Places I'm Visiting: Japan 2025 – Kurashiki

A short trip to Kurashiki. Kurashiki is a modern Japanese city. In many parts of it, you'd see few signs of its history as an important hub of commerce, but step into its well-preserved old town and it's like you're in another time. 

The area now the old part of the city was once a shallow inland sea. It was drained in the 17th century and became a center of salt production and then a center of cotton production, in part because cotton is unusually tolerant of salty soil. Production of cotton led to cotton spinning and Kurashiki became famed for its denim (Kurashiki is the still the home of Kurabo Industries, originally Kurashiki Boseki [Kurashiki Spinning], a major producer of textiles and other products; its first factory complex, built in the 1880s, has been converted into a hotel and retail shops). 

Many of the city's cotton and textile warehouses, retail stores, and residences dating from as far back as the late 1600s have been preserved or restored. There is an entire district of white stucco and tile architecture, buildings that today house shops and restaurants but also businesses, some of which have been in continuous operation for 100 years or more. 

The town has dozens of museums, the most famous of which is the Ohara Museum of Art. In addition to the Ohara Museum, there is a toy museum, there are other art museums, a history museum, a museum of natural history, a museum of folk arts, and others. 

I mainly wanted to see the Ohara Museum on this visit – another place I last saw more than four decades ago. Opened in 1930, it was the first permanent collection of Western art in Japan. It originally showed mostly French paintings and sculpture of the 19th and 20th centuries but later expanded to include paintings from other European countries and other periods. Today the collection also includes work by some well-known 20th century American artists.

The collection was originally established through the patronage of Ōhara Magosaburō, whose wealth stemmed from the Kurashiki textile industry and on the advice of the  painter Kojima Torajirō (1881–1929). In 1961 a wing was added for Japanese paintings of the early 20th century (including work by Fujishima Takeji, Aoki Shigeru, Kishida Ryūsei, Koide Tarushige and others) and a wing was added for ceramic work by Kawai Kanjirō, Bernard Leach, Hamada Shōji, Tomimoto Kenkichi and others in the same year. A wing was later added to show woodcuts by Munakata Shikō and dyed textiles by Serisawa Keisuke. These last two sections are now together known as the Crafts Wing (Kōgei-kan). A memorial hall dedicated to the work of painter Kojima Torajirō is nearby. 

While the Ohara collection has a few gems (an excellent Gauguin, an oil sketch by Cezanne, and several excellent pieces by Japanese artists), on the whole I think the ceramics in the Crafts Wing are of a higher caliber. The work of Hamada Shōji is consistently of the highest quality but I was also impressed by the work of Kawai Kenjiro, a potter I had not previously been aware of. 

There is an El Greco Annunciation in the collection that gets a lot of attention, but I've never been able to stomach El Greco. I think he's the man who invented painting on velvet. So, if you visit the museum, don't miss the Crafts Wing. Unfortunately, photography is banned throughout the museum (except in a small section of antiquities), so I can't show you any highlights. 

Kurashiki is in Okayama Prefecture, once known as Bizen, and the famous Bizen Ware pottery is very much in evidence with many specialty stores selling handmade Bizen pots. With all the museums and the dozens of shops and boutiques, you could easily spend a couple of days wandering through the old town. The old town manages to remain an historical district while at the same time carrying on as a vibrant modern shopping and business area. Well worth a visit.

Places I'm Visiting: Japan 2025 – Japanese Bush Warbler

Finally. The Japanese Bush Warbler, known locally as the Uguisu, is a secretive skulker, frequently heard and rarely seen. I have lived in Japan for a total of nearly 20 years and never seen this ubiquitous songster. Like the Bewick's Wrens common in Northern California, the Japanese Bush Warbler has an oversized voice. It's hard to believe such a small bird can make so much noise. Everywhere in rural Japan you hear the Uguisu's distinctive song. It's a drab little bird, but its song is hauntingly beautiful. I had never seen one until yesterday. Because they tend to stay hidden deep in foliage and they move quickly, I was lucky to get this shot of one in full song. Not a great photo. I wish it were sharper, but it will do. Finally. 

Places I'm Visiting: Japan 2025 – Mt. Aso

Our tour of Kyushu ended with a visit to Mt. Aso after a stop at Takachiho Shrine. We went to see the shrine but also to complete a mission. We were asked by the proprieties of the inn we had stayed in the night before to deliver a package – some of her home-baked bread. On hearing that we were heading for the shrine, she asked us to take the bread to the Guji there (the head priest at the shrine), a friend of hers. Mission accomplished. The area around the shrine is said to be the location of several key events in the creation myths recorded in Japan's earliest written documents, but, as a guide I overheard said, no place names are mentioned, so other places have made the same claims. Regardless, the area is pretty. It’s known for its serried cedar forests (logging operations were evident everywhere – old stands of trees alongside clear-cut areas and areas newly replanted), for  its terraced rice fields, and for its volcanic rock formations. 

