April 21: Takayama wanderings
Apr. 22nd, 2012 06:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
blatherskiteWe’d arranged for a third Japanese-style breakfast today, and it was much in the same vein as our first breakfast, though with several substitutions: the miso paste was replaced by sweetened beans and a bowl of fresh tofu, the sweetened eggs were replaced with a softboiled egg with a scarily orange yolk (possibly they feed their chickens marigold petals?), and the lotus root was replaced by pickled cabbage and what looked to be baby broccoli rabe florets and stems. Yummy as always, and a hearty start to the day.
Our plan was to spend the morning at the “Hida no sato”, a reconstructed folk village for the Hida area built from old homes and other buildings designed to showcase some of the key features of interest of bygone times. You can take a bus to the site, but since we’re apparently masochists, we decided to walk there instead. It’s about 20 minutes southwest of town, and not the most beautiful of walks, but pleasant enough once you get past the highway portion. One of the things we love to do on our trips is stray from the beaten path and explore side roads and alleys, and we often find interesting things that way. (Witness, for example, the artwork we found hanging in the narrow side street behind the Takayama archives.)
Like similar villages we’ve visited in Scotland, Ireland, and Massachusetts, the folk village is a collection of old homes that have been disassembled at their original locations, transported to the museum site, and then painstakingly reassembled. In this context, “old” means “up to 300 years”, and the original location was a nearby part of Japan that was drowned to create a hydroelectric reservoir. There were two or three main building types, depending on how you count the styles. The first type was a relatively flat-roofed building covered by cedar shingles or tiles, which are held down against wind and rain by logs laid across the tops of various rows of shingles and weighted down with large stones. Given that the area gets up to 8 feet of snow in a bad winter, this shouldn’t be the most survivable design, but a profound understanding of how wood flexes under a load let the builders create a structure capable of surviving that weight of snow, with a little help from shoveling off the roof when needed.
I suspect that another great aid to keeping the buildings intact is that most of the buildings and most parts of all buildings are constructed without any nails: the wood joinery is almost entirely tongue and groove (more technically, a form of mortise and tenon jointing), in which pieces of wood have their ends carved to fit into notches in other pieces of wood. In some places, a wedge is then driven into the gap between the two pieces of wood to create a firm gap; in others, a hole is drilled through the tongue so a pin can be driven through the hole to hold the tongue in place. (Any carpenters in the audience should feel free to provide correct details, as necessary.) Other parts of the binding are ropes wound around beams and other structures to hold them firmly in place.
The second type of building is a thatched A-frame, with the thatch up to 3 feet thick in places and steeply pitched to shed snow—steep enough you probably couldn’t stand on the thatch without driving pitons into the straw and standing on them instead. Despite being built of straw, these roofs last 30 to 60 years before they need to be replaced, and I found myself wondering whether anyone will still remember how to build such roofs when the current batch needs to be replaced. The signage suggested that it took roughly 4 days to completely thatch a building, but didn’t specify how many workers were involved or their skill level; given the size of the roofs, I suspect this was more like a barn raising led by a few experts than a few dedicated souls throwing up a roof in their spare time. Interestingly, these buildings were quite huge, suggesting that at least some of the owners were quite prosperous.
One thing I love about such places is seeing how people from vastly different cultures and environments find similar ways to solve the same problems using whatever resources are available to them. The thatched roofs, for instance, looked much like those we saw in Scotland. Though we didn’t see the tools used to create those roofs, I imagine they were pretty much like those we saw at Hida no sato: basically, huge sewing needles (4 or 5 feet long) that were used to push ropes through the thatch so each bundle could be stitched to the roof beams.
