Hachiman

We set off saturday morning at 2am for Gifu prefecture, and at around 7am drove into one of the most beautiful montain villages I have ever seen.

Hachiman, also known as Gujo-Hachiman as it's part of the bigger city Gujo, is a smallish town in a beautiful mountain valley, with 2 rather nice size rivers flowing through it, and many many many small streams. Every road and alleyway has gutters of gurgling water, and there are innumerable canals running between the houses, most of them filled with an amazing number of huge carp.

The houses themselves are still very traditional, which means they don't look solid enough to last through the winter, and yet have obviously been there quite some time.

They also look as if whoever constructed the second floor did so in complete disregard of what style might previously have been employed to build the first floor. This makes the 2- and 3-floor houses look like something from the children's books where you can flip the pages to dress the characters in different clothes.

As the town started to wake up, we had a pleasant little visit, enjoying the cool morning air, before moving on to one main attraction of this town: the plastic food company! Japan is known for its displays of terribly life-like plastic food displays outside of restaurants and bars. And here is one of the places where such displays are made!

Look but don't eat! It's all silicons gel....

We even got to have a little hands-on class of tempura-making. (On the photo I am making the decorative lettuce leaf).

As we got into afternoon, the coolness quickly evaporated to be replaced by a swealtering heat only confined valleys can achieve. And so the local youth moved on to what appears to be their favorite summer occupation: jumping off the bridge into the (freezing cold) river below. Or at least the boys do. The girls either cheer them on from the bridge or get their wet suits on and paddle around in the swimming area near the bridge.

Leaving the rest of the party to swim around in the river, I wandered up to Hachiman castle, one of the main features of the town.

Like seems to be rather common in Japan, this castle spent its lifetime being beuilt, torn down, rebuilt in a different style, burnt down and finally rebuilt again, so that this actual castle is from 1933. It is wooden covered in white plaster which makes it really quite beautiful, sitting atop the mountain. I did not go inside it, though, as there is only a museum in there, and as far as I can tell, they re-built it as a museum in 1933.

And finally, after a delicious dinner of fish, fish and more fish (the local specialities), we got to the point of our trip, the Obon festival! And all dressed up as we should be!

This is half traditional, with a small band platform with singers and a few musicians, which sets in the middle of a square, while the crown join in the traditional dancing, moving up and down the roads on each side of the square. The other side of the town saw a normal village fair, with some small attraction stands (shooting and darts are really big here), and lots and lots of food stands, many of them selling unknown things fried in batter.

It was a very fun evening for all (we had some extra excitement when we had to fish one of the girls' telephone out of the carp pond), but I was glad to slip into bed for some well-deserved sleep!