Museum Day in Takayama

September 25

On Friday, after breakfast, we first headed to the morning market where local foods and products were offered – mainly fruits and vegetables. Since we were still quite full, we treated ourselves to just two pears as travel snacks.

After that, we visited the Takayama Jin’ya, which was basically like the local county office during the Edo period – at least as far as I understood …

Starting in 1692, the shogunate took direct control of the area and dispatched an official to oversee its administration. To this end, the Jin’ya was established. It was certainly interesting to view the huge building and learn how the administration was organized back then.

Taxes were, for example, mainly paid in 60-kilo bags of rice. Quite unwieldy...

After that, we went to another museum where we could admire the huge and elaborately designed festival floats of the city. These have been paraded through the streets during certain holidays for centuries. Some of the floats even had quite intricate mechanical features built into them.

For example, one float had a laughing Buddha, with smaller figures tumbling around before eventually a confetti cannon was fired.

And since we still hadn’t seen enough museums, we then headed to an open-air museum. There, you could stroll through old farmhouses from the region. The historical buildings were painstakingly dismantled from their original locations and then rebuilt on the museum grounds.

This provided a pretty good insight into the lives of ordinary rural people from the 16th to the 18th century.

Much of it reminded me of old mountain huts in the Alps. The Hida region we were in is also very mountainous and was historically known primarily for cattle farming and wood processing. Additionally, winters here can get quite cold and bring up to two meters of snow.

After this exhausting museum day, we first went to eat – at a fantastic ramen restaurant. After all, we had yet to have ramen during this vacation.

It was truly delicious. I have rarely had such a hearty and rich noodle soup.

Afterwards, a solid eight-hour digestion nap was definitely necessary.