On my trip to Kyushu 48 years ago, we made a stop at Mt. Aso, but it was completely shrouded in dense fog. There was simply nothing to see. This time, the weather was more favorable. Aso is one of Japan's most active volcanos. In the main crater there is at present a blue-green lake of sulfuric acid that has been relatively stable, but occasionally there are small eruptions and even in a stable state the crater constantly spews steam. The area around the crater is strewn with rocks expelled in previous eruptions, mostly pumice and scoria. It all looks peaceful, but a row of colored warning lights at the entrance to the main crater area that reflect the level of sulfur dioxide in the air and concrete shelters that look like they belong on the WWII Normandy Coast are proof that anything could happen at any time. Most visitors appeared unconcerned.

Along the way, we stumbled upon the Sakamoto Zenzo Museum, a small museum dedicated to the work of – you guessed it – Sakamoto Zenzo, an abstract artist that was active mostly in the 1960s and 1970s and into the 1980s. The work was housed in an attractive building that looked fairly Western from the outside, but was very traditional inside. The place claims to be Japan’s only art museum with floors entirely of tatami mats.

One inn we stayed at, the Luna Observatory Auberge Mori No Atelier, has the second-largest privately owned telescope in Japan (82cm, or 32.3 inches – second-largest by one centimeter), a planetarium, and it offers stargazing sessions in the fields behind the inn. Telescopes of this size are generally owned by governments or institutes of education. 

The view through the telescope, to be honest, was a bit disappointing as the weather was not very good, but the instrument itself was impressive. It dwarfs a figure standing beside it. At the touch of a button, it will find any celestial object in its database. The man who demonstrated the telescope works in the restaurant as a waiter. The man who did the planetarium demonstration also works as a waiter. It was amusing to watch them change hats. As waiters they were awkward. When talking about the stars, they were in their element.

Places I'm Visiting: Japan 2025 – Takachiho Gorge

After seeing the Buddhist statues at Usuki, we visited Takachiho Gorge, which is a popular tourist stop. You can rent a row boat to see the gorge from water level. I've photographed it artfully, making the place look quite deserted, but, in reality, it's full of unpracticed boaters bumping into the walls of the gorge and into each other. 

I found it difficult to row with my back to the direction of travel (which is the correct way to propel a rowboat) and ended up doing it backwards, which worked but probably looked strange. 

The gorge is pretty even though only a small portion is accessible. Worth a visit, but make a reservation online ahead of time – the wait for a boat otherwise can be as long as five hours.

One highlight was seeing a small dark bird zoom past, flying just over the surface of the water and straight down the gorge – behavior that immediately identified the bird as a Dipper of some sort. I later looked it up and found that the Brown Dipper (Cinclus pallasii) is the local Dipper – a new life bird for me.

Places I'm Visiting: Japan 2025 – Usuki

In the past few days, I've been traveling through Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan's four main islands. Kind of a whirlwind tour. We crossed over from Shikoku by car ferry landing very near  Usuki, which is famous for an area with buddhist statues carved into rock faces of tuff, a soft rock of welded volcanic ash. The carvings date from the late Heian to early Kamakura period, which puts them early in the 12th century. 

I was last in Usuki 48 years ago. I first visited Japan in 1977 as a high school exchange student. One of my host families owned a tile factory of renown that made the roof tiles for several famous buildings including Matsuyama Castle and the Glover House in Nagasaki, the oldest surviving Western-style wooden house in Japan. I went along on a trip to inspect the Glover House tiles. 

Memory is unreliable. At Usui I remember seeing mostly a single large carved stone head. I have no recollection of the many  standing and seated figures carved into the rock there. 

In any case, the place looks very different today, nearly half a century later. The head I remembered has been restored to the body it came from, a parking area has been added, pathways have been created and structures have been built over the statues to protect them from the weather. In addition, they've been designated as National Treasures (in 1995) since I last saw them. The place was familiar and strange at the same time. 

It was interesting to see Royal Ferns here (and many more at other locations in Kyushu). These are one of the Osmunda ferns that are unusual in that their spores are borne on entirely separate structures from the fronds (most ferns bear spores on fertile fronds that otherwise resemble the non-fertile fronds). I've tried to grow Royal Fern in the past, but never had much success. It was a pleasure to see them happy in their natural habitat.