I wrote about my wife's favorite Japanese town (see previous post on Uji) a few articles back. Now I get to write about my own favorite Japanese town, an old feudal settlement nestled within the mountainous Central Japan and blessed with world class festivals and sights within Day-Trip distance. It is a town where ancient traditions are highly treasured, where sculptors and Sake brewers still work inside their 18th Century Machiya townhouses, under the backdrop of the majestic Japan Alps. Welcome to my impression of Hida Takayama.
Takayama is an old provincial capital located almost at the dead centre of Japan -- if you draw a line halfway between the northern and southern tips of the Honshu Island, you'll strike across Takayama. This area of rugged mountain ranges has been known as Hida historically, and even today Takayama is still widely called Hida Takayama.
This is a very unique region within Japan, culturally separated from the rest of the country due to the treachery of the mountain passes through the feudal ages. Today you can get here from Tokyo or Osaka in approximately 4 hours by train. As for us, we arrived by local bus from the village of Shirakawago to the west, as part of our cross-mountain trip originating from Kanazawa.
SAN-MACHI
Of Takayama's numerous tourist attractions, the most famous is a well-preserved section of the original feudal town -- exactly three streets of it -- known as the San-Machi (Town of the Three). Flanked by the lazy Miyagawa river on one side and the Tera-machi temple district on the opposite, it has become a major destination for cultural tourists and photographers who arrive en masse for its incredible concentration of interesting sights and beautiful photo spots. Many of the building are designated National Cultural Treasures, and the city is recently putting together a proposal to be recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Even to the uninitiated tourist, it's like walking into an Edo Period artist colony, and some of the shops and studios have been around at least that long, with the craftsmanship being passed down from master to apprentice through generations.
One interesting feature of the old town was the high concentration of traditional Sake breweries, signified by these large balls of cedar branches (Sugitama) hanging under the roof. I counted at least four or five of them located within a couple blocks of each other, all taking advantage of the crisp, sweet tasting water from the surrounding snow-capped peaks.
The Sake varieties produced in this region seem to be aiming towards a drier, unrefined full-body taste ... or at least that's the impression I get from the samples in the local markets. There is also a noticeably greater variety of semi-filtered (Nigori) wines compared to what we saw in Kansai or Tokyo, which is probably nothing more than some marketing people coming up with wines to match the region's rustic image.
Some of the breweries offered Sake tasting for a nominal fee, but I had to give that a pass -- I knew that I wasn't going to buy anything and weigh down my backpack further, and I would feel bad about troubling the brewery staff. I think I must have been slowly adapting into the Japanese mode of thinking during my travels.
Outside the San-Machi district lies the modern city, which is somewhat commercialized but still pleasantly uncrowded for a leisurely stroll around town. Discerning souvenir hunters would uncover goldmines in the numerous traditional carpentry studios, some of which have been in business for a century or more. The store signage here reads "Ichii-Ittobori" ("first-rank one-chisel carving" ... my translation), a highly sought-after style of wood carving originating from this region.
A humorous testament of just how amazingly beautiful Takayama is -- the owner of the house must have had daily encounters with inquisitive foreigners mistaking his immaculately preserved house for a museum. When an entire section of the town looks so uniformly exquisite, it's easy to forget that real people carry on their daily lives inside these sliding doors of dark wooden lattices.
Aside from being famous for feudal townscape and breweries, Takayama also features an amazing number of interesting little museums for a city of this small size. We chose the following three.
TAKAYAMA JINYA
The city's biggest tourist attraction after the San-Machi, this medieval castle-like enclosure housed the local government from the 17th Century until the 1960s, which is quite amazing if you consider that the older generation used to stroll through this museum to pay their taxes just a few decades ago. A radical concept compared with the modern Prefecture Office across the river, the Jinya is a historical vestige from an era when the idea of a government office was an enormous mansion for the governor and his servants, gigantic storehouses for the annual tax collection (in the form of rice and grains), countless rooms for various official and private functions, and an artfully manicured courtyard garden.
Overlooking the central courtyard was a grand, multi-functional reception hall -- out of bounds to visitors of course. In fact we had to carry our own shoes in plastic bags through most of the rooms due to the Tatami mat flooring. The calligraphy at the far end reads "Loyalty" and "Filial Piety", ancient Confucian themes popular with the ruling class (for obvious reasons) through the feudal ages.
As popular with tourists as the Jinya was, the entire complex was so vast and spacious that we were able to find a quiet stretch of the veranda to just lie down and relax. For a long time I just sat there in front of the courtyard, doing nothing and thinking nothing. That was quite a rarity on this trip, as we had become so used to being pushed through the major sights by hordes of uniformed students on their school trips.