Similarly, most cultures around the world have invented some form of sled, even if it’s only a primitive form like the travois. The Hida Japonese had something like a dozen different types of sled, with different architectures for different log lengths and different cargos (e.g., wood versus stone), different articulations (e.g., fixed vs. mounted on a pivot), different types of runner (different length, thickness, or depth, depending on snow or soil conditions for the time when the load was dragged), and different ways of drawing the sled (e.g., animal vs. human vs. team of humans). They even had a specific sled type designed to slide over round logs that would be placed under the sled’s runners as rollers, making it easier for the sled to slide.
We spent at least 2 hours at the village, exploring the various buildings and enjoying the site itself, which is perched on the side of a mountain covered in hinoki and tsugi and offers a fine view of the Japanese alps (many still snow-covered) to the northeast. (We’ll be going there in a few days to travel the alpine route, which crosses the mountains). On the way home, we stopped at the gift shop and sampled the usual wares to stave off hunger until we made it back into town and found a restaurant. There were a few places along the way, but they were either way pricey or didn’t have a menu we could read. Shortly after we passed our minshuku on the way back into the restaurant area near the train station, we spotted a place we’d walked past half a dozen times before without noticing it was a restaurant, and took a closer look. Glad we did, since it turned out to be excellent. We shared an order of gyoza (pan-fried dumplings) dipped in vinegar with added hot pepper oil, and a huge bowl of teriyaki pork (very tender) in a bowl of savory broth filled with ramen noodles. Yum!
For the afternoon, our plan was to visit the temple area on the far opposite side of town, east-northeast of anywhere we’d been before. There are 10 temples perched on the slopes of a steep hill, arranged along a long “walking course” that threads through hinoki and tsugi forests and cemetaries. We visited each one, making sure to stop and enjoy the peace and stillness, and the quality of the light in the forests. Despite the cloud cover, enough light penetrated the trees to make it quite beautiful; on a sunny day with more light, it would have been as spectacular as the aboriginal sacred site we visited in Australia several years ago, which still holds pride of place as the single most ravishing woodland I’ve ever visited.
After the last temple, we headed back down to our minshoku so I could have a good soak and a shower before dinner. I haven’t described the baths in detail, so a few additional points of interest: A Japanese bath is not for cleaning yourself; it’s for soaking and relaxing. Thus, you shower first before getting in to scrub off the worst of the grease. At a real onsen-style bath, you’re usually soaking in mineral water piped in from a hot spring, but at our minshuku, it was just hot water. Bathing is segregated by sex, but is otherwise communal; as many people as happen to be around and in need of a soak may share the tub. Some onsens make private baths available for couples and families, but we haven’t been to one of them yet. Thus far, I’ve bathed alone each night, possibly because I usually go at the end of the day, either around dinner time or late at night (the bath is open until 11 PM). After you’re done soaking, you then go soap up and shampoo under the shower.
Dinner was at a place called “Origin”, which was highly rated by the Lonely Planet guide. We’d looked for it the first day and hadn’t found it despite our best efforts. Several factors contributed: there was no English sign, no menu outside, and the location shown in the guide didn’t quite match the actual location. It’s actually a few score feet down a side street rather than on the main street that runs in front of the train station. Mostly, though, it was the lingering effects of jet lag: we were both so tired we could barely think straight.
We finally spotted Origin a day or two into our stay based only on a throway line in the guide that said to look for bamboo poles outside. Sure enough, when we spotted the bamboo and poked our heads inside the door, there it was. Dinner was pork and leek skewers, with the meat roasted to a fine and tender delishousness, accompanied by lighly breaded pumpkin tempura that was just as good. The main course was Hida beef (plus onions and mushrooms) which we fried up at our table on a tiny gas-powered griddle. This definitely falls in the “guilty pleasure” category, because the waitress dumps a chunk of lard on the griddle, and as it melts, it makes enough grease to fry the meat. Veggie oil would have been considerably healthier.
