I’ve been writing about how Japan is weird, and how I have come to think of it as not so weird anymore. What I haven’t written about is just how beautiful the place is.
I don’t get out enough. I spend a lot of time – like the rest of us – with my head down, working, sleeping, working again. I’ve lived in this country for the larger share of my adult life. I have been to Kumamoto, Fukuoka, Saga, Oita, Okayama, Hiroshima, Hyogo (Kobe, Osaka), Wakayama, Kyoto, Aichi (Nagoya), Gifu, Shizuoka, Kanagawa, Tokyo, Chiba, and Fukushima. But the only ones I actually visited for fun were Oita, Kumamoto, Kyoto, and Kanagawa. The rest were business. I can say I was there, but can’t say much more than that. It’s like a layover in an airport. You’ve been to Chicago… technically. BTW, Oita and Kumamoto were both in the last year.
In November, I took the fam up to Nikko, in Tochigi (so now I can add that to my list – the fun list, not the layover list). I had never been, but heard so much about it. There is the resting place of Tokugawa Ieyasu, the founder of the Tokugawa shogunate. We visited in November, so it was pretty dry and cool, but apparently it is very wet there, especially in the summer. You can see the result in all the moss on the stone structures. Visiting places like this tell you where the images come from in anime like Mononoke Hime, and Valley of the Winds. Below are a couple of pics. Hope you like them.
B.S. Donovan 
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