April 24-25: Matsumoto and surrounds
Apr. 26th, 2012 07:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
blatherskiteMatsumoto is just east of the Japanese alps region, in a wide valley between the alps and another range to the east. Mostly the mountains are shrouded in mist, making clear the origin of those silk screen mountain paintings that were so popular back in the 1990s. It’s quite lovely, if a bit odd because the mountains are so large (2000 to 3000 meters tall and running horizon to horizon), yet they fade into the background in an interestingly ghostly way. We were actually quite fortunate in having our first day of the visit unusually clear, so that the mountains were crisp and sharp, and lovely both for their own sake and as a backdrop. On our second day, they were more the ghostly silk screen backdrop type of mountain.
Our goal the first day was to visit Matsumoto-jo (= a castle), one of the three largest wooden castles in Japan and dating back about 400 years. The basic structure is the familiar pagoda style, with the sweeping roofs, but it has the expected Japanese combination of elegant design (it’s very attractive in its own right) and underlying functionality. For example, the moat surrounding the castle, populated by the usual carp and several swans, is lovely enough, but with sinister undertones: its width was carefully calibrated to ensure that the windows in the castle would be just high enough and far enough away to be out of range of a typical musket from the period when the fort was built.
We arrived with the cherries in peak bloom, filling the background with a luscious pinkness. (By the second day of our stay, the petals were falling like snow every time the wind blew, and you sometimes saw kids running through the fallen petals and kicking them into the air in kid-sized clouds.) Despite this being the middle of the week, the park surrounding the castle was filled with people, ranging from the usual ducklings to seniors, all enjoying the cherries and the sunshine. We were expecting to have a pleasant but uninformative visit, since the vast majority of the signage was Japanese-only, but the site has many volunteer docents who are there to give tours, one of them approached us and took us under her wing. She was a woman a bit younger than us (she has 15- and 18-year-old boys), and despite claiming to have only 1 year or so of experience, she was highly knowledgeable about the castle’s history, and was an engaging hostess with a sly sense of humor. Two favorites: There were sliding pieces of wood with wires sticking up from them, kind of like those wire-form cheese slicers, in most of the windows, and after telling us about Japanese musketry, she asked us what the purpose of the devices might be. I assumed it would have something to do with musketry, and proposed that they were aids to ranging the muskets for fire down from the windows, but the explanation was more mundane: they were there to keep the ubiquitous pigeons out. Towards the end of the tour, she held a quiz to see how sharp we were: in the moon room, where visiting nobility would sit to sip sake and watch the moon, she asked us how it might be that visitors could see three moons. The first two were obvious (the actual moon and its reflection in the moat), but I was quite pleased to guess the third: as a consequence of the sake. (I assume in the metaphorical “seeing double” sense rather than the more literal “as a reflection” sense. To finish our tour, she taught us how to fold origami cranes. Shoshanna’s turned out quite good; mine can be seen as a crane if you have a good and charitable imagination.
The main type of Japanese food we hadn’t yet experienced was a steak house, so that was our destination for the evening. The host spoke nearly perfect English, and he was charming and attentive, but he apologized that there was no English menu; instead, we ordered from the wax or plastic models of his fare in the restaurant window. These models are quite amazingly detailed; the betters ones look almost exactly like what you’ll get, even upon close inspection. I had a deliciously savory and tender steak, accented with a delightfully sharp mustard, accompanied by perfectly prepared home fries and some broccoli, washed down with an Asahi Extra Dry beer. All very yummy, though the beer is nothing special (i.e., not a microbrew). Shoshanna was less pleased with her salmon, since it came with a cream sauce (she’s not a fan, and didn’t notice the sauce when she looked at the model model) and what she described as “spaghetti” noodles; I finished off what she didn’t want to eat, and found the salmon tasty and the noodles much better than standard restaurant spagetti (perfectly al dente).
