After some fairly strenuous walking days we were looking forward to putting out feet up just a little today, and we achieved it because we were on the move most of the day. Kicking off with a bus from our accommodation into Omihachiman station, we then caught three consecutive trains, with transfers at Meibara and Nagoya. We are finding the transport system very easy to navigate, and having just 10 minutes between transfers is fine.
Rolling into Matsumoto station at 1pm, we found the bag lockers, rammed our bags into a single large locker as usual, then jumped on the local train to take us out of the city and to a small town further inland. We have been eagerly anticipating this excursion for a long time because our destination was Japan's museum for Ukiyo-e. It seems pretty strange to have the national museum sitting out in the backblocks of a smallish city miles from Tokyo, but there you go! The museum holds over 100,000 woodblock prints (the world's largest collection), however only 70 prints are on display at any one time.
Ukiyo-e is the name given to woodblock printing, and it flourished in Japan particularly between the 17th and 19th centuries. The subjects were principally of courtesans, kabuki play actors, folk tales and landscapes such as the Nakasendo and Tokaido trails and Mt Fuji. Both John and I became intrigued by this artform on our first trip to Japan, reinforced on our second. We took home various prints e.g. our placemats, as a result. Our favourite artist is Hiroshige, who produced amazing landscapes depicting real life in Japan, some of which relate to the Nakasendo Way. The latter is the trail we hiked on our first trip and we can recognise some of the locations he painted.
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| The ukiyo-e museum |
We weren't sure what we would come across with only 70 prints currently on display, but we very pleased we made the effort to get there. Most pictures were arranged in order so we could follow the daily life of a courtesan, others from when the courtesans had to be relocated to new quarters due to fire, and other interesting examples of typical life a few centuries ago. There was clearly a distinction between courtesans and geisha. The former were more or less very fancy prostitutes, the latter were entertainers, with sex thrown in after a certain point for their top sponsors. It was very interesting, and clearly the prints were the best examples of their type. We haven't seen them with such rich colours before. The finery worn by the courtesans must have been incredible.
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| Inside a courtesan house - a brothel as they described it |
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| A courtesan |
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| The top courtesans of three courtesan houses |
With only an hour at the museum, which was just enough, we backtracked to the train station, rode the local train and collected our bags. We were immediately picked up by the shuttle to take us to our ryokan, our accommodation for the next two nights and our final accommodation here in Japan.
As always, the welcome was very friendly, we were shown to a nice room, with another room across the passage which is a private sitting room for us. This is the only place on the whole trip where we don't have an ensuite, so we have been spoilt so far. With a quick strip off, then donning of our yakutas, it was off to our respective onsens for a leisurely wash and soak in the onsen.
Dinner was, as we expected, amazing. We chose the early sitting, which in retrospect wasn't wise as most people came later on and their service was slower, whereas we had plate after plate arrive perhaps a little too rapidly. We complemented the meal with a small taster flight of three different sakes.
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| Our table on arrival |
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Rice cracker bowl with lemon and grapefruit.
Shrimp and octopus, ginger and greens. Yam cube. |
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| Tasting flight of sake |
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Grilled whole trout and shiitake mushroom.
Salmon sashimi and horse sashimi with ginger and garlic dressing.
Local beef with apple and greens, seared at the table in miso sauce. |
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| Miso soup with tofu and other goodies, pickles and rice |
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| Bamboo shoot, lotus root fried and as a ball, pickles in sauce, tofu. |
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| Tempura fern fronds, leaves and prawn |
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| Cold soba noodles with soy dipping sauce, radish, spring onion and fresh grate-it-yourself wasabi |
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| Cheesecake with blueberry jam and caramel sauce |
It was as good as it looks. Highlights were the miso soup, the crunchy shiitake mushroom, and particularly the miso sauce beef. Apparently the beef was fed on apples and soba noodles! Weirdly the background music was an awful version of The Sound of Music, Simon and Garfunkel and other inappropriate tunes.
