Statues collection annotated

I've finished annotating my collection of interesting statues and sculptures. You can find them here. Some are historical, and some are artistic. Many are weird.

お帰り、マクドナルド

As I'm going through my old keepsakes while preparing to move to California, I found an old info sheet on Welcome Back, Mr. McDonald (ラジオの時間　or Radio Time in Japanese), a Japanese comedy movieshown at the Carnegie around 2000/2001. I still remember this movie, which was pretty great, and I also remember mentioning it to people the following summer in Okinawa, although I didn't realize that it had won several Japanese Academy Awards. Looking at this sheet now, I see that the film series was organized with the assistance of Keiko McDonald, who I didn't actually know, but who I heard headed the Japanese Studies department at the University of Pittsburgh, and who I believe recently passed away recently.

Shirakawa-go and Mountains

So the day after that dam, we came to Shirakawa-go, a World Cultural Heritage Site for its thatched-roof houses, called 合掌造り　gassho-zukuri or "clasped hands." People still live in them.

(note the satellite dish)

Here's a better picture of what the town looks like, taken from Wikipedia


My other cool picture of this town is of the Buddhist temple.


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After that we proceeded to bike through 天生峠　Amou Pass, an 800 meter climb over 12 km according to the Japanese Wikipedia. It was drizzly and foggy, but that was good because I tend to overheat. I had trouble for the first few kilometers, but by about halfway I had found my groove. Great views, though.
Actually this is a poster next to the road. All I could see was fog.

There was a sweet plaque to mark the actual pass. It's written right to left, which was how they did things before 1945. I couldn't really read the plaque, sadly, but someday I'll read it, too, like the plaque on the Peeing Boy of Nakatsu.

Then we descended carefully down the other side. I caught a picture of Gray going by across a curve.

Eventually we made it (through some pretty run-down towns) to Furukawa, yet another cute historic town. This one is kind of famous for its carpenters, who all had distinctive cloud patterns on the eaves.
Finally we made it to Takayama, where we met up with our host, Mike. He took our picture with this weird statue (I'm still annotating my album of statues, it'll be done soon).
On the way up to his apartment, Mike pointed out this cult building, which is apparently going to survive the apocalypse and is incredibly tacky.

Cartoon series

I took a lot of pictures of odd cartoons on my journeys. You can check them out, with comments and some locations, in this Picasa album. I'll upload all the sculptures and statues next.

If any tech-y people have advice on incorporating geo-location into photo albums, lemme know.

Going home

This will be my last cell post unless i get bored in the next 2 hours before my flight takes off. ill post more pics and thoughts as i readjust to life in the USA.

So then after looking around Hachiman and filling my water bottles from a spring in town, we continued northwards.

Here's the spring.

The next fun attraction was a waterfall that Kobo Daishi (remember him?) meditated under.
This was in the middle of our first real climb.

Then we crossed the Continental Divide. There was a little park.
One side of this arrow flows to the Pacific Ocean, while the other flows to the Sea of Japan. You see a lot of this kind of cheesy stuff in Japan. Otherwise the park was really nice.

Next we rode around a huge dammed lake, which wasn't very pretty, but was cool.
Here are two giant sakura trees transplanted from temples that were submerged by the dam. The placards try to tell a story of the trees' survival as a symbol of nature being okay with these sorts of dammed lakes. I'm not so sure. Still, the dam was pretty cool to look at.

more pix

Okay, so we didn't end up exchanging photo data before he left, but I'll probably post some of the best ones later on.


So Gray and I set out from Gifu and headed north. It wasn't long before we could see snow-capped mountains, something I hadn't seen in Western Japan.



Having Gray around made me appreciate the scenery again, so I'll post one of the views from the road. This is pretty typical rural Japan.


Right so the weirdest part of the first day was this:

This is the 日本まん真ん中 exact center of Japan (at least by population in 1990). The building is also a giant sundial with numbers in the parking lot. Inside there's a bunch of art and a community center. Also, that needle goes all the way down to a map of Japan:


Then, as you know, we made it to Gujo Hachiman, a cute historic town. The Youth Hostel was also a temple and a day care center, but was closed. Not exactly sure why but it involved the most intense apology i've ever seen. But then it turned out we could camp by the river. The next morning looked like this:

Be sure to ask Gray about his electric bath.