Japan where groups of these large ancient farmhouses survive more or less unscathed, although once they could be found all over Japan. 

 Until the 1970s, the villages were very remote and inaccessible, particularly in winter, when they have heavy snowfall, and the inhabitants survived by rearing silkworms. Now, they're UNESCO sites and, although the houses are still family homes, the villagers live mostly by tourism. So the village atmosphere is less  "authentic" than it was in those remoter days, but at least visitors like me have a chance to appreciate them. They're such a contrast with sparkling modern Japan, and there is something rather reassuring about their still slightly ramshackle and traditional air.     

You'll see old fashioned sights like beans laid out to dry in the sun outside the houses

Giant radishes from the garden hung in the porch

and strings of physalis or "Japanese Lanterns" hang on home made frames outside the wooden walls, overhung by thick thatch.

Trucks trundle down the little roads, loaded with straw for repairing thatch.

Rice sprouts from small fields,  the pink and white blooms of untidy cosmos plants wave in the wind,

and there were lots of butterflies when we visited in October.

.And life goes on, with people going about their daily business and hanging their washing out to dry 

One of the houses is an inn, and we went inside and had tea. The owner was very friendly although she didn't speak English, and she was happy to let us wander round the large, dark rooms.

and she was happy for us to look around

It was really dark up in the attic, and we gaped at the silkworm rearing trays and equipment.  How I wished the silkworms were still there, munching away on mulberry leaves beneath the tall rafters. Hanging off a beam were some of the  woven straw boots that local people used to wear in the very heavy, snowy winters

There is a little restaurant-cum-giftshop in one of the farmhouses which, despite seeming rather slow and touristy, sold one of the nicest lunches we had in all our time in Japan

The houses are at great risk of fire, with their open, wooden construction and thatched roofs, but one advantage of being a UNESCO site is that the villagers no longer have to rely on an antiquated fire engine - here it is, stashed away alongside someone's house. Loads of money has been invested to keep the village in good shape.

Now there's a modern and very high tech system explained on the poster below, which operates from an underground water supply and sends huge jets of water arching over each house in the main street.  Apparently the system is occasionally turned on even when there is no fire, to create artificial rain in dry periods. It must be a most spectacular sight to see. 

See the strange red dancing figures in the sign above?  You get a clearer view on the poster below. It is a bit of poetic license to have these dancers operating the firefighting equipment, but traditional to Gokayama is a performance called Mugiya-bushi,  The dancer is holding a percussion instrument which can be waved around to make a rattling sound.  

Songs in this tradition are still performed.

Gokayama opened a small window into a very, very different world, and it is set in an entrancing landscape, with calm rivers and steep wooded mountains of enormous beauty.  I hope I'll be able to go back one day to this area, do some hiking and see what else there is to see.

Happy New Year!