Hida beef is also beautifully marbled, and the fat makes it remarkably tender and savory. We finished off with a deep-fried eggplant swimming in sauce filled with tiny mushrooms (Shoshanna says they’re probably inoki mushrooms). Beer with dinner was a Suntory premium malt, which is very nice indeed. Since we shared it and it was a smallish mug, we both wanted more, so we stopped at “Circle K” (a local place much like 7/11 or any other depanneur) and bought an Asahi Black Extra Dry to take home and drink in our room. Even nicer (given that I like dark beers best).
Our plan was to spend the morning at the “Hida no sato”, a reconstructed folk village for the Hida area built from old homes and other buildings designed to showcase some of the key features of interest of bygone times. You can take a bus to the site, but since we’re apparently masochists, we decided to walk there instead. It’s about 20 minutes southwest of town, and not the most beautiful of walks, but pleasant enough once you get past the highway portion. One of the things we love to do on our trips is stray from the beaten path and explore side roads and alleys, and we often find interesting things that way. (Witness, for example, the artwork we found hanging in the narrow side street behind the Takayama archives.)
Like similar villages we’ve visited in Scotland, Ireland, and Massachusetts, the folk village is a collection of old homes that have been disassembled at their original locations, transported to the museum site, and then painstakingly reassembled. In this context, “old” means “up to 300 years”, and the original location was a nearby part of Japan that was drowned to create a hydroelectric reservoir. There were two or three main building types, depending on how you count the styles. The first type was a relatively flat-roofed building covered by cedar shingles or tiles, which are held down against wind and rain by logs laid across the tops of various rows of shingles and weighted down with large stones. Given that the area gets up to 8 feet of snow in a bad winter, this shouldn’t be the most survivable design, but a profound understanding of how wood flexes under a load let the builders create a structure capable of surviving that weight of snow, with a little help from shoveling off the roof when needed.
I suspect that another great aid to keeping the buildings intact is that most of the buildings and most parts of all buildings are constructed without any nails: the wood joinery is almost entirely tongue and groove (more technically, a form of mortise and tenon jointing), in which pieces of wood have their ends carved to fit into notches in other pieces of wood. In some places, a wedge is then driven into the gap between the two pieces of wood to create a firm gap; in others, a hole is drilled through the tongue so a pin can be driven through the hole to hold the tongue in place. (Any carpenters in the audience should feel free to provide correct details, as necessary.) Other parts of the binding are ropes wound around beams and other structures to hold them firmly in place.
The second type of building is a thatched A-frame, with the thatch up to 3 feet thick in places and steeply pitched to shed snow—steep enough you probably couldn’t stand on the thatch without driving pitons into the straw and standing on them instead. Despite being built of straw, these roofs last 30 to 60 years before they need to be replaced, and I found myself wondering whether anyone will still remember how to build such roofs when the current batch needs to be replaced. The signage suggested that it took roughly 4 days to completely thatch a building, but didn’t specify how many workers were involved or their skill level; given the size of the roofs, I suspect this was more like a barn raising led by a few experts than a few dedicated souls throwing up a roof in their spare time. Interestingly, these buildings were quite huge, suggesting that at least some of the owners were quite prosperous.
One thing I love about such places is seeing how people from vastly different cultures and environments find similar ways to solve the same problems using whatever resources are available to them. The thatched roofs, for instance, looked much like those we saw in Scotland. Though we didn’t see the tools used to create those roofs, I imagine they were pretty much like those we saw at Hida no sato: basically, huge sewing needles (4 or 5 feet long) that were used to push ropes through the thatch so each bundle could be stitched to the roof beams.
Similarly, most cultures around the world have invented some form of sled, even if it’s only a primitive form like the travois. The Hida Japonese had something like a dozen different types of sled, with different architectures for different log lengths and different cargos (e.g., wood versus stone), different articulations (e.g., fixed vs. mounted on a pivot), different types of runner (different length, thickness, or depth, depending on snow or soil conditions for the time when the load was dragged), and different ways of drawing the sled (e.g., animal vs. human vs. team of humans). They even had a specific sled type designed to slide over round logs that would be placed under the sled’s runners as rollers, making it easier for the sled to slide.
