I made this a couple months ago on my other blog  and finally got around to posting it XD  Hope you enjoy!

For those using Firefox I’ve noticed there’s an issue with it playing the music.  The music is very soft for the first 5 seconds, then gets louder, if no sound plays after 10-15 seconds (after all the loading of course) I’d suggest just clicking the link below and watching it from Dream Studio.
http://video.sanriotown.com/video/d402d62932b61025

Video clips of the 2008 Aomori Nebuta Festival.

I apologize for the somewhat lengthy pauses between the videos.  If I didn’t include them, half the time the videos skip the first half before it catches up.

www.hakkodapowder.com 

 I found a pretty nifty site all about skiing and snowboarding here in northern Japan.   It’s run by this guy who offers guiding services up in the Hakkoda mountains.  The Hakkoda’s are up here in Aomori Prefecture, and are a pretty big mountain range.  They’re very popular to ski/snowboard at but I’ve been hesitant to try them myself as I’m a very inexperienced boarder.  Last year some time I got to take the ropeway up to the top of the mountain and look around during a tour.  It was a really nice view, and you could see Aomori city and the bay it’s on from the top.  I’ve also seen some tours that do hiking trips through the mountains there, and I’m interested in going on one.  I’m gonna have to keep an eye out for one that’s offered as I really don’t like having to drive all the way there cause it’s 2-3hr drive up and back and then I’d be walking around too so I’d be tired driving back.  While taking a bus tour can be a little annoying, it’s cheap and relaxing for the most part.

Oh, I also found the link to the official Hakkoda Ropeway site: http://www.hakkoda-ropeway.jp/  Now I really want to go hiking there ^^  It looks so pretty.

Oh, the hakkodapowder has a bunch of info on festivals up here in the Aomori prefecture too!  He actually wrote about several I haven’t gone to yet, but I too hope soon.  Not this coming weekend, but the next is a fireworks festival out at Lake Towada, and I’m itching to go.  Lake Towada is K and mine’s favorite place to go for a nice relaxing day.

Matsushima

Saturday K and I took a tour to Matsushima bay in Miyagi Prefecture. That’s actually 2 Prefectures south of the one we’re currently living in, which is Aomori Prefecture. It was quite a long bus ride (4hrs) but well worth it, we both agree it was the best tour we’ve been on so far. The first place we visited was the Marinepia aquarium, we arrived just in time to catch the seal show for that hour. Seal shows are so much fun ^^ The seals names were Andy, Asuka, Noi and Ruthy.  I love all the cute stuff they have them do, they played volleyball 2 on 2, had a race with each other, and a bunch of other fun stuff.

Then we walked around the aquarium and got to see all sorts of awesome sea creatures. They had this giant manta ray that’s wing span was bigger then my arm span! It was freak’n huge! They also had a shark tank, an otter, penguins, electric eels, and hundreds of other things. I have trouble turning off the flash on my camera so I didn’t risk taking any pictures while we were in that area.

After there we headed over to the Zuiganji Temple. Right after the gate into the temple complex is a stand of sugi trees and these wall of caves dug into a rock face that house stone tablets and Buddhist sculptures, many of which were of Kannon. Kannon is known as the Goddess of Mercy and is a very prevalent Buddhist deity. These caves are pretty cool looking, and the statues look very old. The complex itself contains several buildings, the main one being the Temple itself, but there is a nice museum that they built next to the temple containing many Buddhist relics as well as Date Masamune’s armor and a life sized replica of him. Masamune is known as being a great military leader as well as a devout Buddhist. He had the Zuiganji temple rebuilt in 1609 and also founded the city of Sendai, which is now the capital of Miyagi Prefecture. He’s a pretty fearsome looking guy, he had an enormous crescent on his helmet, but it’s kind of funny, the mascot for Matsushima/Masamune is of a cute onigiri with the crescent on his forehead. XD I wonder what he’d think of it as the mascot representation of him?

The temple contains many beautiful paintings on sliding doors and hanging wall scrolls. I picked up a nice book with pictures of artwork since you can’t take any pictures inside the temple. There are some amazing wooden carvings decorating the temple too.

After that we wandered around the city for a bit, got some food and headed to this little island connected to the main land by a little red bridge. There are actually several islands connected that way but we only got to see 2 while we were there. The third one was connected by this incredibly long bridge and if I remember correctly has more Buddhist temples on it, but we didn’t have time to get over there. The island that we did get to that we liked the most was Oshima, and it had dozens of really old sculptures and more caves dug into the rock walls. It was incredible, like walking into history. It wasn’t a really big island either, but it had paths going everywhere, many of which were just the rock of the island worn down by thousands of people over the centuries. There was even a tunnel dug through the rock.

The last thing we did was take a boat cruise around the bay where we got to see dozens of the islands that Matsushima is famous for. A lot had really interesting histories, like this one that legend has it Masamune used to have midnight parties on this one island, and another was where retired horses were sent to live out the rest of their life in peace.

