Behind the Mountains: Shirakawago

We had parted with Ken, who had gone to visit a friend in nearby Nagoya on the previous day. After having spent the night in an (unexpectedly) expensive inn, our driver woke up hungover. With one last vigorous push, he drove us to a valley behind the mountains, and left the car in a clearing by a brook where the water ran crystal blue, and fell asleep, leaving Dario and I on our own to explore the World Heritage Site of Shirakawago.

The villages of Shirakawago bear incredible visible historical heritage, from the structure of the tall thatch-roofed houses to the scattered agricultural fields squeezed even between said houses. Villagers here used to make their trade with the outside world by farming the base elements that were necessary in the creation of gunpowder and paper. In these lands were snowfall still comes thick and heavy through the colder months, people made a simple and honest living.

This picture by Dario.

Now that they're considered by UNESCO to be World Heritage, these villages draw a lot of their livelihood from tourism. Many of the farm houses have re-established themselves as inns, allowing visitors an imaginably great opportunity to live as one of the villagers and let the life of the countryside breathe through them in full. Dario had previously been through Shirakawago and done just that, barely half a year ago. In his own words, the place was worth returning to every season of the year. That aside, a lot of the farmhouses have also turned into museums. Once again, history buffs could really have a field day, here.

Shirakawago was the last of our sightseeing stops before we headed back to Tokyo, but I'll be back there, some day, I'm sure.

The Takayama Festival

It was upon the noon of the second day into our road trip that we arrived upon our destination of Takayama. The very purpose of our trip lay here: to attend the famous Takayama festival, renown throughout Japan. Well rested after our stay in the Kiso Valley, Ken, Lo, Dario and I found the streets of the city packed with tourists both from abroad and within Japan, the crowd growing denser and denser towards the epicenter of the festival grounds.

The enormous floats of the Sanno Takayama Festival

In a nutshell.

The Takayama Festival is held twice a year with very slight variations - once in Spring and once in Fall, with each of the festivities lasting two days. During this time, enormous yatai festival floats are pulled into the town square, and a procession of 200 men, women and children dressed in varied traditional outfits can be seen parading across the town. Some are dressed as oni - Japanese demons, children play instruments such as bells and flutes, and others still wear the outfits of Shinto priests, carrying large flag-like standards.

Holy crap it's crowded.

At different points during the festival, the crowd gets extremely densely packed around the festival floats as ancient puppet show over 300 years old begins, puppets emerging from the top of the floats themselves. The three puppets themselves are beautifully crafted and controlled by 12 strings each, requiring 3 puppeteers to man a single one. I later learned the springs in the puppets are carved out of whale. Hoowee. Each puppet gets the limelight for a part of the show, with each segment having an impressive turning point. For instance, the last puppet, that of a maiden, had a dragon burst out of her ass. I kid you not. This part was deemed too obscene for the Japanese public until only 30 years ago.

Hey, even the festival aside though, Takayama is a nice town quite worth a visit. It doesn't at any point feel like a metropolitan city. It has a charming market street with oldish shops, but even nicer still is the presence of rivers running through the town, spanned by scenic bridges from which, looking down, the likes of koi fish can be seen swimming around.
At the extremity of the central part of the city is a park and a mountain from which one can see the whole of Takayama. I was reminded at once of Montreal.

It's quite charming!

The first thing I did in Takayama.

All in all, Takayama was a charming experience and another window into Japanese culture. The festival was worth the trip, but my tip-toeing across central Japan didn't end at Takayama.

As you'll soon see!

On the Road to Takayama

My three musketeers by my side, we had set off to Takayama with the goal of arriving on time for the Sanno Festival, renown throughout Japan - a three-day trip I've only just now gotten back from. The road to Takayama itself, though, was worthy of notice, as we drove through the countryside and up and around mountains to get to our destination. We managed to make quite a number of stops along the way, too, and here are some of them. No doubt each of these would've been worthy of a smaller trip just for themselves.

 Matsumoto
 Our first stop, a little more than halfway to Takayama already, was Matsumoto. Although the small town bares little in terms of bustling city life, it does have the Matsumoto Castle - one of the few in Japan to have remained in such an intact state. Over 400 years old, the castle has resisted the wear and tear of time and still remains as majestic as ever. It has a moat, with koi fish, and, holy shit, say it with me, swans. There are god damn swans in the moat. Wow.

Kiso Valley
 Knowing full well that our chances of finding a place to stay within Takayama would be fairly slim, we decided to spend the night in the Kiso valley, tucked in between the area's numerous mountains. Thanks to Ken, we managed to find a cheap bed that also provided us a hot bath and breakfast on top of that. 
 The Kiso valley, though, is also home to a number of very old post-towns, the likes of which are often seen in samurai movies. The most notable post-town in the valley is that of Tsumago, which we paid a quick visit to, and found rather silent and empty, despite it barely being 7:00 in the evening yet. Still, Tsumago had a very particular and dated feel to it, and left me wondering what its few streets would have been like during the day.

The Japan Alps
Although the mountain paths we took along our drive did not take us very high up the mountains, we did get to enjoy a lot of the mountain scenery, complete with pristine rivers and lakes. Not too far in the distance were white cap mountains, and so too were there too many ski resorts to count, still white with snow but not operating at this time of the year. Takayama city itself lies nested within these alps.