Places I'm Visiting: Japan 2025 – The Last Two Weeks

The last two weeks of my recent trip to Japan were spent mostly on Ōshima, in Ehime Prefecture, with family, but they also included side trips to the nearby island of Ōmishima and to Matsuyama, Kure and  Tomonoura, the latter two both near Hiroshima on Japan's main Island of Honshu, and again to Kurashiki, also on Honshu. 

The island of Ōshima is at the center of the Inland Sea area controlled during Japan's Sengoku Period by the Murakami Suigun (traders, guides, and occasional pirates) and at the north end of the island is the Murakami Suigun Museum, which focuses on the maritime history of the Murakami Suigun.

There is a great deal to see at the museum, but it's not well labeled in English – although well enough for a non-Japanese speaker to get some idea of the activities of the group and what areas were under its control. The tidal currents in the Inland Sea are notoriously dangerous, and even today the shipping lanes through Japan's Inland Sea are among the most tightly controlled in the world. The Murakami Suigun primarily acted as traders and guides helping ships navigate safely through the boiling whirlpools created by the shifting tides between the islands. In return for their services as guides, they took a percentage of the goods passing through. 

My perspective may be unusual, but, to me, most exciting object in the museum is a red, cochineal-dyed coat. "Cochineal" refers to the red dye (also known as "carmine") and to the insect from which cochineal is derived  (Dactylopius coccus), a scale insect native to tropical and subtropical South America and into Mexico and the Southwest US. It parasitizes cacti in the genus Opuntia (the prickly pears), sucking moisture and nutrients from the host plant. Cochineal insects on the pads of the cacti are brushed off the plants and dried. Carminic acid can be extracted from the dried insects and their eggs, which is then combined with aluminium or calcium salts to make cochineal, the dye. 

Today, cochineal is mostly used as a food additive (as a natural colorant), but it was once in high demand for textile production. It was highly prized because carmine, or cochineal, is bright red and, importantly, it is colorfast. Most other natural red dyes are fugitive. The Murakami Suigun Museum's red coat (still brilliantly red after almost two hundred years) and faded red flags (dyed not with cochineal but with safflower (Carthamus tinctorius), known in Japanese as benibana) illustrate the difference. As cochineal insects live only on cacti native to the new world, far from Europe and Asia, the dye was rare and expensive before the development of synthetic dyes. It is quite remarkable that cochineal was being used in Japan in this period. The bright red coat in the Museum's collection strikes me as an extraordinary artifact.  

Kure, is today best known for its naval base. You might say Kure is to the Japan Maritime Self Defense Force what Mare Island once was to the US Navy. Kure continues to be one of only two submarine bases in Japan and all of Japan's submariners are trained there. Kure is also remembered for the most famous of the many ships built in its shipyards, which have been in continues operation since the Meiji Period – the battleship Yamato, the largest battle ship ever constructed (she displaced 71,000 long tons when fully loaded and carried nine 18-inch guns, the largest guns ever mounted on a warship of any kind). 

Despite her size and big guns, she was sunk in April of 1945 by US carrier planes; by the end of WWII, battleships, vulnerable to air attack, were essentially obsolete. In addition to the still-operational shipyards and the Maritime Self Defense Force base, Kure has a museum that focuses on minesweeping and submarine technology, featuring a full-sized submarine, which incudes interactive exhibits. The second floor focuses on  minesweeping, with exhibits showing the many different types of mines and illustrating minesweeping techniques. 

The history of minesweeping after WWII presented there is rather interesting. I had not been aware of the extent to which the US mined Japanese waters during WWII. Mines were still being removed from Japan's waterways well into the early 1950s and beyond. Typically for Japan, which in official contexts likes to focus solely on how Japan suffered during WWII, there is little mention of the war itself or of the activities of Japanese submarines during the war. The museum – as it is housed in an actual decommissioned submarine that sits in a giant cradle in the middle of a street – is a somewhat startling sight.

After visiting Kure, we went to Tomonoura, near Fukuyama. The town is known for its harbor (which has been active for centuries) and historical buildings surrounding the harbor area. These are in a similar style to the well-preserved buildings in Kurashiki, but almost none in Tomonoura have been restored, so, compared with Kurashiki, it looks rather dilapidated. As we visited in the rain, we didn't stay long. 

One highlight of the last two weeks was an excellent dinner at Fenua on Oshima, a restaurant that focuses on traditional French cuisine, heavily influenced by locally available ingredients, run by the owner/chef (all by himself), who studied for years in France and ran a successful French restaurant in Tokyo for many years before retiring to the countryside on the island. In the evening, only one couple is seated. It can be hard, therefore, to get reservations but worth the effort. The wine selection is very good. Not cheap, but cheap in dollar terms compared with what the same number of dollars will buy you in the US (about $90 per person for the set course not including wine). Fenua is an unexpected oasis of European culture in rural Japan. The beautiful building, with views over the ocean was designed and built by Kengo Kuma and Associates.

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.