Spring has sprung!

Though the official start of spring, Setsubun, was a few weeks ago, for me the sign that spring is here is the arrival of the plum blossoms.

Like the Chinese, I find the plum blossom more enchanting and exciting than the cherry blossom.

We have quite a few plum trees in the area...and at least they grow fruit, which is more than can be said for the cherry blossom.

Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art.

The Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art is located on the waterfront in Kobe, and was opened in 2002 as part of the post-earthquake reconstruction.

Designed by Tadao Ando, an architect I am coming to appreciate more and more. The Hyogo musuem is in many ways similar to the Fort Worth museum he built at around the same time.

I will post more later, but for now here are some of the spiral staircase between 2 of the 3 main buildings.

Tada-Ji, Hamada

Located in the hills just to the east of Hamada, Tada-Ji is the oldest existing temple in Hamada.
Founded in the early eighth Century by a student of Kukai it is a fairly large complex with several huge trees over 1,000 years old.

Kukai, known posthumously as Kobo Daishi is the founder of the Shingon sect, bases at Koyasan near Osaka/Nara.

This statue of Kobo Daishi stands in front of an Inari Shrine. Around the statue is a short path with 88 stone markers representing the 88 temples of the famous Shikoku pilgrimage. Miniature versions of pilgrimages are common throughout Japan, but this may be the shortest I've seen. Why walk 1,400 kilometres to visit 88 sites when you can walk it in 14 metres!

Of course there are hundreds and hundreds of miniature statues as at most temples.

Interestingly there is also a kagura-den with small shrine within the grounds.

Inside the main worship hall are 59 wooden statues that were found washed up on a nearby beach. Experts date the statues to about 1,000 years ago. They were found in 1870 around the time the new Meiji Government had a campaign to suppress Buddhism. Thousands of temples were razed and buddhist artworks destroyed, obviously sometimes by throwing them into the rivers and sea. The sea current here comes from the west so there is a high probability that they came from a temple in Yamaguchi Prefecture.

There is a big Matsuri here in early march that I hope to attend as I have never been to a Buddhist matsuri.

More posts on Tada-ji here.

Typical Japanese Landscape 15

With 10% of all the active volcanoes on the planet located in Japan, a volcano must be a typical Japanese landscape. This one is Mount Sanbe here in Iwami, and at 1126 metres is the highest point in Iwami, but a dwarf compared to Japans most famous volcano, Mt. Fuji.

The last eruption was about 1,400 years ago, but 3,500 years ago there was a major eruption that buried the forest under hundreds of feet of ash.

Actually Sanbe has 7 peaks, with a caldera about 1k across between them.

In the foreground is the Gonokawa River.

Mizokuchi demons

This is the draincover for the town of Mizokuchi in Tottori Prefecture. A story concerning the mythical 7th emperor of Japan visiting the area and fighting the local Oni, demon or ogre, is considered to be the earliest mention of Oni in Japan.

Up until recently the town had an Oni Museum, but apparently it has closed down due to lack of visitors. The giant statue on top of the building was visible from quite a ways off.

There was a small collection of demon masks from around the world.

And a small collection of demon masks from around japan.

A nice wooden Hanya mask.

Off course it wouldn't be Japan without "cute" demons!

Japan on 1,000 yen a day.

Was over the river at the store yesterday and saw this guy come cycling through the village. It is rare we see any foreigners in this part of the world, and rarer still foreigners touring by bicycle, but with full panniers that was obviously what he was doing. I stopped and asked him if he needed any help or information, and asked the obvious first question "where have you cycled from?". My jaw dropped with his answer "England!"

Justin, from Sheffield, left England at the end of July, cycled across Europe, then Asia, and arrived in Shimonoseki on a ferry from China on January 18th. He then did a circuit of Kyushu before coming back to Honshu and is now on his way up to the northernmost point of Tohuku before heading back down to Tokyo for a flight to Canada.

His answer to the question "why?" is simple and obvious "because I like cycling".

Since 2002 he has cycled his away across all the continents of the planet, with brief returns to England to work at a job for a few months to raise the cash to go cycling again. Other than the times people invite him into their homes for the night he camps out every night by the side of the road and prepares porridge, vegetables, and japatis to eat everyday.

Our offer of a cup of English tea he found impossible to refuse, and while chatting our offer of fish and chips and a bed for the night was accepted.

He is travelling the back roads in Japan, and reckons Japanese roads are some of the steepest he's encountered. In terms of being a cyclist he reckons the Japanese are the worst drivers in the world, but he has no real complaints and is thoroughly enjoying his time here.

So, if you live along the Japan Sea coast, keep your eyes open for him during the next month, and trade a bed and a meal for some fascinating stories.

Shimane by numbers. Part 2

More fascinating fun-fun-filled facts and statistics about where I live.

Per capita there are more museums and art galleries in Shimane than any other prefecture bar one. I have been unable to find out what that prefecture is, so if anyone knows, please let me know.

Why do we Shimaneans have more museums and galleries?

