Kakunodate: a little known castle town
Trip Start
Mar 22, 2009
1
29
43
Trip End
May 03, 2009
Kakunodate,
Hokkaido,
Japan
Monday, April 20, 2009
So I can't really tell you why I chose Kakunodate--it's off the general Shinkansen line and it's got no castle, but it sounded like it might be a nice low key place to wander, much like how Otaru turned out to be. Turns out western foreigners may skip the place, but the Japanese do not. Luckily it was slightly before the full sakura bloom and it was a weekday, but the place definitely had a lot of tourists. Turned out it was during their cherry blossom festival--they have a 2km 'tunnel' of cherry blossoms--and all the fried food stands were out. And best of all, a lot of the old samurai houses were open to the public to explore, though many tended to focus on the blooming weeping sakura in the yards...
Like other cities, Kakunodate have a preservation distriction of these nice samurai houses--manors essentially with sculpted gardens, etc. Unlike say Tsumago, these houses are still in use by the family in a way that doesn't scream tourism for most of the year. It's nice to see a rubber garden hose in front of an old house for once. But don't get me wrong; this place is defnitely built for tourism. As the samurai lost their status during the Meiji restoration, they turned to craftwork to survive. Which means that a lot of the houses here are involved in brewing soy sauce or miso, or making things with cherry bark, or ceramics. All this was nice to see too, and bad for my wallet, but it was the houses themselves that were the best.
Many of the families have these giant thick barn-like buildings that are used as storehouses for things like pickles or family treasures. During the festival, the families put their prized heirlooms in the vault for people to see. So it's really all odds and ends--a bunch of kabuki dolls, lacquerware and pottery, scrolls, maps and even a family with a trove of intricately drawn human dissection guides. Somehow the elucidation of the human ligaments of the hand are more disturbing in blue ink than the real thing in photos or in the BODIES exhibition. Plus, all the figures for the guides were of caucasians--take from that what you will.
Could've gone longer but needed to catch a train--which are exceedingly infrequent in this part of the country--down to Tsuruoka to climbs some stairs at a sacred mountain tomorrow. Same old, same old. Incidentally, though the trains are rare, the journey down the northwest of Honshu is really beautiful with huge tracts of rectangular rice paddies, the vast ocean--technically it faces Russian but you can't see land--and lots of mountains behind everything. It's like a very badly played game of hide and go seek.
Tomorrow: Haguro-san and Naruko Onsen
-mike