We spent at least 2 hours at the village, exploring the various buildings and enjoying the site itself, which is perched on the side of a mountain covered in hinoki and tsugi and offers a fine view of the Japanese alps (many still snow-covered) to the northeast. (We’ll be going there in a few days to travel the alpine route, which crosses the mountains). On the way home, we stopped at the gift shop and sampled the usual wares to stave off hunger until we made it back into town and found a restaurant. There were a few places along the way, but they were either way pricey or didn’t have a menu we could read. Shortly after we passed our minshuku on the way back into the restaurant area near the train station, we spotted a place we’d walked past half a dozen times before without noticing it was a restaurant, and took a closer look. Glad we did, since it turned out to be excellent. We shared an order of gyoza (pan-fried dumplings) dipped in vinegar with added hot pepper oil, and a huge bowl of teriyaki pork (very tender) in a bowl of savory broth filled with ramen noodles. Yum!
For the afternoon, our plan was to visit the temple area on the far opposite side of town, east-northeast of anywhere we’d been before. There are 10 temples perched on the slopes of a steep hill, arranged along a long “walking course” that threads through hinoki and tsugi forests and cemetaries. We visited each one, making sure to stop and enjoy the peace and stillness, and the quality of the light in the forests. Despite the cloud cover, enough light penetrated the trees to make it quite beautiful; on a sunny day with more light, it would have been as spectacular as the aboriginal sacred site we visited in Australia several years ago, which still holds pride of place as the single most ravishing woodland I’ve ever visited.
After the last temple, we headed back down to our minshoku so I could have a good soak and a shower before dinner. I haven’t described the baths in detail, so a few additional points of interest: A Japanese bath is not for cleaning yourself; it’s for soaking and relaxing. Thus, you shower first before getting in to scrub off the worst of the grease. At a real onsen-style bath, you’re usually soaking in mineral water piped in from a hot spring, but at our minshuku, it was just hot water. Bathing is segregated by sex, but is otherwise communal; as many people as happen to be around and in need of a soak may share the tub. Some onsens make private baths available for couples and families, but we haven’t been to one of them yet. Thus far, I’ve bathed alone each night, possibly because I usually go at the end of the day, either around dinner time or late at night (the bath is open until 11 PM). After you’re done soaking, you then go soap up and shampoo under the shower.
Dinner was at a place called “Origin”, which was highly rated by the Lonely Planet guide. We’d looked for it the first day and hadn’t found it despite our best efforts. Several factors contributed: there was no English sign, no menu outside, and the location shown in the guide didn’t quite match the actual location. It’s actually a few score feet down a side street rather than on the main street that runs in front of the train station. Mostly, though, it was the lingering effects of jet lag: we were both so tired we could barely think straight.
We finally spotted Origin a day or two into our stay based only on a throway line in the guide that said to look for bamboo poles outside. Sure enough, when we spotted the bamboo and poked our heads inside the door, there it was. Dinner was pork and leek skewers, with the meat roasted to a fine and tender delishousness, accompanied by lighly breaded pumpkin tempura that was just as good. The main course was Hida beef (plus onions and mushrooms) which we fried up at our table on a tiny gas-powered griddle. This definitely falls in the “guilty pleasure” category, because the waitress dumps a chunk of lard on the griddle, and as it melts, it makes enough grease to fry the meat. Veggie oil would have been considerably healthier.
Hida beef is also beautifully marbled, and the fat makes it remarkably tender and savory. We finished off with a deep-fried eggplant swimming in sauce filled with tiny mushrooms (Shoshanna says they’re probably inoki mushrooms). Beer with dinner was a Suntory premium malt, which is very nice indeed. Since we shared it and it was a smallish mug, we both wanted more, so we stopped at “Circle K” (a local place much like 7/11 or any other depanneur) and bought an Asahi Black Extra Dry to take home and drink in our room. Even nicer (given that I like dark beers best).