The answer is simple, because we are an incredibly sophisticated and cultural people!

We have museums for sand!

And we have museums for water! Actually this is one of my favorite museums I've come across in Japan, it's only a few minutes from my house. I will post more on it later.

In Hamada we have a huge Childrens Art Museum.

And lets not forget concert halls and auditoriums like this one in Daito, a town of 5,000.

The cynical among you might suggest that the real reason we have so many museums is because Shimane is the biggest recipient (per capita) of central government public works funds, so as well as all the museums we have...

........bridges to nowhere..........

... well protected mountains,........

.. and well protected rivers and coastline!

One final statistic...... it is estimated that 90% of the public works in Shimane are subject to dango! Dango is the Japanese word for bid-rigging, whereby a small group of companies get together and decide among themselves which company gets which project, and then they set an extremeley overpriced bid.
Bid rigging is of course illegal, but like many laws in Japan it masks the fact that bid-rigging is the standard way of doing things in Japan. The construction companies make huge profits, some of which is channeled to the political parties that bring the pork, the bureaucrats that award the contracts get nice cushy post-retirement jobs in the companies they have awarded contracts to, known as amakudari, and the prefecture gets infrastructure it neither needs nor wants. The losers are of course the tax-payers who fund the process.

I wrote this post a couple of weeks ago, so was really miffed when someone sent me this link to a New York Times article last week that covers the same subject even using Shimane as the example.

Omoto Shrine. Hamada

Tucked away up a little lane about 200 metres from the Otoshi shrine near the harbour in Hamada is a small Omoto Shrine.

I have been unable to find any information on the shrine. Omoto probably refers to the kami Omotojin, or it may refer to the fact that this shrine is built on the earliest shrine in the area before the Yamato Awashima Shrine. Or it may mean both things.

There is a small kagura-den and a small secondary shrine in the grounds, and I found these paper flowers which may have come from a Hana Mikoshi.

I love wandering around the alleys and narrow lanes of the old parts of Japanese towns. Without traffic it is easy to imagine how things were in earlier times.

Some people put plastic bottles of water around their doorways and houses in the belief that it will stop neighborhood cats from peeing there. I have no idea if there is any truth to this old-wives tale, but several houses in the area had put plastic flowers in the bottles which added a nice touch.

Omoto Kagura

It is believed that the root of Japanese religion, AND the root of Japanese performing arts lie in shamanic trance. Shamanic kagura was once commonplace throughout Japan, but was suppressed by the Meiji government. Only one place in Japan still has traditional shamanic kagura and that happens to be the place I live. I will be posting a lot more on this subject as it is the focus of a lot of my research and there is almost nothing on it in English.

The focus of Omoto kagura is Omoto, or Omotojin, the local land-based kami. Up in Izumo it is called Kojin, and like Omoto is represented as a rope snake. There are about 60 sites in my area that are considered Omoto shrines, though only a few have shrine buildings. Omoto kagura is practised at a handful of shrines, each shrine working to a 5, 6, or 7 year cycle, so some years there is no Omoto kagura , some years several performances.

Omoto kagura is performed by priests, and in fact all the priests of the county take part. As in the old days, the villagers perform theatrical kagura during the intervals between the priests various dances.

The supreme importance of Omoto kagura to the area is indicated by the number of offerings on the altar. I counted more than 40 different things on the altar at this performance in Ichiyama, compared with less than a dozen at a normal ceremony.

The dance in the video is called Tsunanuki (rope-pulling) and is probably the most well known of the various dances. If an Omoto kagura is successful then someone will be possessed by Omotojin and will answer questions by the priests usually on such matters as the coming years agricultural cycle, upcoming dangers etc. The grandfather of a friend of mine became possessed by Omotojin on 5 different occasions in the last half of the 20th Century.

February harvest

This should really be "daily harvest", as we get eggs every day. We currently have 15 chickens, from a high of about 25 a few months ago. A few of the older ones passed away from old age, and a few made their way into my favorite recipe Noisy Chicken Soup. All you need for that is a noisy chicken and a cleaver.

We no longer have any cocks. The noise was simply too much, and chickens can be gotten for free anytime, so we dont need to produce our own chicks. I kept this one cock around for a while though simply because he was so ugly.

The eggs are free as we feed the chickens kitchen & table scraps, weeds they really like, we get sacks of last years rice at harvest time, and a good part of their diet is nuka (rice bran and germ). Sacks of nuka are free as the Japanese dont eat it, preferring the tasteless, barely nutritional white rice. We do feed the chickens a little store-bought mash, and this we buy from the money we get from selling our surplus eggs. We have a lot of people who will take all the eggs we can sell as they are said to be really tasty (must be the bran)

Of course the other product is chicken shit for the garden. Store-bought chicken shit is really cheap, but it comes from factory farms and is loaded with antibiotics and other drugs that end up in the soil.

Picking cabbages, lettuces, spinach, spring onions and carrots right now, and gearing up for planting as spring seems to be here....