Our goal on the second day was to visit the Daioh wasabi farm, a local producer that covers 15 hectares (about 40 acres) and accounts for something like 5% of Japan’s total production. To get there, we took the local slow train half an hour out of town, and walked for another half hour through the Hotaka urban area and the surrounding paddy fields that were just being prepped for planting of the annual crop. (Some were still being puddled, with small areas of surface standing water; others were flooded; still others had already been planted. Several tractors were out harrowing the flooded fields to prepare them for planting.) Many hawks circled above the fields, seeking prey.
We also saw many herons or storks standing in the fields or flying past overhead, all too distant to see clearly even through the camera’s zoom, but unmistakably members of this group of birds based on their heavy wings and how they look in flight (huge beaks and legs trailing behind as they fly). Turns out there’s a rookery right beside the wasabi farm. You can’t get close to the rookery, which is a good thing because it helps protect the young, but it’s unmistakable even from a distance, with huge nests in the tree tops and a raucous noise audible even at a distance from the squabbling neighbors and the babies crying out when mom or dad returns home with food.
The farm itself is a lovely space, nestled in a river valley a short distance (a couple miles max?) from the eastern mountains. The wasabi fields are located down in the gravel of the rivers. Until this visit, I hadn’t known that wasabi was a crop that grew with its feet wet all of the time. The river bottoms are gravel mixed with mud and silt, and the wasabi are planted in raised rows of gravel that keep the leaves above water but the roots (i.e., the wasabi that most people think of) submerged. Each crop takes about two years to produce. We watched for a while as one worker ran a rototiller across the harvested rows, while a team of half a dozen workers, all men, followed in his wake and used special tools to flatten out the gravel and clear the channels (about 3 to 4 feet wide) that ran between sections of the field. The tool looks like a cross between a spade and a hoe, with a wide shovel blade perforated by holes to let water through, angled backwards towards the worker like the blade of a hoe. We also got to watch the women processing the harvested wasabi into roots (which are grated to produce the familiar hot paste that is eaten with sushi), and the stems and leaves, which are served as vegetables.
Admission is free, since this is a working farm that earns its keep from sales of wasabi. But there are several snack bars, restaurants, and gift shops packed with wasabi-themed merchandise, much of which you can sample. Three favorites: wasabi ice cream (an odd but surprisingly tasty concoction), potato croquettes containing wasabi potatoes, and wasabi beer (Kirin lager with just enough wasabi to give it a distinctive taste). Interestingly, our experience thus far suggests that except for pubs, restaurants typically stock only a single variety of beer, or at most two. We had a pleasant time dipping our feet in a pond stockd with rainbow trout and “redfish”, which looked kind of like large goldfish. The water, which originated a few thousand feet higher as snow, is a chilly 15C most of the year round, which is very refreshing after a long, hot walk from the train station to the farm.
Dinner in the evening was at the “Old Stone”, a Japanese take on an English pub that does a really credible job of capturing the ambience. We had succulent and tender beef stew in Guiness gravy and a roasted pork slab that was even tastier. Washed it down with a pint of “real ale”, our first craft (rather than mass market) beer, which was very tasty too. (We didn’t record the name, unfortunately.) To finish off for the evening, we walked down by the river near the Nonuya ryokan for desert. On our first day, we’d sampled “takaiya”, which are fish-shaped fried dough with a hint of cinnamon filled with various tasty things. I chose the sweet red bean paste; Shoshanna tried green tea with cream. Both very yummy, but the red bean version was better. Interesting note about the river: the street beside it is Nawate street, which has frogs as its theme. The reason is a Japanese pun: the street is lined by shops, where you can go to buy things (the verb kaeru, which is also the noun for “frog”). So they made the pun explicit by placing frog sculptures near each of the bridges crossing the river.
A couple corrections to previous notes: First, the drums at the naked festival are smaller than I’d remembered. Closer to 1 foot than 2 feet. Second, now that we’ve actually had a chance to see the local bikes up close, it’s clear that many (but not all) are locked, most with tiny circular locks that clamp the rear wheel to stop it from turning. So despite the low crime rate, Japan’s not the perfect crime-free paradise my previous notes suggested. Still, in the west, you’d expect thieves to just throw the bike in the back of a van and saw the lock off safely at home. Also, it’s nice to see women walking alone down dark streets, seeing a hulking westerner appear out of the darkness (me, followed by Shoshanna), and showing no sign of alarm or hesitation in passing us by. That says much that I like about the culture.
