Nagoya City Museum

Today was a day well spent, well, at least for me, it was. After a lovely orange-almond-scone at our bakery in the lobby of the Hilton I made my way to the City museum in Nagoya. At first I looked at the special exhibition about Pompeii. I was really astonished how many original artworks they got. Many frescos, but also bronze artifacts, statues, a caldarium from Boscoreale, jewelry, you name it.

Poster for the Pompeii Exhibition

Really beautiful things! Unfortunately as with most special exhibitions, you were not allowed to take photos. The bigger was the surprise that they allowed to take photos in all their standard exhibitions. So I enjoyed quite some time in the Jomon, Yayoi, and Kofun section of the museum. I was especially happy about the two burials, one of them a midden burial from the Jomon period. The male held a dog in his arms:

Late Palaeolithic/Incipient Jomon tanged points

Beautiful Late Jomon pottery decoration

Yayoi boat with outline of the skeleton

The head area of the deceased in the wider end of the boat

The other time periods were also awesome.

Kofun period Haniwas

handy money: an oval gold coin from the Momoyama period

The sun clock in front of the museum tells you exactly that I spent all morning and most of the afternoon indoors :)

Although it was already late I hurried to see the castle, and I just managed it in time. Nagoya Castle in one hour! But this will to wait till tomorrow.

Ieyasu clock tower movie and mango queen coconut drink

Ah, I forgot about the movie of the Ieyasu clock tower.

I took a new movie today that includes the end :) . The quality sucks, but I can't help it, it is just a mobile-cam.

See Ieyasu dance around and put on a noh mask:

Oh, and I absolutely have to show you my super refreshing coconut drink from Mango Queen's juice bar (or rather what is left of it), we reached 42° C (107° F) today, so I just had to drink some of it before I took the photo.

Hacho Miso and Kabuto Yama

Today I wanted to have a look at the famous Hatcho Miso Street. The Hacho Miso Comany Ltd. has been sitting here for more than 500 years and is producing high quality miso products. These are some of the old buildings in the Hachoukuradori Ave.

The traditional way to ferment beans to miso is done in huge cedar barrels which are covered with 3 tons of river stones and left there for 2 to 3 years.

http://www.mitoku.com/products/miso/hatcho_intro.html

You can make a tour or sample their miso or even better buy it for a price between thrice and five times over the supermarket price. Since I came from the back and saw the 'traditional' plastic barrels rolling around I thought I should leave the tour for the buses that stood in front of the tour office or o-miyage shop or rip-the-tourist spot.

Instead I went through the park to get to Kabuto Yama (甲山). Okazakikeikan's Blog said there are Jomon burials there, but I can't confirm this, there is at least nothing left to see from an excavation etc.

This is the way up to Mount Kabuto and this is the top of it:

There is an old cemetery halfway up the hill:

And their are mushrooms (kinoko) as the summer draws to a close:

On my way back I strolled through Okazaki Koen again and noticed that my laments from yesterday must have been heard. They were replanting the neglected flower dial:

Okazaki Koen

Okazaki Castle is situated in a small park. Coming from the south entrance I first had to cross Shinkyo Bridge

The public phone booth near the main gate:

A somewhat neglected flower dial from 1960, it is said that they change the flower arrangement four times a year (really?):

The statue of Ieyasu, the first shogun of the Tokugawa shogunate who was born in Okazaki Castle:

The statue of Heihachiro Tadakatsu Hondo, a general who served Ieyasu:

I liked this one quite a lot, but the afternoon sun didn't really allow to make a nice photo, the warrior shined and reflected, a proud warrior indeed: 

The funniest thing, however, was the clock tower not far from the Noh theatre. At first it looks very unsuspecious like an average mechanical clock:

But every half hour it opens and an Ieyasu in form of a karakuri doll pops out and dances around:

I made a movie of it, maybe I will manage to properly cut it, then I will upload it, too. So, for now, sorry for my incompetance to work with movie maker properly.

Toyota City Museum of Local History

Today I went to Toyota City to have a look at the ... no, not the automobile museum, but the museum of local history.

On my way from the Shintoyota station I came across a small shrine.

Unfortunately, one wasn't allowed to take pictures inside, so all you can see are the exterior of the museum and the Kofun which was brought from Nomiyama in 1967 and re-erected on museum's grounds.

The Kofun chamber:

Can you see how embarrassed the cute little dog is about the dog poo? And how happy a Japanese child cleans up behing it? How well behaved Japanese children are in contrast to European ones :)

View of modern Toyota City:

Lucky Jomon Find and Okazaki Castle

Sometimes, a bad sense of direction has it advantages. I wanted to go to the castle but rather took a wrong turning and instead found something far more interesting than a reconstructed castle. On a small hilltop, adjacent to the river Otagawa, a small Jomon settlement (Shinguu 真宮 Iseki) presented itself in the best light:

The presentation was a bit weird, but I guess it was made in the 1960s or 70s when concrete was the material of choice for everything. But you can see the outline of the huts very well, including the postholes. And, since I know that some of my dear readers are archao-phobic, I won't show any more postholes. Even though there was a further yayoi building close by.

