Date Published
3rd August 2015
My traveling companion Chad has a real knack for finding the most bizarre hidden gems in Japan.
He even has a special google map dedicated to this. Want to visit the site where Jesus was REALLY entombed? Sure, that’s in Aomori. Cat island is old hat, how about prostitute island? That’s in Mie.
Although we were ostensibly there for landscape shooting, thanks to Chad we saw a huge amount of… other things.
What follows is a non exhausting list of some of the highlights.
1) This cool library van.
2) Deadly suzumebachi in a honey drink.
3) A fertility shrine and sex museum (photography not allowed inside).
4) A "dog museum" (actually a venue for legal dog fights).
5) A fair exchange.
6) A pirate museum, with samurai pirate outfits for babies to dress up in.
7) A museum for towels.
8) Child folk hero Kintaro in the fight against forest fires.
9) Whatever this is.
10) The Zenigata Sunae, a giant coin made of sand.
11) A crab living high up in the mountains.
12) A beautiful traditional garden with a waterfall which, before the invention of pumps, was manually operated (servants would continually rush water to the top of the hill).
13) A real Cat Bus.
14) A street with transformers all ornately painted with different whales, one of which had an interesting method of propulsion.
15) These cute birds.
16) An anpanman puppet.
17) A spooky cave, and a taxidermy + prize winning (live) chicken exhibition at its exit.
18) This fantastic glass cafe on a cliffside.
19) What looked like a haunted, abandoned house on the outside but (if you managed to find the well hidden door) was actually an incredibly cosy hobbit hole/restaurant inside (with... interesting food).
20) A beautiful old vine bridge, with an even more adventurous alternative.
21) A rooftop artist commune/workshop/garden/duck pond.
22) This killer Oni roller slide through the woods.
This doesn’t even begin to cover everything we saw. Many things we just stumbled our way into, including an exciting one which I’ll be posting about next week, and the week after that I’ll post the landscapes resulting from all this film I brought back:
If you were to squint, the small village would look positively bustling; every corner, every building and every field had an assortment of lovingly crafted and well dressed scarecrows posed in myriad scenes of daily life.
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Every time I’ve been in Shikoku, the mountains and the clouds put on the most fantastic, moody displays.
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