Located just a stone's throw from the San-Machi, the Jinya pronounced the Shogun's strategic presence in this remote region of giant timbers and rich gold and silver mines. You can see how the occupants poured centuries of ownership care into the architectural details of their 10,000 square metre property, down to each nail-less joinery in the complex arrangement of open beams.
There are other exhibits of daily life in the Edo Period, among them a set of earthen kitchen stoves, and a 19th Century toilet preserved in such good condition that they had to put a "DO NOT USE" warning beside the "Toilet" sign. Makes me wonder if they found out the hard way ...
But the most educational exhibit was the little courthouse, filled with various interesting instruments which I had no idea what they were until I saw ...
Whoa! No comments from me!
Takayama Jinya
Official Website: http://www.pref.gifu.lg.jp/pref/s27212/
Entrance: 400 yen (CAD$4) as of late 2008
Directions: Walking out the JR train station, head straight along Hirokoji Dori until you hit the Miyagawa river, then turn right before the bridge. Takayama Jinya will be on your right side after one block.
TAKAYAMA MATSURI YATAI KAIKAN
The most expensive museum in town (820 yen) isn't a typical museum of artworks and historical artefacts, but an air-conditioned storehouse for the centuries-old, lavishly decorated floats used in the semi-annual Takayama Festival parade. Each year, the 100,000 fortunate people who visit Takayama during the Spring and Autumn festivals are be able to see all this and more along the parade route free-of-charge ... except for the doubled and tripled hotel room prices (think Running-of-the-Bulls in Pamplona, Spain). Being not as fortunate, we had to settle for seeing only four of the floats within the museum's gigantic glass box.
You have to see the shimmer and the intricacies of the gold-leaf covered sculptures to believe the opulence -- and the immaculate condition -- of the floats, considering that many of them date back from the 1600s and are still in use twice a year. That's quite a demonstration of robustness and component replaceability in engineering terms, not to mention just plain looking good.
The most popular of all floats features a triplet of lifelike marionettes who can supposedly perform a wide range of complex gestures and requires 8 puppeteers to operate. The climax of the puppet show, which I've only seen in a video at the museum, has the pot-bellied monk raising his hand and an explosion of white confetti would appear magically out of a hidden compartment and rain down on the audience.
It's all interesting to a degree, but I'm just the kind of traveler who would rather be joining the festival alongside the locals -- that's why we timed our visit to Kyoto to coincide with the Aoi Matsuri. But then there are just too many interesting festivals in Japan to see in a lifetime. If I ever plan a trip to Central Japan again, I'll have a hard time deciding between the Shirakawago Light-Up Festival in January and the Takayama Festival in April and October.
SAKURAYAMA NIKKO-KAN
The ticket to the Takayama Matsuri Kaikan includes entrance to another exhibition of the wood-working mastery of Takayama's artisans, a 1/10 model of the Nikko Toshogu mausoleum complex that contained 100,000 individual pieces of miniature components and took 33 sculptors 15 years to complete. Talk about commitment! This was the crowning achievement in a lifetime of hard work for these artisans, and it's difficult not to be awestruck when we saw the grand scale of the model filling the large exhibition hall.
Just look at the intricate details of the Toshogu, where each little sculpture of the facade was modelled after the actual building with religious adherence. Of course the famous sculptures of the three monkeys and the sleeping cat are there as well. The top of the roof in this picture was about 50cm tall, to give an idea of the scaling.
The really cool thing is that all this is just a modern extension to the long history of artistic collaboration by the local artisans. Like Italian artisans employed by its European neighbours during the renaissance, the Hida artisans were employed (or drafted) for the construction of the temples and palaces in the ancient capital of Nara -- and that is a tradition dating back 1400 years.
Takayama Matsuri Yatai Kaikan and Sakurayama Nikko-kan
Official Website:http://www.hida-hachiman.org/
Entrance: 820 yen (CAD$8) as of late 2008
Directions: Walking out the JR train station, head straight along Hirokoji Dori across the Miyagawa river. Turn left after the river and go straight for three blocks, at the same time watching for a two-storey-tall stone Torii gate at one of the cross streets on the right side. The Torii marks the entrance to the Sakurayama Hachiman-gu shrine located in the same grounds as the two museums.
INTERESTING MUSEUMS WE DIDN'T VISIT
One of the most popular museums in town was the Hida Folk Village, an open-air exhibition of traditional Gassho-zukuri farmhouses complete with traditional handicraft demonstrations. But IMHO this is primarily for people who don't have time to visit Shirakawago and see the real, living village.
