Tuesday, 29 August 2006

I'm on holidays this week so we had planned to spend some time in the neighbouring prefecture of Nagano but unfortunately Mark had a whole bunch of work to do which curtailed the project scope of the holiday. But on Tuesday we packed up the car and drove two hours to Matsumoto in Nagano-ken for an overnight stay. We went to Matsumoto Castle which is the centre-piece of Matsumoto. The original castle was built in 1595 and was on a hideous tilt when they began restoration in 1950 (but some bits have been completely rebuilt). Apparently the town was on the verge of pulling the whole thing down and selling the bits for scrap until someone decided it might nice to keep it (and it's now a National Treasure of Japan).

Here's Buster standing by the moat at the front of the Castle - it's beautiful isn't it?

Here's another view of the outside. Unfortunately it was too dark to get any good photos of the inside but it was suprisingly cool - who'd have thought that those tiny windows for firing arrows and guns out of would let in so much breeze?

We also visited The Japan Ukiyo-e Museum which houses a bunch of wood-block prints. What were initially one color wood-block prints in 1710's developed to the multi-colour prints by 1760's. They are described as mass-media for the common man. They were quite beautiful and we even bought a woodblock print to take home with us.

We stayed at a ryokan (a traditional Japanese inn - kind of like a bed and breakfast) near the centre of town.

Here's our room at the ryokan.

Usually you get dinner and breakfast at the ryokan but we opted to eat out because Matsumoto is quite big and we were staying near the posh bit. We wandered around town for a bit and ended up having dinner at a fabulous Indonesian restaurant. Which sounds weird I know. If it's any consolation to you, we had a traditional Japanese breakfast at the ryokan - rice, grilled fish, pickles and miso.