Adventures in Japan

Day Nine:Tsuwano and Hiroshima

Tsuwano is basically known for one thing: fish. Tsuwano has a lot of fish. More fish than people. Not counting the tourists. Which we never do.

The fish aren't in an aquarium or anything like that. Oh no, they are quasi free range fish. They live in the water filled gutters of the town. It's not as dirty as it sounds. The gutters are there specifically for the fish. They are all nice and clean with clear water that is constantly circulating. It is all quite nice to look at. Picturesque. Ironically, we have no pictures of the quaint streets lined with fish. Funny.

We do have pictures of a whole bunch of red tori gates.


We counted them.


We counted 903.


We believe we miscounted.

There was a lovely view from the top. And a nice Inari shrine.

It has been fairly hazy during the duration of our journey thus far. Makes landscape pictures a little drab.


We tried to spice it up as best we could.

In addition to a bunch of fish, this town has a lot of cranes. There might be a correlation there. They have a festival every year where people dress up as cranes and dance around.


Those aren't real people, those are statues.

The sun was really beating down on us as we descended from the shrine, so we decided to grab some coffee. This town also has a lot of funky little coffee shops. I think it has something to do with all the fish. We also stopped into a great little art shop. It was a real family affair. The guy we talked to ran the place, his wife made all the pottery and dishes and such and his sun supplied the paintings. Everything in there mocked us and our lack of funds. We wanted to buy it all. The painterly sun has a website, if you want to see which way our tastes run: www.akira-berlin.de Have fun navigating in German. It's like navigating in English, but angrier.

We also poked around in the souvenir shops. Lots of cool souvenir shops in Tsuwano. We didn't buy anything. We did buy some YakiAisu. If you've been playing along at home, you'll remember that Yaki is the Japanese word for cooked(basically) and Aisu is their way of saying Ice which is short for Ice Cream. Cooked ice cream. Not deep fried ice cream, no. A scoop of ice cream is placed between to soft, sweet, lovely bits of bread (more cake than bread) and then this "ice cream sandwich" is placed in a sandwich maker and toasted up. So good.

I got some soft serve wasbi ice cream as well. This region is known for its wasabi. (And fish and birds) The wasabi ice cream was... very wasabi-y. It cleaned out my nasal cavity.

We did all this over the course of a couple hours. Carla had scheduled us to be there for a few more, but we felt that we had done enough. No sense in over doing it, right?

So we took a train into Hiroshima.

Oh yeah! This is the map of the town (Tsuwano) in the visitor's centre.


It was made by junior high kids. It rocked.