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So K and I went on a tour earlier today to two places in Iwate Prefecture, the first was Hiraizumi and the second was Geibi gorge. They are both very picturesque places and even though it was raining K and I had a pretty good time. We do both hope to get back down there again maybe during the summer or fall though when it hopefully isn’t raining. ^^

In Hiraizumi town is a tall hill, and on that hill are many temples and shrines. Here’s a link to the official Hiraizumi town site: http://www.chusonji.or.jp/index.html The majority are Buddhist temples, the most famous being the Konjiki-do (Golden Hall) temple and is made of wood from Southeast African rosewood, African Ivory iridescent shells and covered in gold leaf. It’s quite a site to see, such detail is amazing. Here’s a link to a picture from the official site:http://www.chusonji.or.jp/annai/konjikidoh/index.html, you can’t take any pictures of it unfortunately. It was built by this dude Fujiwara Kiyohira for a mausoleum in 1124. The statues are of Amida (the head Buddha) which is the main figure, and of Amida’s attendants. On the sides of each dias are carvings of peacocks gilt covered with gems adorning their tail feathers.

Another temple and the main one for the area is the Chuson-ji (Golden Pavilion) temple, which was built in 1105. The story behind it goes that Fujiwara, the same as above, lost his father, wife and son during battles and realized “that hatred and revenge would not heal the pain in his heart, so he pledged to Buddha to build the temple to help console the spirits of the dead, whether friend or foe, human or animal.” That was from the pamphlet I got from the temple complex.

The Fujiwara family after the temples were built dedicated themselves to transcribing Buddhist sutras (sutra is a word for manual). They had some beautiful ones transcribed onto dark blue scrolls with gold and silver ink. They displayed several in the museum that now surrounds the Golden Hall. They also displayed many other objects, but not anywhere near the 3,000 treasures that they have from Fujiwara’s time.

After that we wandered around the complex area for a couple hours, and thankfully the rain had calmed down for a bit so I could take some decent pictures. We found a Noh theater, which we thought was really cool, cause we had just learned about Noh plays in our Japanese Language and Culture class a couple weeks ago. Noh is a form of play that was created in the 14^th century and sponsored by the samurai/nobles class. Noh players wear mask and very bulky kimono’s so that the actor’s personality doesn’t reflect onto the character they are playing. It’s sometimes called “the art of walking” because every movement they perform is slow and calculated to reflect a certain type of persona for each character. Old women move different then young men characters and you can tell from their movements what type they are without having to look at their masks if you’re well versed in Noh (I’m not XD). The stage is in the center of 4 pillars and connected to a door off stage by a narrow walkway called the hashigakan, and painted onto the back of the stage is a pine tree (Cyprus I think) that represents a spiritual area, or an area where spirits have been seen. That type of Cyprus tree is commonly found by temples and shrines as well. The props for the play are very simple, like a plain four walled hut will represent a house, or just an outline to represent what the item is. On the back wall chanters will usually sit and almost all talking not done by the main actors is done by them. There is also a whole art form dedicated to making Noh masks that is handed down generation to generation, as well as the acting itself. Kabuki is like this as well, where it is a family position handed down to the next generation. Here’s the wiki link to Noh if you wanna read up on it more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noh

Oh, I forgot to mention but there shrines are usually Shinto and temples are Buddhist. So back to the trip XD. Beside the Noh stage was another shrine, which I really like the look of, and next to that were 12 little alters each with a picture of a Juunishi (the Chinese calendar animals). I took pictures of them together and of K and mines animals, I’ma monkey ^^ While we were there we bumped into a women who spoke really good English and she said she was from Kobe and that she was a descendent of Heike and her husband was a descendent of the genji that fought an epic battle against each in the Heian period (1180 give or take a few years). This time frame became a tale told by wandering monks who chanted this as a lively hood. It was then eventually written down and became a national epic called The Tale of the Heike: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heike_Monogatari .

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We walked around a bit more and came to a shrine with a bath of Torii leading down to a road, and the shrine seemed to be dedicated to kitsune (foxes). They had a bunch of cute statues of the foxes, some of concrete and some of ceramic. After that we headed back to the bus to head to the Geibikei gorge.

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It’s a magnificent ravine surrounded by incredibly tall rock walls. It made me feel really small to be dwarfed by such gargantuan walls. We hopped on a boat that had no engine and powered by one man with a pole. Along the way the guide pointed out many famous points such as the Bishamon cave and the Lion’s Snout. The Bishamon cave has a shrine to Bishamon-ten, the god of treasure. At the mouth of the cave they placed an alter box (used to put offerings in) and they say if you can throw yen from the boat into the box as the box passes you be blessed with good fortune. None of the people on my boat managed to, but it was difficult because all the boats had a low hanging rain-canopy. Then after a bit we get off of the boat and walk over a bridge to see a couple more rock formations, one of which was a hole across the water that you buy a little rock with a Shinto mark in it and try to get it into the hole. The guide said if you get it in you are blessed with good luck for a year.

The stream was really clear, and you could see Koi swimming in the water, they liked to hang out near the boat dock incase someone dropped any scraps in XD Then we got back on the boat and started back. The boatmen are famous for singing a local folksong called Oiwake “Parting of Ways” which is about the gorge and boating along it. It was really nice, and then the boatman requested that we (the American group) sing our national anthem for him XD Oh, one of the things they advertise about the boat trip is that you can ride it all year long; during the spring and autumn they put the rain canopy on, during the summer they take it off, and then for the winter they enclose the who cabin and put in a kotatsu (a coffee table covered with a blanket and with a heater underneath) so that you can enjoy the scenic winter beauty from a nice cozy boat.


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Oh, I found this really fun Hello Kitty bag while we were down there, and also this awesomely cute stuffed tako (octopus) ^^ I couldn’t help myself XD

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