Back to Basics

Well, my own personal basics, anyway.

I've been meaning to get around to posting photos of our Japan trip, which seems years ago now, and I just haven't got round to it. So please bear with me while I make my first attempt.

Hmm. Not too bad. That was pretty easy, actually.

I'm taking these photos out of the chronological order of our actual trip, but the first place that come to mind when I thought about our summer trip to Japan was Takayama. A popular, though out-of-the way, tourist destination in Japan is a small mountain town called Takayama (where I snapped the above photo). The streets there are a bit like a working museum, and the town looks much like it would have a few centuries ago—think a Japanese Colonial Williamsburg. Though you can certainly find modern products to buy in the shops, there a quite a few that still sell foods and other goods that are made using the same processes that would have been in use during the time period. Unlike a museum, however, many of the shops are still owned and operated by the same families who have lived and worked there for generations.

See this? It's a cedar ball suspended above the entrance to a sake brewery. A family-style one, that is. We were told that everywhere we saw a cedar ball like this, we were looking at a sake brewery. It's basically the same thing as hanging the tradesman's shingle out front. The ball is actually made of cedar, which grows everywhere and is used everywhere as well.

The breweries look pretty much like any other type of shop on the street, and if you walk inside, you will be greeted by a family member or employee. At a small bar inside, patrons can participate in a Japanese style wine tasting (sake in lieu of wine), and I was disappointed on our trip not to have had more time there with my husband. It would have been so much fun to just belly up to the bar and hang out tasting sake for a while. But our children, unlike horses, couldn't just be hitched up to the post outside, quietly to graze on oats while we took our time in the sake saloon, so we had to move on . . .

This photo was taken from the train window on the way to Takayama, and since my poor little camera is very basic and not at all brand new, this was about the clearest shot I could get of what I guessed (correctly) were small green tea plantations. For more thorough info, you might check out http://www.obubutea.com/ . I'm not recommending this site for any particular reason other than for the photos of what a tea plantation looks like, though it does appear to be an incredibly dense site that I will be looking at more closely myself. Most of us, I'm guessing, only see the dried tea, and many only see it through the gauzy paper sachets that come in boxes of twenty, so I thought you might find it interesting.

Just enough time for one more, I think . . .

It's hard to resist including a photo of a certain familiar face surrounded by the image of "sarubobo". The sarubobo (meaning literally "monkey baby") has a long history. Of course, the origin is most likely very simple: scraps of fabric were used by mothers and grandmothers to make dolls for children. Along the way, however, greater symbolism became attached to the dolls. There are many, many charms for luck in Japan, and this is one of them. This blog has some really great photos: http://hidatakayama.blogspot.com/2010/04/sarubobo-luck-made-of-plush.html

Well, that's all the time we have for today, boys and girls. Perhaps tomorrow I'll put up photos of a wood furniture factory we visited while in Takayama. No, really, it was pretty interesting, and I won't write a book, I promise. For now, if you're interested in more information than I have included here, this is a fantastic site: http://www.hida.jp/english/index.htm