The Kusakabe Mingei-kan is one of the grand merchant houses surviving from the Edo Period. It's now converted into a museum of folk handicraft and architecture.
The Hida Takayama Inro Museum is supposed to have a large collection of hand-crafted medicine cabinets. Somehow I find this really interesting ... don't ask me why.
And then there's just a plethora of totally random museums around town, focussing on anything from teddy bears to squirrels to glassware to fossils. I don't think I've ever seen such a high concentration of museums with the possible exception of Florence Italy.
TRANSPORTATION
So you wanna come to Takayama and see Hello Kitty in a Sarubobo costume? Just joking ... there are a lot more interesting sights than this.
From Tokyo or Osaka, the easiest and fastest way is to take the Shinkansen (bullet train) to Nagoya, then change to the Limited Express "Wideview Hida." The whole trip should take a little over 4 hours. This costs a substantial 13500 yen (CAD$135) from Tokyo and 9500 yen (CAD$95) from Osaka, one way. Of course it's free if you've got a JR Pass. Since Shinkansen trains depart every 15 minutes and the Wideview Hida train every hour, this gives you the freedom of hopping on the train at any time and get a reasonably good connection.
The cheaper way is to take a highway bus operated by Nohi Bus (http://www.nouhibus.co.jp/english). From Tokyo, at least 4 buses depart daily at 08:00, 09:00, 14:30 and 16:00, costing 6500 yen (CAD$65) and taking 5 1/2 hours. From Osaka Nanba, two buses depart daily at 08:10 and 16:30, costing 5500 yen (CAD$55) and taking a little more than 5 hours.
If you're interested in knowing what mode of transportation we took, we arrived by Nohi Bus from the historical village of Shirakawago (2400 yen, 50 minutes), and departed via another Nohi Bus to the hotspring town of Hirayu Onsen (1530 yen, 60 minutes). A rather unorthodox route, but it turned out to be the most economical and direct path to the destinations we're interested in.
IDEAS FOR DAY-TRIPS
The pristine national park of Kamikochi is about 1.5 hours away by bus. I'll add a photo later once I get to the stage of writing an article for Kamikochi, but this is one of Japan's premier scenic areas and is quite worth a visit.
A collection of little hotspring towns known as Oku-hida Onsengo is as little as an hour away by bus ... in fact this was our next destination upon leaving Takayama. This is a relatively convenient place to go if you're interested in a dip in Central Japan's legendary open-air baths. And if you're coming during the winter, the illuminated frozen waterfall of Hirayu Ootaki is quite famous.
There's a famous hotspring town by the name of Gero, one hour south of Takayama by JR's local train. Historically it's one of the "Three Famous Hotsprings" of Japan (the other two being Beppu and Kusatsu), but nowadays it's blighted by a whole forest of multi-storey hotspring hotels. Oku-hida Onsengo is a much better choice IMHO.
The small town of Hida Furukawa, just 20 minutes north of Takayama by JR's local train, is supposed to feature a beautiful section of the old town with colourful carps swimming in the canals along the streets. Sadly we didn't have time for a visit.
Last by not least, and I'm not going to condone this ... but Shirakawago is only 50 minutes away by bus. Though I think a first trip to the Hida region wouldn't be complete without a rustic night inside one of the giant farmhouses. If you can afford two or three nights in Central Japan, do yourself a favor and spend one night at Shirakawago or Gokayama.
HOW MANY DAYS?
With so many interesting sights within striking distance, a first-timer could easily spend four or five days in Takayama without ever getting bored. We did one night in Gokayama, one in Shirakawago, one in Takayama, and one in Oku-hida Onsengo, but all that could also be done using Takayama as a base. Personally I would have preferred having one more day for doing Takayama in depth and to visit Furukawa for a half-day, but as all independent travelers know, time is never enough ...
MY WIFE'S CORNER Enter any souvenir store in Takayama, and you'll be immediately surrounded by an army of faceless humanoid dolls with pointy arms and legs. No these aren't aliens craving for your flesh, but local doll amulets known as Sarubobo (baby monkey). Traditionally passed down from parent to children and made with red cloth to resemble the reddish face of baby monkeys, Sarubobo are now sold by clever entrepreneurs in a myriad of colours, each attributed with a different mystical power. Well ... welcome to the marketing machine of Japan. This cell-phone strap is called the Sarubobo Edition, and was bought in Takayama for around 450 yen. |
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