I then proceeded as intended to the castle. It is a reconstruction from the mid-1950s because the original one was utterly destroyed in 1873. What was left was the moat and the stone wall. But this one comes pretty close to the original if you are looking at drawings from the period.

Here is the very well preserved original moat:

From the 4th floor you have beautiful views of the not so beautiful city of Okazaki:



Today everything is set in a park and I will show you more photos tomorrow :)

Toyama Kofun

Only a little bit south of the Aeon shopping mall in Okazaki are the remnants of several Kofun round burial mounds. Due to building work there is not much left to see. A sign shows the distribution of the 16 round mounds in the area:

This is all that is left of mound 1, a small earthen mound re-erected on the tomb location and a couple of benches for a short rest:

'Reconstruction' of the chamber from mound 3:

I owe this little gem to Okazakikeikan Blog (http://okazakikeikan.boo-log.com/e51416.html) who also has a detailed map where to find the Kofun.

school school school

I can't write a lot at the moment simply because I'm not seeing a lot besides Yamasa school. We have lessons in the morning and two more in the afternoon and loads of homework to do. To make it even more relaxing we have a written as well as an oral test once a week. So all I can present you here are a few mobile pics from my daily walk to school.

I quite liked the sun protection for the mini :)

and these parking lots are just too strange, as is the fact that Japanese people obviously fell in love with cubic cars. I don't even wanna know the air drag of these funny little cars.

Okazaki residency K

This is my new home for the next four weeks:

A big enough wardrobe:

My 'luxurious' bathroom:

And I even have a washing machine which saves me the trip to the coin laundry around the corner.

The appartment is void of anything, so I spent my first day at the 100-Yen shop (which is equivalent to the 1-Pound store in England. I'm now the proud owner of a cup, a bowl, a knife and a hat for 500 Yen ( about 5 Euros - who says Japan is expensive?).

The language course is stressful my sensei is talking like a waterfall but since she is talking about grammar it is sometimes very hard to follow. English is forbidden in the class room which is a good thing otherwise we would only talk in English - my classmates are mostly from the US.

Should I really endeavour to do a PhD?

What happened after the big bang? Men can't tell, women can't imagine

For a short time after the big bang we don't know anything of what happened. This short period of time is called the Planck time. It lasted for the tiniest fraction of a second, but still, we don't know.... After this teeny weeny part of the first second gravitation decoupled itself mysteriously from the united force (no, not the one in Star Wars).
Why am I telling you this? It is just to show, that I am not the only woman who lacks a certain imagination of abstraction. Here is a bon mot from the astrobiology professor (obviously female):

• Professorin: Nach der Planckzeit separieren sich die Urkräfte und die Gravitation koppelt sich zuerst ab.
• Student: Wie hat man sich die Abkoppelung anschaulich vorzustellen?
• Professorin (leicht entsetzer Gesichtsausdruck): Das kann man sich nicht vorstellen! Ich hab schon Schwierigkeiten bei einem Phasendiagramm für Wasser!

I'm not alone. Sigh.....

Daytrip to Frankfurt's Senckenberg Museum

Easter sunday we spent a day in Frankfurt (mainly because I wanted to see the hominid exhibition). When we arrived at the Senckenberg Museum we were sent away again "the special exhibition is just around the corner!". When we turned around the corner the first thing we saw was a hastily put up container building.
And indeed, it housed the exhibition called 'Safari zum Urmensch' (http://urmensch.senckenberg.de/). Yes, it looks terrifying, but the interior was quite ok:

The exhibiton was quite modern and not too scientific, still it explained the principles of the work of anthropologists quite well (from digging up fossils over dating methods to laser technology for 3D editing).
A unique dating method in which one looks at the change in pig molars (which obviously changed very distinctive and rapidly):

Although a lot of the fossils and all (!) of the Palaeolithic art they exhibited were replicas some fossils were really impressive:

Ida, the oldest primate, Darwinius masillae (Grube Messel)

Proconsul, Kenia

Paranthropus aethiopicus, Lake Turkana (look at that beautiful crest of his)

The description of the fossils lacked detail and some English explanations would have been welcome. Well, I guess the braille used too much space already. There also was  not a single mention of the hobbit (Homo floreniensis). How come? This important hominin was discovered seven years ago (!) and the exhibition claimed to be on the crest of the most recent discoveries. Of course I didn't expect the Denisova hominin to be mentioned, although it would have been a nice surprise.

Bottom line: good for a nice stroll through the container, good for kids who are interested in 'ape-men', people who are interested in anthropology (e.g. if you know that the hobbit lived not only in Middle Earth but also in Indonesia) save your money and go to visit the new permanent exhibiton at the Smithsonian National Museum, Washington DC.

Happy Easter!

http://static.neatorama.com/images/2006-04/easter-cartoon.gif

By the way, to meet the demand in Easter eggs in Germany, eggs are imported from all over Europe. Most are coming from cozy places like this:

Ahh the true spirit of Easter...