OSAKA AND HAKONE
APRIL 27 TO MAY 3
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| In major train stations sliding barriers don't open until the train is ready to accept passengers. And the position of train cars are indicated so you know where to stand. |
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| Typical views from train in "countryside." between Kurashiki (actually Odayama, where we caught the express train), and Osaka |
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View from our hotel room on the 29th floor of the Swissotel, Osaka. The lobby was on the 20th floor.
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Takashimaya department store next to our hotel had three floors of restaurants
in addition to a big basement food hall. |
Osaka was added to our itinerary after we could not arrange to add Amano Hashidate and instead aimed for the Mt. Fuji area (Hakone) before finishing in Tokyo.
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| Osaka is bold and brassy. |
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| As usual we went for the maximum market action. This photo captures the crowd. |
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| Crab is king in Osaka |
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| Chestnuts featured. |
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| Crab legs etc. |
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| And live crabs at the aquarium.A satisfactory facility but not the world's largest as it falsely claims. |
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| Pickled vegetables are one of the delights of Japan. I read that the Japanese consume twice as much salt in their diet as other countries. This fact supports a new Japanese product - an electronic spoon that stimulates the tongue in a way that fools it into sensing more salt than is actually in the food. |
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| Horse chestnuts? |
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| Staring cuttlefish? |
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| Excellent department store sushi in the hotel room. |
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| Tourist makes a donation to a monk. (He was standing stock still in that location for a long time but did ring a small bell after the donation was made) |
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| Breakfast area of Swissotel, Osaka. |
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| Bold signage was everywhere. |
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Billiken is a weird pop culture "deity" prominent in Osaka culture and, oddly enough, derived from early 20th Century American design. See, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billiken
Full slogan is "Things as they ought to be." |
A Bunraku performance at Osaka's National Bunraku Theater raised the cultural level of our stay. Three-man teams manipulate large puppets in the Japanese equivalent of Shakespearean tragedies while, on the side, a prodigiously talented narrator provides all the voices to the accompaniment of a shamisen player. In the National Theater, the main puppet manipulator (who controls the head and right arm), is not masked, I consider this a distraction even though they maintain an impressive impassivity.
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| Shinkansen (super express) trains going through a station at about 150 miles an hour are impressive. |
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| A nice, curvy taxi ride from the Odayama station brings us to the Hotel Hakone and a view we hope will, at some point in our two-day stay, reveal Mt. Fuji on the horizon. |
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| We cross the road to have lunch at a good little restaurant. |
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| Danny improvises a chopstick rest from part of a bottle cap. |
The prospects for a view of Mt. Fuji do not look good but do not deter us from taking a bus to a cablecar for another possibility.
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Unfortunately the fog persists and even affects the position of the photos in this blog..
The cable car operator cannot control the fog. We decide to hike along Lake Ashi and take a taxi from the cable car station to the trail.
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| Outskirts of Hakone |
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| Snail on the trail. |
A few hours before our departure from Hakone, Fuji began to show itself and, at the very last minute, with the taxi waiting, we got some great shots. Why is Fuji special? I like to think that, for the Japanese and kindred spirits, it is a symbol of the dominance of Nature over humanity - a gigantic reminder of the importance of behaving modestly in the world - in short, the total reverse of most of the prevailing conduct of Homo sapiens.
HOORAY!
ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL.
- William Shakespeal
ADDENDUM
SPECIAL TRIBUTE TO THE JAPANESE TOILET
END OF PART 2
TOKYO NEXT
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