Our goal the first day was to visit Matsumoto-jo (= a castle), one of the three largest wooden castles in Japan and dating back about 400 years. The basic structure is the familiar pagoda style, with the sweeping roofs, but it has the expected Japanese combination of elegant design (it’s very attractive in its own right) and underlying functionality. For example, the moat surrounding the castle, populated by the usual carp and several swans, is lovely enough, but with sinister undertones: its width was carefully calibrated to ensure that the windows in the castle would be just high enough and far enough away to be out of range of a typical musket from the period when the fort was built.
We arrived with the cherries in peak bloom, filling the background with a luscious pinkness. (By the second day of our stay, the petals were falling like snow every time the wind blew, and you sometimes saw kids running through the fallen petals and kicking them into the air in kid-sized clouds.) Despite this being the middle of the week, the park surrounding the castle was filled with people, ranging from the usual ducklings to seniors, all enjoying the cherries and the sunshine. We were expecting to have a pleasant but uninformative visit, since the vast majority of the signage was Japanese-only, but the site has many volunteer docents who are there to give tours, one of them approached us and took us under her wing. She was a woman a bit younger than us (she has 15- and 18-year-old boys), and despite claiming to have only 1 year or so of experience, she was highly knowledgeable about the castle’s history, and was an engaging hostess with a sly sense of humor. Two favorites: There were sliding pieces of wood with wires sticking up from them, kind of like those wire-form cheese slicers, in most of the windows, and after telling us about Japanese musketry, she asked us what the purpose of the devices might be. I assumed it would have something to do with musketry, and proposed that they were aids to ranging the muskets for fire down from the windows, but the explanation was more mundane: they were there to keep the ubiquitous pigeons out. Towards the end of the tour, she held a quiz to see how sharp we were: in the moon room, where visiting nobility would sit to sip sake and watch the moon, she asked us how it might be that visitors could see three moons. The first two were obvious (the actual moon and its reflection in the moat), but I was quite pleased to guess the third: as a consequence of the sake. (I assume in the metaphorical “seeing double” sense rather than the more literal “as a reflection” sense. To finish our tour, she taught us how to fold origami cranes. Shoshanna’s turned out quite good; mine can be seen as a crane if you have a good and charitable imagination.
The main type of Japanese food we hadn’t yet experienced was a steak house, so that was our destination for the evening. The host spoke nearly perfect English, and he was charming and attentive, but he apologized that there was no English menu; instead, we ordered from the wax or plastic models of his fare in the restaurant window. These models are quite amazingly detailed; the betters ones look almost exactly like what you’ll get, even upon close inspection. I had a deliciously savory and tender steak, accented with a delightfully sharp mustard, accompanied by perfectly prepared home fries and some broccoli, washed down with an Asahi Extra Dry beer. All very yummy, though the beer is nothing special (i.e., not a microbrew). Shoshanna was less pleased with her salmon, since it came with a cream sauce (she’s not a fan, and didn’t notice the sauce when she looked at the model model) and what she described as “spaghetti” noodles; I finished off what she didn’t want to eat, and found the salmon tasty and the noodles much better than standard restaurant spagetti (perfectly al dente).
Our goal on the second day was to visit the Daioh wasabi farm, a local producer that covers 15 hectares (about 40 acres) and accounts for something like 5% of Japan’s total production. To get there, we took the local slow train half an hour out of town, and walked for another half hour through the Hotaka urban area and the surrounding paddy fields that were just being prepped for planting of the annual crop. (Some were still being puddled, with small areas of surface standing water; others were flooded; still others had already been planted. Several tractors were out harrowing the flooded fields to prepare them for planting.) Many hawks circled above the fields, seeking prey.
We also saw many herons or storks standing in the fields or flying past overhead, all too distant to see clearly even through the camera’s zoom, but unmistakably members of this group of birds based on their heavy wings and how they look in flight (huge beaks and legs trailing behind as they fly). Turns out there’s a rookery right beside the wasabi farm. You can’t get close to the rookery, which is a good thing because it helps protect the young, but it’s unmistakable even from a distance, with huge nests in the tree tops and a raucous noise audible even at a distance from the squabbling neighbors and the babies crying out when mom or dad returns home with food.
The farm itself is a lovely space, nestled in a river valley a short distance (a couple miles max?) from the eastern mountains. The wasabi fields are located down in the gravel of the rivers. Until this visit, I hadn’t known that wasabi was a crop that grew with its feet wet all of the time. The river bottoms are gravel mixed with mud and silt, and the wasabi are planted in raised rows of gravel that keep the leaves above water but the roots (i.e., the wasabi that most people think of) submerged. Each crop takes about two years to produce. We watched for a while as one worker ran a rototiller across the harvested rows, while a team of half a dozen workers, all men, followed in his wake and used special tools to flatten out the gravel and clear the channels (about 3 to 4 feet wide) that ran between sections of the field. The tool looks like a cross between a spade and a hoe, with a wide shovel blade perforated by holes to let water through, angled backwards towards the worker like the blade of a hoe. We also got to watch the women processing the harvested wasabi into roots (which are grated to produce the familiar hot paste that is eaten with sushi), and the stems and leaves, which are served as vegetables.
Admission is free, since this is a working farm that earns its keep from sales of wasabi. But there are several snack bars, restaurants, and gift shops packed with wasabi-themed merchandise, much of which you can sample. Three favorites: wasabi ice cream (an odd but surprisingly tasty concoction), potato croquettes containing wasabi potatoes, and wasabi beer (Kirin lager with just enough wasabi to give it a distinctive taste). Interestingly, our experience thus far suggests that except for pubs, restaurants typically stock only a single variety of beer, or at most two. We had a pleasant time dipping our feet in a pond stockd with rainbow trout and “redfish”, which looked kind of like large goldfish. The water, which originated a few thousand feet higher as snow, is a chilly 15C most of the year round, which is very refreshing after a long, hot walk from the train station to the farm.
Dinner in the evening was at the “Old Stone”, a Japanese take on an English pub that does a really credible job of capturing the ambience. We had succulent and tender beef stew in Guiness gravy and a roasted pork slab that was even tastier. Washed it down with a pint of “real ale”, our first craft (rather than mass market) beer, which was very tasty too. (We didn’t record the name, unfortunately.) To finish off for the evening, we walked down by the river near the Nonuya ryokan for desert. On our first day, we’d sampled “takaiya”, which are fish-shaped fried dough with a hint of cinnamon filled with various tasty things. I chose the sweet red bean paste; Shoshanna tried green tea with cream. Both very yummy, but the red bean version was better. Interesting note about the river: the street beside it is Nawate street, which has frogs as its theme. The reason is a Japanese pun: the street is lined by shops, where you can go to buy things (the verb kaeru, which is also the noun for “frog”). So they made the pun explicit by placing frog sculptures near each of the bridges crossing the river.
A couple corrections to previous notes: First, the drums at the naked festival are smaller than I’d remembered. Closer to 1 foot than 2 feet. Second, now that we’ve actually had a chance to see the local bikes up close, it’s clear that many (but not all) are locked, most with tiny circular locks that clamp the rear wheel to stop it from turning. So despite the low crime rate, Japan’s not the perfect crime-free paradise my previous notes suggested. Still, in the west, you’d expect thieves to just throw the bike in the back of a van and saw the lock off safely at home. Also, it’s nice to see women walking alone down dark streets, seeing a hulking westerner appear out of the darkness (me, followed by Shoshanna), and showing no sign of alarm or hesitation in passing us by. That says much that I like about the culture.